When Joel Diamond appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1982, playing the keyboard for the singer Jane Olivor, he told his parents, Ben and Lil, that he had rented a limo to bring them to the show. His father asked, “What’s a limo?” Joel told him that a limo was a big car. So, his parents were whisked away in a big car to Carnegie Hall, where they sat in the middle, close to the front of the stage.

Jane Oliver came onstage first. Next came Joel Diamond. Lil stood up in the audience, and shouted, “That’s my son! That’s my son up there!”

After the concert, Diamond had made reservations for his parents at the Russian Tea Room. Lil complained about the prices on the menu, and refused to order food, so the waiter made her sit at the bar. Lil said she could not enjoy her son spending so much money, and explained, “I’m from Yonkas!”

How Joel Diamond came to play at Carnegie Hall is a Yonkers story that began at the Hammond Organ Store on Nepperhan Avenue. Diamond was born blind in one eye, but when he walked into the organ store, he could play the keyboard. He was a prodigy.

His passion for music led him to teach himself. He waited until his parents left for work; he’d stay home and skip school. He spent the entire day playing the organ. His high school music teacher came to his house and told his mother, “Mrs. Diamond, I want to let you know that your son hasn’t been in school for two weeks.”

By the time he was thirteen, he began working professionally.

Yonkers was a very musical town. Diamond played in every band in Yonkers. While he was originally self-taught, he sought sophisticated instruction. Music became his one-way ticket out of Yonkers. He went to the Berklee School of Music in the mid-seventies during the time when Boston was beset with riots.

He drove himself hard and studied with the jazz pianist Sanford Gold. He also studied with the legendary Madame Chaloff, from whom he learned “the Russian method,” a technique of pressing each piano key so that key never touches its lowest position, and retains its resonance through to the next note. The spiritually predisposed Madame Chaloff dazzled her students with her emphasis on breath and weightless arms, fluttering bird-like in the air.

Joel Diamond took high-profile rock ‘n’ roll jobs with artists like Joan Jett, Felix Pappalardi, and Graham Parker, and often toured with them. He also went on the road with the English guitarist Mick Taylor, who had launched a solo career after a long stint with the Rolling Stones. The money was good but Diamond didn’t care about the money. All that mattered was the music.

A regular at the Possible 20 Bar on West 55^th Street, Joel Diamond knew every musician in New York and played with all of them. Possible 20 was the go-to pub for studio musicians. Musically versatile, Joel Diamond was widely respected and known as a great pianist and accompanist, a musicians’ musician.

One former girlfriend describes Diamond in those days as looking like a Hassidic punk rocker. In his early years, he cropped his hair to be the same style as the artist Egon Schiele.

Later, he developed a penchant for wearing Fedoras, Borsalinos, Soho hats, and backward caps. Suit-wise, he preferred a perfect fit. His suits were made at Jodamo on the corner of Orchard and Grand.

Once he was scoring a film for the Denver Symphony, and had to conduct the orchestra. He was getting pissed, and started saying, “Fuck, Shit! Fuck this and Fuck that. Let’s do this again.” The conductor called him into the control room and said, “We don’t use that kind of language here.” Diamond told him, “This is the vernacular that I grew up with and if you don’t like it, then Fuck you.”

By the end of the session, the formal, classically-trained musicians were all saying, “Fuck this and Fuck that.” Diamond is quick to add, “They probably wanted to say that all along. We had the best time.” Admittedly, Diamond says, “I can be really silly.”

Yonkas speak, notwithstanding, Diamond’s ability to traverse being a musician, a composer, an arranger and a producer, brought him extraordinary opportunities. Defining his entire repertoire as eclectic or avant-garde is a misnomer. Diamond chose his projects regardless of musical genre or cultural certainty to push the edge beyond what is conventional in order to explore what is truly exceptional.

Diamond wrote the score for the film The Believer, written and directed by Henry Bean. The score’s fusion of traditional orchestral music and contemporary electronica garnered accolades. Variety selected Joel Diamond as one of 20 Creatives to watch.

He scored the film Delirantissimo, an experimental comedy directed by Alain Rimbert. Worldwide, the film won six awards for Best Score.

