Category Archives: Bookshelf

Books I’m reading, enjoying and want to recommend. And once a year,
reports from Jewish Book Fair.

To Mrs. Condrey and Ms. L’Engle

It’s good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. (Madeleine L’Engle, 1918 – 2007)

Some time ago, a dear friend shared with me the quotes she receives from her church each morning. Most are thought-provoking, some are comforting. I send some of the gems to Elliot and Emma when they seem especially à propos. If you want to join the club simply go to All Souls Meditation and join in.

This morning’s quote by author Madeleine L’Engle reminds me that I’ve wanted to write about this great lady for quite some time. Her career-changing book, A Wrinkle in Time, was published 50 years ago this year and I cannot see the title without thinking of my third grade teacher, Mrs. Condrey. She was doing DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) back when it was still just the salutation to a letter, not an acronym coined by educators who looked around and said, “Oops! We are suffocating our kids with so much learning, they no longer have reading time!”

Every afternoon, after we had mastered our lessons, learned our learning and cleaned our desks, Mrs. Condrey would read to us until the dismissal bell rang. A Wrinkle in Time was one of our rewards. Those of you who’ve read the book don’t need a plot summary; those of you who haven’t, go treat yourself and open it up. A better book never started with the perennially-mocked line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

While every page Mrs. Condrey read kept me spellbound, what touched me the most was the relationship Meg had with her five-year-old brother Calvin. The genius in a family of Mensa-worthy members, Calvin ends up in the clutches of the evil force “IT” who takes over his mind. Meg frees him, finally, by realizing that the “only thing that she had that IT didn’t was her love for her baby brother.” The passion Mrs. Condrey brought to the scene where Meg liberates Calvin, facing down his Hitlerian captor to do so, was the high point of third grade. (Except perhaps gathering pecans with my friend Cindy Wright in her back yard in preparation for our Georgia project.) “I love you, Charles Wallace. I love you Charles Wallace!” Meg says over and over until IT’s hold on her brother is loosed, catapulting the family back to its eventual reunion.

It would be a dozen or so years before I would have a brother to love, and many years after that until I learned, over and over again, that the power of love is impotent to liberate those held in the grip of damaging inner forces. (Said brother has never been gripped by any evil forces and is happily in the grips of making wonderful baked goods.) Love’s futilities aside, Mrs. Condrey, and Ms. L’Engle, brought to life love’s possibilities. They held rapt the attention of a winsome nine-year-old, revealing how solid the ground built from the grains of sand that are words.

Cindy Wright, second row, third from left.
Yours truly, end of third row on the right.
You cannot see that my beloved Mrs. Condrey
had bright red hair!

Redressing Yesterday’s Gown

Had Jeff Zaslow been the father of three sons instead of three daughters, he might never have written The Magic Room. Sweetly committed to understanding the girls in his life, Zaslow, “wanted to write a nonfiction book about the love we all wish for our daughters.”

When his wife suggested a bridal shop might be the place to set the book, he knew her instincts were right. Research led him to Becker’s Bridal in Fowler, Michigan. Fate and good old journalistic digging, led him to the women whose stories he tells so beautifully in this multi-layered gem of a book.

Every woman has a wedding dress story. Some of you have read this essay. Many of you haven’t. So here is mine.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“I give you a lot of credit,” the bridal consultant said as she zipped me into a six thousand dollar confection of a gown. Clouds of white silk billowed around me. “A lot of women would think about doing this but not many would follow it through.” She pinned the size ten sample into an initial semblance of fit. “There you go. Let’s see what you think.”

Fifty years old and there I was trying on wedding gowns. And I wasn’t even engaged. In fact I was already married. Happily so to the same man I had kissed beneath the wedding canopy more than two decades before.

That April day in 1980 I wore his cousin’s wedding dress. Family situation and finances dictated a creative alternative to purchasing a gown of my own. We nailed borrowed right out of the gate and took care of old, new, and blue in due time. I felt pretty enough, but it wasn’t my dream dress. It fit the bill: white and lacy, right size, and best of all, free.

At the time, the borrowed gown seemed right for another reason. I married during the era when women needed men like fish needed bicycles. Matrimony was anathema. Real women wore navy suits and floppy little silk ties, not wedding dresses. When I told my boss I was taking a few vacation days to marry my fiance, she bristled with disdain. Her eyes said it all — I was turning my back on The Cause.

