By Samuel Long, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I grew up in the modest city of Williamsburg, Virginia. Our “thing” was being the location of the first permanent English settlement and original capital of Virginia. But to me, these were just a part of downtown.

I lived in the area until I was 18 and colonial history became second nature for me and my friends. Anytime we saw a person dressed in colonial clothes or bearing a musket, we thought, “Oh, just another Colonial Williamsburg employee” — if we even thought twice about them.

I went to Lafayette High School, one of the area’s three medium-sized secondary schools. But after leaving to attend college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I noticed something for the first time: what it was like to not be surrounded by old-style buildings or see 18th-century blacksmiths while shopping at Trader Joe’s. Chapel Hill had history, but it was written on plaques or printed in books. It wasn’t all around you every day.

Blacksmith Aislinn Lewis works at a forge in the James Anderson Blacksmith Shop & Public Armoury in Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area. (Darnell Vennie/The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation/TNS)

This realization made me curious about my hometown’s roots. I wondered what it would be like to really appreciate the significance of the place I lived in for almost two decades.

Tom Savage, 67, understands. He lives in the middle of Colonial Williamsburg, the re-created capital that is essentially stuck in the late 1700s.

Every morning, Savage wakes up in the 18th-century Palmer House in the middle of Colonial Williamsburg. In the evening, he sits on the front steps with a glass of wine and talks to visitors who have come from all over the country — and sometimes the world — to experience 89 colonial-style buildings and 301 acres of American history.

Savage, who is Colonial Williamsburg’s director of educational travel and conferences, said living here is his 12-year-old self’s ultimate fantasy. He grew up in Virginia and visited the historical city as a child, which influenced his career and decision to attend the adjacent College of William and Mary.

“Having a house in the historic area, which I use to entertain both personally and on behalf of Colonial Williamsburg, gives me a real showcase to highlight the historic area, the craftsmanship,” he said.

Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780, putting it front and center as Americans’ struggle for independence ignited into a revolution. In addition to Colonial Williamsburg, the area is home to the Jamestown Settlement, a 17th-century living history museum of the first permanent English settlement, and the Yorktown Battlefield, where the United States won its independence and ended the Revolutionary War.

I visited these places numerous times on field trips in elementary school, and the Jamestown Settlement was less than 10 minutes from my house. I remember boarding the Susan Constant, a reproduction of the flagship sent from London to establish Jamestown in 1606, and being incredibly excited.

Since I was an energetic kid, I spent a lot of time ignoring the tour guides and darting around the deck, pretending I was on a maritime adventure. This experience may have been one of my inspirations to join the sailing club in college.

“It’s a really unique place to live,” said Chas Ritinski, training and development manager for the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, which oversees both the Jamestown Settlement and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown.

Fourth of July fireworks display over the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area. (Darnell Vennie/The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation/TNS)

“Colonial Williamsburg is the largest living history museum in North America and so there are just museums everywhere of all different topics,” Ritinski said. “It’s a really neat area to live in.”

The City of Williamsburg’s Economic Development Department lists Colonial Williamsburg as a “major tourist attraction,” with 533,700 admission tickets sold in 2019. The number of visitors has been slowly rising since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said.

Many of these tourists come to see employees working as 18th-century tradesmen in Colonial Williamsburg. Over 20 pre-industrial trades are practiced on a daily basis throughout the historic district. Savage refers to the area as a “living Diderot encyclopedia,” after French philosopher Denis Diderot, one of the originators of the Enlightenment.

Tradesmen who work in Colonial Williamsburg go through years-long apprenticeships to learn how to be blacksmiths, tailors, wigmakers and make these items just like they did over 200 years ago, said Ritinski, who also attended William and Mary and volunteered at the museums as a student.

“While I’m into history, I know a lot of people aren’t. And what’s neat about the living history museums in the region is they really make history accessible,” Ritinski said. “You can go to Jamestown and climb aboard a ship. You can go to Yorktown and hear a cannon fire. There’s a lot of really unique things you can see to make history come alive.”

