Books Archive

First Comes Love - I idly opened “First Comes Love” at lunch. By dinnertime, I was cruising toward the finish and reading in a taxi --- and I wasn't thrilled to walk

First: Sandra Day O’Connor - GUEST BUTLER JILL SWITZER has been a member of the State Bar of California for 40 years and now is a full-time mediator. She writes a weekly column for Above

Five Minds for the Future - Five Minds for the

Five New Picture Books for Children, Spring 2017 - GUEST BUTLER BARBARA BOTTNER has written more than 40 books for children and teenagers. (For her Amazon Author Page, click here.] She’s won national awards and appeared on the

Five Ways to Cook Asparagus (and Other Recipes): The Art and Practice of Making Dinner - Just when you think you will never need another cookbook --- you have Julia Child and Marcella Hazan and Patricia Wells and Canal House Cooks Every Day and V Is

Flotsam - When the child was “four-and-a-half-and-three-quarters-but-in-my-head-I'm-seven,” boy, was she ready to read. Signs, newspaper headlines, the crawl on Fox News --- kidding about Fox News --- captivated

Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers - Michael Gross is a professional shit-stirrer. Almost alone among writers who chronicle the rich and glittering in New York, he doesn’t write books that endear him to his subjects. Does

Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World: 80+ Recipes for a Greener Planet and a Healthier You - We seem to have reached a point when simple decency has become a radical political act. You and I, we are decent people. We may not know how to deal with

Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual - If you got in on the ground floor, you chewed every page of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, (464 pages, $8.00 at Amazon). If you were a second responder, the first Michael Pollan book

Forty Ways to Look at JFK - Who does this sound like? He was an indifferent student. When he had to write a senior thesis in college, he hired a secretary and five stenographers. His father got him

Frank Bidart: Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 - Eight books, collected in one. 736 pages in a beautifully produced hardcover. Half a century of poetry. Frank Bidart is the 2017 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, the

Frank Costello: A Novel - “A lot of people had to die for me to be me.” A chilling, memorable line. And historically accurate. That’s the first achievement of “Frank Costello,” Ronald K. Fried’s novel about

Freedom - Barack Obama went to Martha’s Vineyard and there obtained, a week before its release, a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s novel. That same week, my family was heading to the Bahamas,

French Women for All Seasons - What will probably destroy America is not misguided foreign policy, crushing debt or our insistence on building bombers rather than schools --- it's fat. Go to any

Friends & Family: Unreal Estate; Love at First Bark; Yossarian Slept Here - The mail brings a ton of books. Inevitably, some are by former colleagues, real friends and Facebook friends. Often letters are attached, reminding me of good times passed and not

From the Memoirs Of A Non-Enemy Combatant - Guest Butler Ron Fried produces TV, writes really crisp novels (like Christmas in Paris, 2002), knows everything about Balzac and can bench-press an Escalade. Well, three of those. It takes an

Fun Home - A few days before the Tony nominations were announced, my wife had the good sense to buy tickets for “Fun Home.” Smart wife. "Fun Home" got a dozen nominations. And

Funny Fiction - A doctoral student was asked to name some humorous novels. She'd been grinding at graduate school for so long that she drew a blank. She turned

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee - I can’t think of another book that is two books in one --- and both are sensationally good. The first book in “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of