Books Archive

The Shun Lee Cookbook - At breakfast, Michael Jordan ate only half of his pancakes. I asked him why. “If you want to fly,” he said, “you have to eat like a bird.” Clear conclusion: Control portion

The Silent Wife - Hollywood would rather make “Rocky 2” than “Rocky.” Publishers would rather release “Gone Girl 2” than just about anything. You can’t blame them. In 2012 Gone Girl was the Fifty Shades of

The Silver Bear - There is no love in The Silver Bear. Not one little bit. The desire for love, the hunger for love? Oh, this short novel has plenty of that. There's

The Silver Linings Playbook - This is a little film --- a relationship film: no car chases, no special effects --- about two damaged people who find each other, mess each other up, heal each other. It

The Sky Over The Louvre - If you get to page 830 of Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, you know that Robespierre decided that the Revolution required an image to replace the

The Sleeper - Alfred Hitchcock said the way to make movies that frighten people is to give them a fear bigger than the fears they live with every day. That was pretty much

The Snow Goose - In the spring of 1940, nothing could stop Hitler's march across Europe --- by late May, Paris was on the verge of falling to the Nazis. And the English troops who had fought

The Soloist - It starts as a newspaper story right out of a 1930s movie. Newspaper columnist hurries back to the office. On the way, he sees a middle-aged African-American man, in rags, playing

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Parents, educators, clinicians --- and some kids --- are less than thrilled with "13 Reasons Why," the Netflix series about a teenage girl who kills herself after being humiliated by

The Space Merchants - As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. This isn’t the way science

The Sports Edition: Tennis, Baseball, Football - The Sports Edition exists because everyone I know can't take phone calls at night because... the U.S. Open. And the baseball season is approaching a final reckoning. I won't be

The Square Foot Garden: Gardening Made Easy - During the pandemic, having enough land for a garden was a status symbol --- it meant you'd escaped the urban hellscape and were living the updated version of the good

The Stoics: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius… and a Buddhist monk - Let’s be clear: Stoicism will not offer peace of mind. Its emphasis is on virtue, on right conduct, living in harmony with nature. Epictetus: “Work, therefore to be able

The Stories of John Cheever - Of the many profiles I've written, why is my Cheever piece still so vivid for me? The answer has less to do with the man than with his work. That

The Story Of My Life: The Autobiography of Helen Keller - When Charles Dickens toured the United States in 1842, he made a special point of visiting institutions. In Boston, he visited the Perkins School for the Blind, where he met

The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music - I want you to stop your life and watch what is easily the best video of the year. The scene is a tribute concert, honoring Taylor Hawkins, who was the

The Summer Kitchen - Home is a 26-acre estate in the Westchester town of Bedford, New York, where her neighbors are Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. But home is also three separate condominiums in

The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones - You don’t care about The Rolling Stones? Read this book anyway. Were you sentient when Kennedy was assassinated? Then you watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and, later, the

The Tears of Autumn - So, after 50 years, many of the government's files about the assassination of President Kennedy have been released. Did you learn anything? I didn't. And when more are released, I

The Tender Bar - George Clooney directed the film of “The Tender Bar.” It was made for pennies: $10 million. It got great reviews. It made no money. I’ve read the book twice, I