The Jamestown Settlement and Yorktown Battlefield felt like a different world entirely to me when I was young. I went to the local elementary and middle school. My mom took me to the grocery store in an old strip mall. I would beg my parents to take me to GameStop to get the new Legend of Zelda game every time Nintendo announced a new release.

The historical district and the rest of the city were divided, but I think that’s what made it so special.

One of the best parts about living in the area is its modern versatility, Savage said. While the colonial part of the city is considered downtown by many locals, Williamsburg also boasts New Town, a 365-acre mixed-use “new urbanism” community.

With a slew of homes and offices, New Town is where many of Williamsburg’s upscale shops, fine dining and professional businesses reside. The destination has always been a hot spot for locals, tourists and 15-year-old me, when I and my friends wanted to see a movie or get ice cream.

“I think you get the best of both worlds,” Savage said. “All the modern conveniences are available.

“Williamsburg has expanded vastly since my student days, and I’m certainly in New Town once if not twice a week. Either to go out to dinner or go to a shop or perhaps a movie with friends.”

When I visited my parents a few months ago, I also noticed new apartments, restaurants and shops between New Town and Colonial Williamsburg. It calls itself “Midtown Row,” but everyone seems to shorten that to “Midtown.” The recently built development replaced a section of an old strip mall.

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Williamsburg is developing at a fast enough pace to give me mixed feelings. I was nostalgic for those old stores, but expansion shows the economy is thriving. Maybe the city will even have an Apple Store soon.

The largest industry in Williamsburg is lodging and food services, according to the Department of Economic Development. Restaurants are rampant across commercial and historical areas, and cater to the 6 million area visitors each year.

“Some people complain about tourists, but at the end of the day, they play an important role in the economy,” Ritinski said. “They’re coming here, there’s tourist dollars, and more importantly, people are coming who want to learn stuff.”

And everyone who lives and visits Williamsburg gets to experience its breadth of history.

“You see that history everywhere. You can get off work and go to a grocery store and you see a colonial guy buying his groceries,” Ritinski said.

“You go to run another errand and you see another colonial person. You run a 5K Thanksgiving morning and you see colonial people in Nikes running before they go to work. The history is everywhere.”

While I was living there I had a hard time viewing this as significant because I was so used to it. I even wondered why anybody would want to come to Williamsburg as a tourist.

I understand much more now that I’m gone. Oh, and I forgot to mention, we also had Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Water Country USA, which we would visit a few times every year. Just a minor thing, but they were really awesome, too.

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Mia Taylor, TravelPulse

When planning a trip abroad, the logistics of transportation during your stay in a foreign country are invariably one of the details that must be sorted out.

And for plenty of travelers, the answer is renting a car. However, for some travelers, the idea of driving on unfamiliar terrain is more than little nerve-wracking.

The good news is that there’s a new ranking of the safest countries to drive a car in Europe. Think of it as a go-to guide to deciding whether a car rental or public transportation is your best option in a given country.

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The ranking is part of a report titled the Safety Performance Index (PIN), which is issued annually by the Europe Transport Safety Council. The rankings included in the PIN report are based on data provided by the individual countries assessed in the report.

Based on all of this data Norway has been deemed the safest country for road users. In 2023, the country was the leader among PIN-ranked countries with just 20 road deaths per million inhabitants, says the report.

Following close behind Norway in the 2023 safety ranking was Sweden, with 22 deaths per million.

The next highest ranked countries for road safety all tied at below or equal to 35 deaths per million. The countries in this tied group include the UK, Denmark, Switzerland, Malta, Finland, Germany, and Ireland.

As a side note, the average road mortality rate throughout the EU for 2023 was 46 deaths per million inhabitants. And that’s a decline from 55 deaths per million inhabitants from when the report began back in 2013 — meaning it’s getting safer to drive in Europe overall.

