Dirty Wars and Polished Silver by Lynda Schuster

August 14, 2017

Lynda Schuster’s memoir, Dirty Wars and Polished Silver, is a story of a changing life, much of it spent in war zones. Ironically, Schuster’s second marriage to a career diplomat was meant as a change from her career as a war correspondent. However, even...

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

August 13, 2017

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America. Sadly, one of the final episodes in the book is still being played out fifty-six years after publication of the book. Steinbeck wrote about America and its...

My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul

May 15, 2017

Bob = Book of Books. Of course, Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, is a reader. She’s also compulsive, as many of us are, about keeping a list of the books she reads. Paul has kept that list since 1988 when she was a junior in high school....

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

March 27, 2017

There was something poignant about reading Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. I checked it out of the library when I read her piece in The New York Times, “You May Want to Marry My Husband,”http://nyti.ms/2mFk0fE....

An Open Book by Michael Dirda

December 20, 2016

When I read literary critic Michael Dirda’s book, Browsings, I discovered he’s from northern Ohio, and went to college at Oberlin. Browsings led me to the story of Dirda’s youth, An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader’s Life. It’s a...