If there were ever a time when people need shortcuts, the holidays are the time. So a cookie cookbook that has a substantial chapter on Sugarplum Shortcuts is a welcome time-saver. Consider baking three different cookies from one dough... Read More

Picassiette (Ital)? the “crazy plate smasher”— was the moniker locals gave to foundry worker Raymond Isadore when he began affixing broken cup fragments, seashells and stones to every inch of his Chartres, France home in 1938.... Read More

Germain’s sequel Night of Amber sweeps along in the same strong story current started in her first novel, The Book of Nights. The protagonist, Charles Victor Peniel, sometimes known as Night-of amber-Wind-of fire, proclaims himself... Read More

This is a strangely sad and compelling memoir, like a story told at a bar frequented by artists. In the summer of 1976 a local boy hitches a ride from a white Mercedes convertible. The austere smiling woman in the passenger seat is... Read More

Managed health care is not the subject of this collection of doctors? stories about encounters with patients, but it is certainly the phantom under the bed. In nearly every story, the patient’s level of care is impacted significantly... Read More

With the passage of the Equal Employment Act of 1972 many women found doors opened to jobs that had previously been reserved for men. Carlson was the first woman hired as a pipefitter by Minnegasco, the Minneapolis Gas Company. In this... Read More

After Carson McCullers died, her literary executors sought to find a suitable editor and publisher for McCullers’ autobiography. It took them thirty years to find someone sensitive enough to handle the honest, compelling memoir by the... Read More

American transcendentalism, the nineteenth-century philosophical and literary movement made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and A. Bronson Alcott, had at its heart the idea of intuition. The accepted... Read More