Most dangerous roads in Europe

So, now that you know which countries you can rent a car and drive around in without being overly stressed, let’s look at the least safe countries in the PIN ranking.

The two countries with the highest mortality rates are Bulgaria and Romania, with 82 and 81 deaths per million respectively.

Meanwhile, Spain, Slovakia, and the Netherlands earn the less-than-ideal distinction of having a road mortality rate in 2023 that was higher higher than it was back in 2013, says the report.

The Netherlands and Slovakia, in particular, saw a 20% rise in their road death rate over the decade. Spain, meanwhile, experienced a 6% increase.

©2024 Northstar Travel Media, LLC. Visit at travelpulse.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, has been on Maxim Loskutoff’s mind for a long time.

The author grew up in Missoula, Montana, less than 80 miles from Lincoln, the town near the shack where Kaczynski lived and constructed the bombs that killed three people and hurt nearly two dozen others. Loskutoff was 11 when Kaczynski was arrested; the mathematician-turned-terrorist would later plead guilty to murder and be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Kaczynski took his own life last year.

Loskutoff, the author of the short story collection “Come West and See” and the novel “Ruthie Fear,” says that he wasn’t surprised when it turned out the feared Unabomber made his home in Montana.

“I was 11 when he was caught,” he says. “It clarified what I had seen on class trips, where we’d go to a place where some outlaw died violently, or where a bank robber was hanged. When I was a kid, the ethos of the Interior West was a national release valve, a place where people who were escaping their lives could come to reinvent themselves or to live outside the law.”

Loskutoff decided to make Kaczynski a character in his third book, “Old King,” published by W.W. Norton. The novel follows Duane, a man who moves near Kaczynski’s shack in 1976, when the bomber was engaged in a sabotage and booby-trapping campaign against his neighbors. Duane learns to fear Kaczynski, although the two share a love for the old-growth forest around them.

Loskutoff talked about “Old King” via telephone from his home in western Montana. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: This is your third book that takes place in the American West. Do you find the way that you’ve written about the West has changed since you published “Come West and See”?

Definitely. When I was growing up, there was this sense that the West that I knew was overlooked. I grew up reading a lot of books in which the West was portrayed as either heaven or hell. You had the pastoral books where the only thing that marred the magnificence of the West was the shoddy people within it, or you had sort of the Cormac McCarthy version where the West was a stand-in for hell itself, this place where judgment day is being played out. There was also a lot of space in the social classes that were being portrayed. 

The tension between the various classes and the landscape itself really motivated me in my first two books. It felt like the tension and anger and confusion that I felt living in the West and growing up in the West hadn’t been expressed in culture, and as such, it felt like it was very much in danger of boiling over. As I get older, a lot of that panicked feeling diminishes; this sense of “I need to be the one to warn people” goes away, and it becomes more of an examination of what is in me, and what is in all of us who live in the West, that makes the relationship so complicated.

Q: Were you writing this book when Ted Kaczynski died last year?

I was toward the end. It was really surreal, because he took his own life the day that I turned in my final draft. I was turning this book in, and beginning to ask the question of, “This person is still alive; what are they going to think about this book?” That was something I’d really tried to isolate myself from as I wrote. It felt necessary to have this real character casting a shadow over this fictional world because of what he represented to me in terms of the mythology and in terms of having a real person that people could latch onto in order to understand that. But it was a haunting moment.

Q: What made you decide to have him be a character in this book in the first place?

The main rule I have for myself as a writer is to trust in my own obsessions, and he was an obsession since my childhood. I didn’t really think of Montana as anything except home, and as such, I was just sort of inventing the story of it. And the story I invented was of these woods with monsters lurking within them. So when he was caught, it was this validation that there was a dark presence in these woods. And he continued to haunt me because the reaction to him was so complex, both nationally and for myself. It was really confusing to me as a kid who this person was and exactly what he had done.

