essay – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories & Essays by Harper Lee

By Scott J. Pearson | October 26, 2025October 27, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Most Americans have read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird at some time throughout our lives. It’s the clearest account of Jim Crow’s effects on Southern American culture and of the power of a few upright people to fix it. Lee’s Alabama roots are well known, but she actually wrote the classic in New York City. Beforehand, she wrote a series of short stories with themes that forecast her great accomplishment. Posthumously, those stories have…

Personal Essays

Words and Police Brutality

By Scott J. Pearson | June 20, 2020June 20, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

There has been a lot of discussion in America recently on police brutality. Much of the rhetoric has centered around “structural racism” versus a “few bad apples.” As portrayed in political circles, the constructs behind these seem irresolvably opposed to each other. Structural racism contends that problems need to be solved through reforms in the system while others say that police officers should be filtered through means of enhancing personal responsibility. I do not have…

Why Read? An Essay

By Scott J. Pearson | February 17, 2020February 16, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Twenty years ago, I thought that the Internet would dramatically change – even enhance – the way we humans communicate. After all, this is how Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized civilizations in the sixteenth century. Ten years ago, when Kindles, tablets, and smart phones hit the market, I thought digitized word would replace the written word. These early predictions have proved true in one sense but untrue in another. They have indeed changed the way humans…