No longer bound to a 24/7 workweek, my wife and I managed to avoid the horrible winter of 2014 by being in sunny Florida. But it was not a time for beach and sun — we kept busy with classes, reading, studying, concerts (both in the audience and as participants) and other activities that the time flew by.

Each year I save up the new books I want to read for the trip; books on politics, religion, history and especially novels. These include Nevada Barr, who writes mysteries about National Parks (we've been to most of them); Les Roberts, whose Cleveland detective writes about places in which I grew up; Sara Paretsky, the former CNA Chicago insurance claim attorney I once met; Daniel Silva, whose Israeli secret service assassin, Gabriel Allon, is bound to thrill; and finally the first two books of Ken Follett's "Century Trilogy," all 1926 pages of them.

What stirred me most were Follett's descriptions of what led to World War I and World War II. He traces a Welsh nobleman, a Welsh coal miner, a German, a Russian and an American political family through the events leading up to two world wars, their lives intertwined by sex and politics. The stories primarily involve conservatives vs. liberals, Fascists vs. Communists, and the rich vs. the poor. What is troubling is how similar the facts he describes in the 1905-1920 era and the 1932-1946 era are to what is happening in 2014. It is still the liberals vs. the conservatives, and the rich vs. the poor. In a recent New York Times article there was a graphic showing how the percentages of rich and poor varied between 1962 and 2014. It varied over the years, but the bottom line was that there are a greater percentage of U.S. poor in 2014 than in the 1960s. What ever happened to all of that "post-war prosperity"?