As a young girl I dreamed of wearing my mother’s dress. With its capped sleeves, fitted lace bodice and a runway’s length of tulle gathered into its skirt, my mother’s wedding dress was Audrey Hepburn all the way. The back hall closet was my choice haven for hide and seek. Not because the closet was such an original hiding place but because, wedged back behind zippered plastic garment bags and sacks set aside for Goodwill, I was close enough to the dress to touch it. Close enough to dream of wearing it one day. When she and my father divorced, the dress disappeared — donated, I later found out, to a local theater.

I realize this preoccupation is rather juvenile. Twenty-six years down the aisle I know that dresses do not a marriage make. Commitment isn’t forged with dupioni, underwires and lace but with dedication, understanding and laughter. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that I’d missed out on a crucial part of what makes a woman a woman. So much so that the first silent promise I made to my daughter even before they cut the cord was that she would have her own wedding dress one day. There’s no accounting for the lost dreams of childhood.

Somewhere on the road to fifty, I decided to use the year to do those things I’d dreamed of but had put aside. Some women parachute out of Cessnas. Others train for marathons. I called up the fanciest wedding salon in our town, explained my intentions, and made an appointment.

Then I nearly canceled. This was silly. What business does a fifty-year-old woman have trying on wedding dresses? Nevertheless, I showed up at the appointed hour. Ever the writer I figured if nothing else, I might get an interesting essay out of the afternoon.

Lisa smiled when I shared the reason behind my appointment. The store was undergoing renovations and we were in last season’s sale section. “Let’s go next door,” she said. “That’s where we have all our newest gowns.” I wanted to hug her. She understood how important this was and she was with me the whole nine yards. Or fifteen or however many there are in gowns these days.

“May I choose more than one?”

“Sure. Why don’t we start with three and if none of those work, you can try on more.” I took my time. Some were so plain they looked unfinished. One Marie Antoinette number just needed the flock of sheep and beribboned staff. Most though were the stuff of dreams. I moved through the racks slowly, enjoying every moment, every shimmer of silk and taffeta. It was all there: lace, tulle, embroidered trains; hand-sewn crystals twinkling from the center of pleated rosettes; hems edged in pearls; on-the- shoulder, off-the-shoulder; strapless, backless and plunging neckline.

I chose one that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, one that was mermaid slinky and overlaid with heavy Alençon lace, and a third that was strapless, quite high style and elegant.

Lisa took me into a curtained dressing room and I realized that I was going to have to undress in her presence. Remove my bra and nestle my real-woman, unimplanted, eighteen-years-post-nursing breasts into the bodice of these gorgeous gowns. What had I been thinking? I suddenly felt like Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard’s desperate, once-beautiful actress. But there was no turning back. I took a breath and reached for the Audrey Hepburn.

She drew back the dressing room’s mocha velvet curtain and gestured me towards a ten-foot wall of mirror. I hadn’t expected the afternoon to come with all this drama. I stepped up onto the carpeted platform, looked at my reflection and started to cry. Even at fifty, with wrinkles a-hinting and grey threading through my hair both north and south, I felt like a princess. The skirt billowed around me. It whispered and rustled when I turned. I laughed and pirouetted as if I were on stage. I smiled at the image in the mirror. The girl who was the bride I’d once dreamed of being, smiled back.

I looked cute and gamine. Pretty. I’m a sequin’s breadth under five feet; my stature often pegs me for younger than I am. Even at fifty, I knew I could carry off such a dress. But beautiful as it was, this wasn’t The Dress. I told Lisa it was the one I would have chosen twenty-six years ago This was the dress from my hide-and-seek days.

I took another twirl and headed back to the dressing. If dress number one was Audrey Hepburn, dress number two was Marilyn Monroe. Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Even before Lisa zipped it up I knew it wasn’t for me. My hips looked big, my bust too small. This was a hubba-hubba dress for a woman who broadcasts her sexuality 24/7. Many women can pull off a dress like this. But not me. Back to the dressing room.

Dress number three was made of a kind of silk I’ve never even heard of. Strapless and form fitting it was sexy without drifting into come-and-get-me-boys territory. The dress had a hint of flamenco about it. An asymmetric trail of rosettes began at the bodice and ended in a cascade at the train. Lisa zipped and pinned me into it and once again drew back the curtains.

I stepped up before the wall of mirror and gasped. This was it. I looked gorgeous. Flat out stunning. I’ve attended black tie events feeling plenty glam. But this dress was about something else. The woman in the mirror knew her power in all its permutations. She knew who she was, knew what she wanted, and made no bones about projecting it. She was sexy. She was competent. She was anchored to a well of confidence deep within. How could so much silk and doodads do this? I recalled Lisa’s comment about wedding dresses embodying our image of ourselves and the image we want others to see.

