“This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage”
Only writing kept me from being swept into the dust heap of third grade, and for this reason I not only loved writing, I felt a strong sense of loyalty to it. I may have been shaky about tying my shoes or telling time, but I was sure about my career, and I consider this certainty the greatest gift of my life.
“The Soul of All Living Creatures”
Evolution favors the wolf who focuses on what matters most: finding food, remaining healthy, resting, breeding, caring for young – not confronting and dominating others. The same is true for all species.
Several weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published “Zoo Animals And Their Discontents,” an article about Dr. Vint Virga, a veterinarian and animal behaviorist who tends to the psychological welfare of animals in captivity. Virga is to zoo animals what Freud, Frankl, and Jung were to humans. So, when an animal in captivity displays anxiety, depression, phobias, obsessive-compulsive behavior and other maladies, Virga is called in to diagnose and treat the afflicted animal. Read more 
“The Brothers”
One way to bring Americans to reflect on their past – and future – would be to revive memory of the Dulles brothers. Their actions frame the grand debate over America’s role in the world that has never been truly joined in the United States.
“My Struggle: Book 1”
My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn’t a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth.
In Norway, revealing personal information and family secrets is considered shameful so when Karl Ove Knausgaard, the award-winning, best-selling author wrote a 6 volume autobiographical account of his life, the public took notice, read the critics’ reviews but ultimately decided to buy the books. Read more
“My Gentle Barn”
At the core of every human being is a resilience that buoys us back to the surface of life. With every painful loss or setback that brings us crashing to our knees, we find some way to keep breathing and move forward.
My Gentle Barn is the story of how one young girl made her dream come true. Ellie Laks grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family whose members didn’t understand who she was or what made her tick. Told to be quiet, help her mother, and subjugate herself to adults and males in particular, Ellie was a lonely and angry child who didn’t know why her family put her in a box where she didn’t belong and blamed her when she was victimized. Turning to animals – and especially those who needed help – Ellie found solace, compassion, and understanding in the creatures she shared a special connection with. Looking back as an adult, Ellie writes:
Five Chimneys
We lived to resist and we resisted to live.
Five Chimneys was written in 1947 by Olga Lengyel, a 38-year old survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau who wrote the book as a memoir; a personal account of the year she spent in a concentration camp. In 1944, Olga was living in a small city in Transylvania (which was part of Hungary at the time) with her husband, Miklos Lengyel, a surgeon, their two sons, Arvad (11) and Thomas (9), and her parents when they were told they were being deported to Germany. Read more
“Wave”
During our lifetime, there are certain dates that cause us to remember where we were when disaster struck. For my parents generation, there was November 22, 1963 and for me, there is September 11, 2001 and December 26, 2004.
The day after Christmas in 2004, I was in Guayaquil, Ecuador waiting for a flight to Madrid, Spain. I had just spent the holiday with my family exploring the Galapagos Islands and was planning to continue on with them to Machu Pichu, Peru but I developed a tooth problem and decided instead to return home to Madrid. At the airport, everyone was glued to the televisions with CNN reporting that a horrific tsunami struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the coasts of the Indian Ocean. At the bottom of the television screen was a counter with the estimated number of deaths increasing by the thousands every few minutes. It seemed unreal. Read more
“The End of Your Life Book Club”
Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life, even if you aren’t aware of it.
Mary Anne Schwalbe has just returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan when she is diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer which is almost always fatal within months. Unwilling to give up, Mary Anne decides to fight and seeks treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where she lives with her husband, Douglas. Her adult son, Will Schwalbe accompanies his mother to her chemotherapy sessions where they pass the hours reading and discussing books they’ve read or are reading. The End of Your LIfe Book Club is Will Schwalbe’s account of the last two years of his mother’s life and how two people – a mother and a son – used books to share, discuss, and disclose their thoughts, feelings, and love for each other. Read more
“Elsewhere”
Reading was not a duty but a reward, and from that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can’t make a writer without first making a reader, and that’s what my mother made me.
Those are the written words of Richard Russo, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Empire Falls and most recently Elsewhere – a memoir of his life as the son of Jean Russo – a woman he credits with directing his life into a field where being “obsessive, dogged, and rigid” are assets rather than liabilities. Read more
Blue Nights
Several years ago, after my 14-year old golden retriever died, a friend gave me a book called “The Magical Year of Thinking” written by Joan Didion. The book is about the sudden death of Didion’s husband and the grief she experienced: reliving the last few days, imagining different outcomes, and sometimes pretending the loss isn’t real, that it was all a bad dream. As time goes by, the reader realizes that time doesn’t heal all wounds; time just makes the wound more bearable. And, although the loss of a beloved pet cannot be compared to the loss of a partner, “The Magical Year of Thinking” doesn’t distinguish between types of grief. Grief is grief no matter how you experience it. Read more
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