One of Diamond’s favorite film projects is Milarepa, directed by Neten Chokling, A tale of greed and vengeance, Milarepa is about a man who became Tibet’s greatest mystic. The film won an award for Best Spiritual Fiction Film at the European Spiritual Film Festival in Paris.

He was the musical producer and arranger for playwright David Mamet, most notably for the film Oleanna. He produced and arranged two albums for Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon. He also produced albums for other artists, including Livingston Taylor, and Sarah K.

The project near and dear to his heart was creating the score for the urban ballet Leonard And Minky. Choreographed by John Selya (Twyla Tharp, ABT) at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop, and narrated by none other than the nasal-voiced Mayor Ed Koch, Leonard And Minky is the balletic story of two cats. It’s fair to mention Joel Diamond’s own two cats were named Leonard and Minky.

Commissioned by the Cuban National Ballet to compose four pieces for the Compañía de la Danza Narciso Medina, his work “Seasons” premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in May, 2003. And his string quartet, “Danza Caprichosa”, recorded by Orchestra Nova, was nominated for a Grammy award.

While Diamond started his career playing as a sessions musician, he felt compelled to raise the barre to see how far he could grow as a musical artist. He often downplayed his pursuit of serious orchestral music among his rock n’ roll and jazz colleagues, and was known for his work in the studio.

As a sessions musician, he worked with the jazz greats: Hazel Scott, American Latin Jazz bass player Victor Venegas, bass player Leopoldo Fleming, Jesus Silva, and Chris White, who was Dizzy Gillespie’s first bass player.

Diamond says he and Chris White were very close. “We had a spiritual ‘magical’ relationship. We would see things musically the same way.”

After recording sessions, the musicians ate together, and their conversations inevitably turned philosophical and spiritual. “That is what made it so interesting,” Diamond says.

Joel Diamond’s journey from working-class Yonkers to Carnegie Hall took more than prodigious talent. Diamond thinks a lot of luck was involved and his success had a lot to do with the people he met along the way. He said, “I have this strong faith in God because there are too many things in my life that are synchronistic.”

Remembering his gig at Carnegie Hall, Joel Diamond describes Jane Olivor as the most perfect, talented singer he had ever worked with. He couldn’t wait to do gigs with her. Her voice was so beautiful and her phrasing was perfect. They sold out at Carnegie Hall and more shows had to be added.

Diamond in the Rough is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

If you listen to old-timers, boomers, and grifters, they’ll tell you Yonkers is where rock music grew up and made a name for itself. No matter how many old-timers romanticize our inglorious past, growing up in working-class Yonkers was no bed of roses. Kids could get stuck in the thorns forever and become working stiffs.

There were only three ways out of Yonkers: death, education, or fame. Drug overdoses and death by violence guaranteed a one-way ticket out of town, but they were extreme measures. Not everyone had the type of smarts that made them fit for school. Becoming famous was, by far, the best way to get out of town. The road to fame was paved with music. Rock, Jazz and the Blues, music was everywhere.

Despite the city’s reputation for blatant racism, the color of music wasn’t black, white or brown. Music was color blind. If you were a good musician—that’s all anyone ever cared about.

Some Yonkers kids are still playing in clubs today, like Wyatt Walker Jr., whose father was a preacher in Harlem and chief of staff for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ed Murphy produced the first rock concert ever held in Untermyer Park, and later became the personal assistant to Rolling Stone Keith Richards before moving to Norway, where, for years, he produced the Notodden Blues Festival.

Vincent Laporta and Eddie Reynolds were the guitarists for Lou Reed and the Tots. Some Yonkers kids became legendary in the music world, like Steven Tyler and Ray Tabano of Aerosmith. Songwriter Chip Taylor is known for writing “Angel in the Morning” and “Wild Thing,” but his work as a Country Western musician was about being a storyteller in the most pure sense of the word. Music prodigy Joel Diamond dropped out of high school to become a sessions musician and a world-class composer.