Back in street clothes, the froth and faille returned to the racks, I hugged Lisa and thanked her for her generosity of time and spirit. My afternoon at the bridal salon changed nothing and everything. I’m still going grey. My joints still creak when I rise each morning. But that years-long yearning has been stilled, replaced with pride and affection for my own gumption. I hadn’t only found the dress of my dreams. I came face-to-face with the woman I have become. Gutsy. Sexy. Strong. I love her all the more for daring to rewrite a small but precious piece of her past.

A Great Book for the Third Adolescence

I recall reading somewhere along the way that the terrible twos were the “first adolescence.” Then came the teens, the time we most often link to the word adolescence. During both phases of my kids’ passage through these stages of turmoil and tenacious defining of self, I bought books by the armloads, seeking answers and wisdom to help us all through. We made it.

Once again, I find myself reading books for insights and wisdom to guide me through a new phase of emotional growth and self-definition. Only this time it’s my own. I’ve been on a book-spree, reading about other women’s middle-years search for self, centering and answers as they meet this next phase of life. And then a wonderful book came my way the way the best gifts do — magically unanticipated at just the right moment with just the right message.

Reading Here I Am by Leonard Felder, Ph.D. felt like coming home. Or seeing the home I have lived in all my life in a new light. Or maybe even re-entering the home I know and love so well only to discover new rooms I never knew existed.  And eight rooms at that.

The book’s subtitle — Using Jewish Spiritual Wisdom to Become More Present, Centered and Available for Life — says it all. And that’s what the coming home is about. Because until this beautiful book came my way, the soul-fortifying concepts of being present, centered, and here now seemed the provenance of Eckhart Tolle, Buddhists, yogis and others whose wisdom, though sustaining, came from sources outside my own religious heritage. In his book, Felder offers up eight simple and powerful remedies from Jewish sources that can open doorways to inner peace, stress reduction, gratitude and more. Not just for Jews, but for everyone. If wisdom originally penned in Sanskrit is increasingly universal, why not wisdom penned in Hebrew?

Here I Am is a practical book. It doesn’t overwhelm the reader with time-consuming tasks. There’s no journaling or checking in with a prayer partner. No 21-day pledges. Just eight simple statements chosen for their power to transform spiritual, physical and emotional distraction into calm. 

The book’s title comes directly from the Hebrew Bible. Where are you?God asks Adam. Hineini, Adam replies.  Here I am. Felder uses this ancient exchange between God and God’s first creation as the model for centering. He guides readers to take a moment, and a breath, and then ask themselves this primal question: “Where are you?” The answer, “Hineini/Here I am,” allows space to check in with self. Felder reports that as his clients modeled  one or another of these phrases, they found themselves less anxious, better able to manage difficult people, and re-energized for the tasks at hand in their daily lives.

From outsmarting the “anxious moody brain” with a blessing of gratitude, to viewing those who intimidate and/or enrage us as potential teachers, to finding a moment of peace by recognizing and connecting with the soul placed within us, Felder’s techniques are sensible and accessible. The author also examines the effectiveness of his methods from a scientific perspective as well, drawing on research by neuroscientists, biologists and others who have devoted their careers to the relationship between emotions and physical well-being.

Will incorporating these techniques into your life take a bit of dedication? Absolutely. This book is not a get-out-of-angst-free card. But implementing its wisdom does not require reaching high into the heavens or diving deep beneath the seas. It’s all right here on earth between the covers of one engagingly profound book. I am grateful to Leonard Felder for bringing into the spiritual marketplace wisdom from Jewish tradition that will guide the harried among us back to a place of peace, health, gratitude and confidence.

As for the third adolescence? Whether applying the concept to these middle years of ours catches on or not is immaterial. Here I Am is a keeper for moving through any stage of life — present, centered and available for life.

Pussycat Pussycat Where Have You Been?

Well, not visiting the Queen. We leave those glamorous trips to my sister-in-law, just back from London in preparation for the April 29th wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. The walk down Westminister Abbey’s aisle takes four minute, in case you’re wondering.

So in addition to working and working out, practicing yoga and taking a lovely trip to visit our son and enjoying a quick visit with our daughter who came home for a weekend, I have been reading. So here goes — a collection of mini book reviews:

Devotion by Dani Shapiro. I have waited so long to write about this book that it is now out in paperback. Which might be even better b/c it will be cheaper to purchase and the book is an absolute keeper. Devotion is Shapiro’s second memoir. How does someone in her forties already write two memoirs? The woman does a lot of living, which also includes authoring five novels.