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He’d gone to Harvard, which was very kind of otherworldly and impressive to me as a kid in Montana. He had a connection to the environmental movement. And there was the strangeness of his war on technology; he was this anti-technology person who spent all of his time obsessing over creating these little pieces of technology that he used to kill people. So there was just all this kind of complexity that kept bringing me back to that figure. And for me, that’s kind of the richness of fiction when you have all these questions that you can’t quite answer, but you can’t stop thinking about, and that was who he was for me.

Q: Was there anything unsettling about trying to get inside the mind of someone like Kaczynski?

Absolutely. The reason the book took me so many years to finish, and lived for so long as an itch I couldn’t scratch, was because I didn’t know how to position him. I knew that I didn’t want to write a book in which he was the hero or even the anti-hero, and because he is such a big presence, that was very hard to avoid. How do I keep the camera from being overly focused on this person who in the end was monstrous? 

It took me a long time to figure out that the sense that I wanted to capture was the sense that I had had of him, which was just this shadow lurking over a community, over a state, and in the end, over an entire country, and through really learning a lot about the community of Lincoln itself, and the petty cruelties that he inflicted on his neighbors over the 25 years that he lived there. I realized that that was my entry point into the book — it was more about the monstrosities that he was inflicting on his neighbors in this small town, and the people who lived next to him for years who had to deal with that in their own lives. They were really the heroes of this story because even though they lived next to this incredible cruelty, they didn’t become it themselves.

A demon holing up in a basement preys on a single mom and her three kids; and a San Francisco filmmaker delivers a sublime meditation on grief and grieving.

Those two films — “The Deliverance” and “The Secret Art of Human Flight — are worth watching during one of the most unreliable times on the movie calendar, Labor Day weekend.

Here’s our roundup.

‘The Deliverance’

Demonic possession movies don’t gain respect since most of ‘em can’t compare to William Friedkin’s 1973 pea-soup-spewing classic “The Exorcist.” The lackluster track record of exorcism movies doesn’t faze Lee Daniels (“Precious”), who takes a gritty “based-on-a-true-story” (an Indiana case doubted by many) and then scares the Beelzebub right out of you, and even makes you crack up a time or two. What fully invests us into the story of bad demon behavior that issues forth from the basement of a new home where Ebony Jackson and her three children live are the performances. Andra Day, in particular, flings herself into a meaty role as alcoholic single momma bear Ebony (dad’s serving in Iraq) who, on occasion, smacks cute young son Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins) around and threatens kids who aren’t nice to hers. Ebony stockpiles one bad decision after another, enough  to warrant repeat visits from a wary Child Protective Services agent (Oscar winner Mo’Nique). Day’s volcanic performance seethes with hair-trigger fury and that’s enough reason to give this guilty pleasure a go. So is the chew-the-scenery performance from a delicious Glenn Close as Ebony’s born-again momma Alberta, who moves into this citified “Amityville” hell house after a cancer diagnosis. “The Deliverance” does jump the shark, but it is undeniably entertaining and powered by terrific over-the-top performances.

Details: 2½ stars out of 4; out Aug. 30 on Netflix.

‘1992’

Ariel Vromen’s B-movie thriller rises above its standard heist plot thanks to the actors in it — Tyrese Gibson, Scott Eastwood and the late Ray Liotta — as well as its setting: the post-Rodney-King-verdict L.A. riots. That historical moment plays off in the background as we follow two very different fathers, one a Black man named Mercer (Gibson) who’s recently released from being incarcerated, the other a White man named Lowell (Liotta), who’s intent on stealing metal from a factory where Mercer works. Mercer is trying to protect his son (Christopher A’mmanuel) from getting caught up in the volatile events of that night while Lowell pushes his two sons Riggin (Eastwood) and Dennis (Dylan Arnold) to do dangerous things that will benefit him. A direct and to-the-point screenplay from Sascha Penn and Vromen, and genuine scenes between Gibson and Ammanuem, aid in making “1992” a genre exercise with much more on its mind than you might suspect.

Details: 3 stars; in theaters Aug. 30.

