Gotta give The New York Times credit for devoting a healthy chunk of space to the life and work of Leonard Zeskind, who died the other day of cancer. At age 75--too damn young, as far as I’m concerned. Zeskind’s expertise was the right…
I didn’t think I’d like Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles nearly this much, when I checked it out of the library. Not even sure how I heard about it–probably a mention in The New York Times. Sounded like a fun r…
It was my father, of guy all people, who turned me on to the novels of Kate DiCamillo. This was in the early 00s—the beginning of the end-stretch of his life. By then he'd bought into everything that Kate DiCamillo’s characters fight a…
It's unnecessary, I know, to give more attention to Michael Connelly, whose books are instant best sellers. But I must show some love for his latest, The Waiting. Which had me up all night and into the morning, reading. Yes, I read past midnight. …
To take a break from the political madness of our time, I was reading Maximum Bob, an old Elmore Leonard novel I found in a baby library not far from my home. Classic Leonard. About a bunch of lowlifes in Florida, where lowlifes flourish, who're co…
My dear friend Keith Kelleher is a vintage radical, who’s been on the front lines of just about every cause worth fighting for since I can remember. So I wasn’t surprised to see he’d joined this weekend's march outside of Tesla&rs…
Jackson Park by Charlotte Carter is a run-don’t-walk-to-read novel if you love the following… Riveting mysteries with twist endings… Compelling first-person narratives by likeable characters–-in this case, Cassandra, a 20…
As a kid growing up in the `60s and `70s, I listened to all the hits on my transistor radio as I sat in my bedroom, daydreaming about this, that and the other thing. And of all the voices that came through that radio, the one who sounded the most l…
When President Donnie punished the Associated Press for not obeying his orders, it brought back ancient memories from the `70s, when I began my journalism career at a small newspaper in the suburbs of Connecticut. I was young and naive. My first e…