I met her when she was in town for Detroit’s Jewish Book Fair last November and she was stupendous. Engaging, forthright, giving of her insights and experiences and impetus for writing a second memoir, this time at mid-life. Devotion is the story of her claiming her spiritual life, of struggling to define her beliefs and figure out .

This isn’t Eat Pray Love. It felt deeper to me, more grounded. There were no fantastic trips, or shimmering blue lights in the midst of meditation. No island lover who becomes a spouse in the next book. This is the journey of a real woman who has thought my same thoughts, faced my same struggles and issues, right down to the odd daily habit of turning off the alarm clock and thinking: “Time to make the donuts.”. (Every morning, I kid you not, I can’t believe she does this too). Dani’s book is worth your time. Whatever platform you choose — hardback, paperback, e-book, papyrus — read it.

Were it July and not March, which here in Michigan is still cold as a the peas in our freezer, I would say that Mothers and Other Liars is a perfect beach read. It’s quick; it tugs at your heart; you keep turning pages to figure out what Ruby Leander is going to do when she discovers the parents of the child she found in a Dumpster nine years ago and is raising as her own, want her back. So wait for the beach. Or do as I did — curl up with a cuppa hot chocolate and enjoy a very satisfying and cozy read.

Whenever I think of Julia Glass I recall reading that she wrote her first book, award winning Three Junes, when her kids were in nursery school. While they were stacking blocks and finger painting, she was madly writing away in a closet in her apartment in Brooklyn. Or was it the Village?

Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, interweaves the lives of the Jardine sisters: Louisa (devoted to the arts, aching for the stability of home and marriage) and Clement (peripatetic saver of creatures great and small.) It, too won an award — 2009 Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award.

I didn’t love it. Not as much as Three Junes and The Whole World Over. But I stayed with Clem and Louisa on my flight to California, rocking back and forth between the chapters that took the girls all over the map — of their interior lives, career moves, adolescent affairs and family secrets. The ending came out of nowhere and had me gasping in my middle seat. I will give Glass that; I didn’t see it coming in the least. And because there is something about Julia Glass that charms me, I will definitely read her latest, The Widower’s Tale. If you’re going to be near Portland Maine on April 2, she’s having an author event.

I read the first part of Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed the way I watch horrifying scenes in the movies: squinting through splayed fingers. OK, I didn’t go that far but I would read a few pages, put it down. Then pick it up again, drawn into the horror of the Columbine shooting and the ruin it made of the lives of Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen, a teacher who hid in a supply closet, the sounds of the rampage ricocheting like the bullets, all around her.

I didn’t read Lamb’s first two novels. The manic depression in the first book stopped me right there and I let the second one pass me by. They say three’s the charm. This is a huge novel taking Caelum from Colorado back home to Three Rivers, Connecticut where a beloved aunt has just had a stroke.

I am already edging toward 1000 words with this blog and have one more book to share. So I will leave Lamb alone (cop-out, I know.) This is an extraordinary book. Read it. Through splayed fingers or not.

I would like to take an English class titled, The Works of Diane Ackerman. That way I know I would get to every one of her twenty-three books. Essayist, poet, novelist, naturalist, children’s author, Ackerman is the kind of writer who doesn’t just draw you in from her first sentence but stuns you into submission, mouth agape, all your senses firing. Because that’s how Ackerman writes, all senses firing. You turn the pages of her books as if through amber; when you read her, time slows. Your breathing deepens and you disappear into another world. And if that’s not enough, Diane Ackerman is a looker, too; she has that dark-curly haired ethnic Cher look, but sweeter.

This will not be a book review as I am only three pages into One Hundred Names for Love. But here’s the set-up. Ackerman, on book tour, rushes home upon learning her husband has been hospitalized with a systemic staph infection and kidney stones. The day of his discharge, he suffers a stroke. Major stroke. Language-robbing, memory-robbing stroke. To give you an idea of how cruel this one’s going to be, Ackerman writes that during her husband’s three-week hospital stay, he passed the time composing “a complete sonnet cycle about the Egyptian god Osiris.”

The subtitle of One Hundred Names for Love is A Stroke, A Marriage and the Language of Healing. I don’t want to do anything but read. If I were in school I might skip class and spend the day with this book. That’s why I want to take a class devoted to the works of Diane Ackerman. Then, even skipping class could be rationalized under the heading, Doing Homework.