‘You Gotta Believe’

Ever get a lump the size of a baseball in your throat watching an underdog emerge as a hero when the game is on the line? It might seem corny to some that this kind of scene can still make is cry like a baby, but that is the beauty of this baseball movie by director Ty Roberts (“12 Mighty Orphans”) and screenwriter Lane Garrison. Their dramatized true story plays out in 2002 Fort Worth, Texas, recounting how beaten-down attorney and Little League manager Jon Kelly (Greg Kinnear) and even-keeled coach and father Bobby Ratliff (Luke Wilson) took their downright awful Westside Little-League All-Stars team to the Little League World Series — a minor miracle that comes about due to practice, patience and, finally, focus. Just as the players coalesce into something special, Ratliff — a dear friend to all — discovers he has cancer. The amazing thing is “You Gotta Believe” isn’t overly maudlin, even if it occasionally drops the ball in a few scenes. This is a winning family-friendly inspirational drama that celebrates teamwork, friendship and baseball.

Details: 3 stars; in theaters Aug. 30.

‘The Secret Art of Human Flight’

Accurate cinematic portrayals of the various stages of grief are sometimes so grave and depressing that they’re virtually unwatchable. Uber-talented San Francisco filmmaker H.P. Mendoza doesn’t skimp in relating the hardships of getting yourself out of the grief rut when you lose a loved one, but he also shows how there are moments of dark, profound humor. Indeed, Mendoza’s lead character Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer, in a yank-your-heart-out performance) stumbles more than once as he tries to move forward after his wife, his co-author of children’s books, has died. But he needs some help getting there, and that’s when he decides he needs to pursue flight after seeing a questionable guru (a hysterically funny Paul Raci) who becomes his Obi-Wan guide of sorts, to the distress of his neighbors, the cops and his sister and her husband. “The Secret Art of Human Flight” lands at a time — just like “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You Can-Eat” — when we could all use it emotional boos it offers. The bittersweet screenplay from Jesse Orenshein ends on an exquisite note.

Details: 3½ stars; available to rent now on various platforms.

‘Slingshot’

In this tragically flawed and sluggish space thriller, an astronaut named John (Casey Affleck) goes on a laborious mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, where perhaps a solution for global climate may lie. Getting there, though, presents a real risk to him as well as to Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) and another astronaut Nash (Tomer Capone) since they need to use the tricky orbital velocity of Jupiter to slingshot their way to their destination. Director Mikael Håfström does an admirable job of making the ship’s tight quarters hostile and claustrophobic. Good that. Where the film utterly fails is in the blah flashback-told backstory about the tepid earth romance between John and a brainy Zoe (Emily Beecham). Their flaccid connection is a real deal breaker since it’s instrumental to the plot. With a shorter running time, a better final scene and a heated-up romance, “Slingshot” might have had lift-off.

Details: 2 stars; in theaters Aug. 30.

‘Greedy People’

An ensemble of top-notch actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Himesh Patel, Simon Rex, Tim Blake Nelson, Lily James, Uzo Aduba) make up for some screenplay slips in director Potsy Ponciroli’s unpredictable, highly entertaining neo-noir. It begins with new-to-a-small-town cop Will (Patel) making a false move that results in the death of a woman (Traci Lords, yes that Traci Lords) in her ritzy home. Will and his swaggering and full-of-himself partner Terry (Gordon-Levitt, landing a good role for a change) discover a bag of loot near her body. Rather than ‘fess up to what happened, they make it look like someone else did the job and then take the money and attempt to run. Screenwriter Mike Vukadinovich packs his tone-shifting plot with numerous interesting characters — including scene-stealing Bay Area native Rex as a living-at-home-with-his-momma masseuse who rubs clients in an extra special way for a few dollars more — along with twists, double crosses and stacks of corpses. It doesn’t always work, but it more often than not hits its target, thanks to the performances and an unexpected ending.

Details: 2½ stars, available to rent.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.