I first learned about Gershom Scholem when I read Thomas Sparr’s excellent portrait of German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City. (If you’re [...]
It is precious and rare to fall in love with a book. It is even more precious to get lost in a book and be swept away to another world. [...]
In the face of depressing news I always ask myself: What can we set against it? And I always end up with the same answer: The pursuit of beauty and [...]
Lately, I have been taken with books by young female dynamos: Tami Lahren's Never Play Dead captivated me in August, and now I have a new one to share: Girl, [...]
Excellent view of the White House and the Washington Monument as we were flying out of Washington, DC, and I was reading this book... I am not usually one to [...]
View of Sand Beach, Acadia National Park, Maine, May 2019 Before we left on our recent trip to Acadia National Park, an acquaintance recommended I read Evangeline - A Tale [...]
I just clicked the Send button to submit my last book review. Until now I told myself that this would be my last. I don't want to have to read [...]
I was driving to my cousin's house for dinner last week when two warning lights came on in the car. Then the instrument panel went dead. When I put on [...]
The actual House of Windows as far as we could tell Have you ever traveled in the footsteps of a book? Visited the location where a character lived? [...]
On our recent trip to Boston, we visited Plimouth Plantation. As often happens when traveling, you go out to see one thing and discover another. Plimouth Plantation hadn't been the [...]
The destruction of the synagogue in Reichenberg (Liberec), November 9-10, 1938 Last year I wrote about Remembering Kristallnacht in Liberec, which is featured in my book Jumping Over Shadows. [...]
"...when [you] remember feeling joyfully bound to the whole earth or even universe -- [those moments] are most likely to be associated with being alone, and often alone outside." found [...]
I just reread a book I had read in 2012 when it first came out: Susannah Conway's This I Know. It is one of the few books I've gifted several [...]
Today is Yom HaZikaron, the day Israel remembers its fallen soldiers. As the mother of two IDF soldiers (My daughter wrapped up her service last year; my son is still [...]
{August Break 8/6: I'm Reading...} I can never just read one book! My current bedtime reading is Yossi Klein Halevi's Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. I loved his book Like [...]
"Eventually, I hear footsteps crunching along the side of the house through the glazed snow and my mother's navy blue sigh through the frozen air." from The Language of [...]
The other day I cast about for a comfort book, something pleasant to read in the tub after a busy day. Usually that would mean an Agatha Christie mystery for [...]
Kelley reading at her book launch party at the Book Cellar in June September is Suicide Awareness Month, and on this occasion I want to present you with the beautiful [...]
While walking to my Ulpan (Hebrew school) in Jerusalem this morning, I passed by this street library set up in an old bus station. Of course I was immediately charmed [...]
I have been in a creative bubble for the past few weeks, focusing my mental energies on a creative project, namely a restructuring of my memoir manuscript. I didn't know [...]
Once in a while a book comes along that is like an old armchair. You simply don't want to get up. You could read on and on until your butt [...]
When I read, I underline words and phrases I like. Thanks to Liz Lamoreux's Inner Excavation and her idea of creating a word toolbox to "reveal the poet within," I've been [...]
I didn't read the book for the December meeting of the Memoir Workshop I teach at StoryStudio Chicago. If the instructor doesn't read the assigned book, that's pretty bad, right? [...]
Isn't this a great title? It's a great book, too; one of the most skillfully wrought I have read in a long time. Things I Don't Want to Know is [...]
I can't write about the book I recently finished and liked so much, Lynne Greenberg's The Body Broken, without going into my own experience of chronic pain, which is [...]
I just finished a book I really liked, one I had been meaning to read for a while, and I'm sad it's done. That's the hallmark of a good book, [...]
On a recent Sunday, the mood struck me to finally weed out the three shelves in our big wall of books that are dedicated to my collection of memoirs. The shelves [...]
With the Winter Olympics currently happening in Sochi, Russia, it fits that my review of Maxim Shrayer's memoir Leaving Russia just appeared in the Jewish Book World. Thanks to this book, I feel [...]
The bookshelves of other people are fascinating. What do they tell you? When I'm invited to other people's homes, I appreciate when one of the rooms I get to be in [...]
My most meaningful read of 2013 was, without a doubt, Julia Cameron's The Right to Write. It transformed my understanding of the creative process; it has me writing Morning Pages [...]
The Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in the Public Garden in Boston, created by Nancy Schön Oh, the power of fiction! Especially children's fiction! It had my kids and me retracing [...]
Sometimes it is interesting to retrace where something began, when a meaningful connection was made. My interview with Susannah Conway appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books last week, and [...]
When I saw the news on my Chicago Tribune homepage last night that Joyce Brothers had died, my heart sank. I never met her, never had an exchange with her, [...]
"It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944..." Thus begins Primo Levi's preface to his stunning but short memoir of his time as a prisoner [...]
Of all the books I read this year, the one I have thought most about, talked most about and continue to think about is Mara Moustafine's Secrets and Spies [...]
Some of my grandfather's books, now on my bookshelf When my grandparents were expelled from their hometown in Czechoslovakia after World War II, they lost their house [...]
We've been dealing with a few health issues lately (everything seems OK now), and so I've slacked off blogging. However, yesterday, as I retired to my bathtub with the [...]
Once in a while we read a classic in my Advanced Memoir Workshop, and this June the group chose E.B. White's One Man's Meat. The book proved hard to get [...]
Edmund de Waals' memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes was my favorite memoir of 2011. I am still trying to figure out why because it defies so many of the [...]
My daughter's stack of books she wants to read These days, I feel like my children, a middle schooler and two high schoolers: I have to read certain books [...]
I've been cleaning up my desk (a highly overdue task) and came across this Borders bookmark. I was about to toss it in the recycling bin, when I stopped [...]
On the surface, Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love is about her grandparents’ suicide. But it is really a love story, in more way than one, with all the requisite [...]
I love it when a book becomes a place, an alternate reality I can dwell in. That’s what happened as I was reading Terry Tempest Williams’ now classic memoir [...]
If you're ever looking for a break from dark and heavy memoirs and want to read one that is light yet literary; or if you wouldn’t mind spending time [...]
“i never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.” Helene Hanff, in her letter of January 9, 1952 in 84, Charing Cross Road [...]