So I haven’t been to London. And I haven’t been visiting the Queen. This pussycat’s been reading.

Where’d You Get That Book?

Loved this article in last week’s NY TImes. Publishers Look beyond Bookstores . Now that Borders has declared bankruptcy and bookstores in general seem to be going the way of papyrus, publishers are ramping up their energies to place books where their readers are.

Enter designer Marc Jacobs’ Bleeker Street Bookmarc, books at Coldwater Creek, Michael’s craft stores. As it said in the article “anyone with a shelf” is now game to be approached by book reps, and approached aggressively. And guess what? Titles are moving, with some books being read as never before. Niche marketing wins again.

All of this got me thinking. If I hadn’t purchased the books on my shelves at brick and mortar shops or ordered them from Amazon, where might I have found them? Starbucks has sold CD’s for years. Maybe they should start stocking books on writing, given how many authors hunker down with a latte while writing their novels. Could moms get their sons reading more easily if books about their sports heroes were sold next to the Nikes? What about Memoirs of a Geisha? Might it find a new generation of readers if it were stocked an upscale sushi restaurant? Biographies and therapists waiting rooms? Couldn’t hurt to read how some of history’s greats handled (or mishandled) life’s challenges.

So play a game with your fellow readers and me. In this new world where books are for sale in locales that have no borders, where might you have found the books on your shelves?

Who Woulda Ever Thought?

“Look at this,” my husband said, pointing to the Sunday NY Times’  “36 Hours in…” feature. This week it’s Brooklyn. Yes, Brooklyn. Who woulda ever thought, is right.

I first knew of Brooklyn by way of warning. “If a boy ever wants to take you to Coney Island,” my mother intoned, “don’t go on the Cyclone. He’ll just want you to snuggle up next to him.”

When I first moved to New York City in ’78, my roommates and I couldn’t afford Manhattan. But we could afford Brooklyn Heights. We had the bottom apartment of a five-story brownstone. It consisted of one huge bedroom, which we shared; a teeny kitchen; a living room with a parquet floor that gave way to a private garden (ours); a wrought iron spiral staircase leading up to a loft overlooking the living room; one and a half baths. It was an incredible apartment. The three of us scrimped each month to meet the $900 rent.

I fell in love with Brooklyn. Our street — Sidney Place — ran a single block between Joralemon and State. The church bells across the street were deep and resonant; every once in a while there was a wedding. The Promenade was a part of my morning run. I loved looking at the Statue of Liberty each morning and the World Trade Center’s soaring towers. The Heights’ main drag — Montague Street — had a hippie leather shop whose items I lusted after. With the first freelance check I received, I ordered an editor’s satchel. It held manuscripts in those days. Today it holds my laptop.

During those early morning jogs, I fantasized about living on Grace Court or in one of the stables that had been turned into co-ops. There were the fruit salad streets of Pineapple and Orange. One morning I happened upon the street where a college friend had lived. She boasted that her middle name was Prince. “Like Prince Street. In Manhattan.” Back then, Brooklyn was still just a borough. Manhattan ruled all.

Soon after moving to New York, I met the man who would become my husband. He was from Brooklyn. Natch. Our first date he took me to Coney Island. We rode the Cyclone. And yes, I dove into his embrace as the roller coaster’s rickety cars careened on tracks that pre-dated my mother’s own romances.

One day he showed me a watercolor he’d purchased some years before. It was of a street scene in Brooklyn. The title? Sidney Place, 1941. You can see my brownstone, halfway down on the right. We have a word for this in Yiddish — beshert. It roughly translates as “meant to be.”

Transferred to Michigan on the cusp of becoming parents, we returned to Brooklyn twice a year. I had a love-hate relationship with the borough in those days. The trips were a trial: long car rides with cranky children (in one day no less!); the sirens that awoke my son as soon as I settled him from the last one’s shrieking; schlepping to one relative after another. There was the drunk we wanted to shoot. For four hours straight he stood on the sidewalk beside our building shouting, “Marecon, I kill your mother! Marecon I kill your father!” We never found out what a marecon was but the kids learned that “assho…” was not a vocabulary word they could use.

Those trips wove us all closer, drew us deep into the fabric of my husband’s past — the first cousins he played with like siblings; the aunts, uncles and cousins who were Holocaust survivors. Their accents, and the taste of apple cake and more, are imprinted upon our kids’ memories. I am glad for the pools we swam in and the stories of Ring-a-levio and Stoop Ball and Iron Tag. Suburban kids, Elliot and Emma not only got a slice of city life but planted deep within them is a rich period of post-World War II Brooklyn. People had little materially but possessed everything that makes for life well lived: love, determination, sorrow and tragedy, family loyalty, sheaves and sheaves of stories. Year after year we returned adding rings to our family history. Seders, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, funerals.

And yes, we took them to Coney Island, to the aquarium and into the area’s little Russia. We rode the Cyclone and walked the Boardwalk. We took them to the places of our courtship — the Brooklyn Museum and Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park. We went to Nathan’s for hot dogs; the neighborhood was rough but the dogs were great. Our kids are city savvy from those visits. As my son once said, “Michigan is home but New York is our roots.”

Emma moved to Manhattan after she graduated college. Brooklyn is out of reach for her at the moment. The borough is way hip now. I can’t even imagine the rent my old apartment would fetch. But Emma heads to Brooklyn every chance she gets. She dreams of moving there one day. Just last week she sent pictures from Coney Island where she traipsed the length of the boardwalk, lunched at a restaurant owned by Russians and stalked through the snow-covered beach. It comforts me to know that if I can’t have her in Michigan, I know she’s in a place that feels like home.

I still sometimes fantasize about living in a brownstone on Grace Court. Thirty six hours in Brooklyn? Better you take a lifetime.

Have I left you hungering for more? Here are three great books about Brooklyn:
It Happened in Brooklyn
When Brooklyn Was the World 1920 – 1957
When You’re from Brooklyn, Everything Else is Tokyo

And here is a photo of the beach — Coney Island like I never saw it.

What Would Dewey Do?

February’s Ladies Home Journal features an article about organizing one’s bookshelves by color. The photograph accompanying the article (the above is my rendition; the cat bookends were a gift from my mother some 45 years ago) depicts a shelf of red-bound books beneath which sits a shelf evenly divided between greens and yellows. Way up high on the top shelf, black books and white are nicely integrated with a sprinkling of beiges, tans and ochres. What does it say about book design that there was only one purple book jacket in the whole mix?

As pretty as this literary rainbow is, what serious reader would follow the stylist’s complete decimation of Dewey’s system? I suppose if I thought hard enough I’d remember that the book jacket of James McBride’s The Color of Water is black and white. But Valerie Steiker’s The Leopard Hat? The spine of that wonderful memoir is a dark terra cotta. I’d never find Val again if I didn’t know to look between Mimi Sheraton’s The Bialy Eaters (OK not really a biography but a biography of a bread and the Bialystokers who baked them) and The Ditchdigger’s Daughters by Yvonne Thornton, M.D.

With biographies organized by name, I can imagine a conversation between William Least Heat Moon and Lucette Lagnado. Blue Highways, published in the early 80’s, captures a back roads way of life that has all but died away in the face of interstates and Mickey D’s. Lagnado writes of a lost world in The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. It is an exquisite book. Lagnado’s portrait of her father — well-to-do, confident, debonair — and the family he headed in the years before, and following, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power takes you by the heart and doesn’t let you go.  At all.  I still hurt for her family’s losses when I recall their story.

Look Up (my sister’s biography of emigre artist Sacha Kolin) sits between Alma Mater, by P. F. Kluge and Madeline L’Engle’s The Summer of the Great Grandmother. As fascinating a companion as L’Engle would be, maybe Kolin would have had more to say to another white-spined maverick — Dr. Judah Folkman (Dr. Folkman’s War) — whose quest for a cure for cancer reads like fiction in author Robert Cooke’s hands. Kolin, like Folkman, insisted on following a singular vision despite detractors by the dozens.

The best color match of all, were I so organizationally inclined, would go to photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron and the aforementioned Steiker. Daughters of larger-than-life women whose wardrobes were as much about clothes as personal triumph, Barron’s (My Mother’s Clothes) and Steiker’s memoirs of their mothers are loving, bittersweet and multi-layered as petticoats.

My bookshelves do have something in common with the LHJ spread: one lone purple book. Mauve recounts 19th century chemist William Perkins’ quest to synthesize quinine. The outcome of his failed experiments resulted in the creation of a purple powder; the color mauve was born and with it the key to mass-producing fabric dyes. Perkins became a very wealthy man.  It took until the 1940’s to tame malaria.

Despite stylist Lili Diallo’s hue and cry to shelve books by color, I’ll leave well enough alone. Other than Blue Highways, logically bound in azure, I’d never find anything else.