Yonkers was once a place where a kid could walk from one end to the city to the other without getting into too much trouble. And if trouble is what you were looking for, it would find you. As a working-class mecca, a lot of kids were looking for a come up, and a road to a better life. Any kid could buy an electric guitar, jam in bands all over the world, and get a chance at making the big time.

Things have changed. There is no easy road for the working-class to get out of any town in America. Today it takes a whole lot of money to be a contender, much more than the price of an electric guitar.

Straight Outta Yonkers is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

The Crowded Shroud by Florenz Baron is a weirdly wonderful novel. George Fairhaven is a clever cad who has magical powers. His main squeeze Caroline oozes with carnality, a rare sexiness that would make anyone crazy. George considers Caroline to be a wanton slut, yet he helplessly and happily indulges in her every whim. Caroline has a baby, sired by George, but he wants no part of the child, which Caroline welcomes because she does not want the child to be influenced by George.

Overdressed snobs come and go in the manner of an English Drawing Room Drama; all of them have a droll sense of humor, often attempting to be wickedly funny. George seduces every woman in the book. Everyone’s fucking one another in a cheeky melee that is always one-on-one and done in conventional heterosexual quickies that are politely insinuated, and never graphic.

The story does not have a sense of place. The fictitious locales Umtali, Flamsgusta, Tintagel, Ondicherry, Ozambique, and Ioux City could represent the English countryside, cottages by the sea, or a ranch in Wyoming. Angels and coins, Mithraic Sacrifice and George’s mysterious trunk appear, then quickly vanish without ever becoming leitmotifs. It seems that George’s mysterious trunk is full of treats, trinkets and spells that imbue him with magical powers.

The most intriguing aspect of the story is the mounting body count. George is unwittingly able to cast spells on people. A young boy, Gaius, is inexplicably killed. His mother Jocasta laments that “he was a faceless little boy whom she really did not like, and no pictures were ever taken of him.” Kitty Shelmerdine slips on a banana and falls from a steep cliff into the sea. Lally Ambrose is thrown from her horse during an obligatory fox hunt.

The Crowded Shroud is Absurd Realism at its finest and ought to be celebrated for its literary ambition. Part Joycean, part magical realism, with a smattering of Thomas Pynchon, some of Baron’s sentences are brilliant, and the characters are fascinating, but the story itself has structural flaws and syntax errors that could have easily been fixed by a good editor.

The story surrounding Florenz Baron might prove to be more interesting than her book The Crowded Shroud. Born asFlorenz Hasratoff in 1919, she spent most of her life living as a bohemian artist in conservative, blue-collar Yonkers.

From 1947 to 1974, Florenz Baron, together with her husband Oscar Baron, owned the only independent bookstore in Yonkers, The Alicat Bookshop. The Barons hobnobbed with a legion of literary legends and counted among their close friends Anais Nin, Maya Deren, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, and the Harlem Renaissance Artists Beauford Delaney and his younger brother Joseph Delaney.

The Barons also published the “Outcast Series,” limited-editions chapbooks with contributions from Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and William Carlos Williams (Paterson).

After Oscar Baron died in 1976, Florenz Baron continued to sell books from her home on Ludlow Street in Yonkers. At the age of 80, Florenz Baron self-published The Crowded Shroud, becoming a first-time author. Some say she was also planning to write a memoir. How she developed The Crowded Shroud is as mysterious as George Fairhaven’s magical trunk full of treats, trinkets and spells.

Note: The records and papers of Oscar and Florenz Baron are archived in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Crowded Shroud By Florenz Baron Xlibris Corporation (2000) pp 208

Photo of Florenz and Oscar Baron courtesy of Rebecca Alberts.

Sue Klofak was my closest childhood friend. We were Yonkers kids, working-class, playing street games: kickball, basketball, football. We swapped books. It became a competition to see who would finish first. Sue usually won. Between the two of us we read hundreds of books.

Our love of learning manifested itself in very different ways. Sue collected rocks, fossils and bugs. I wrote stories and poetry. Together we put on carnivals, posted flyers everywhere and charged all the other kids admission.

In high school our paths diverged. Sue won a scholarship to Barnard College. I became a rebel and was expelled from a Catholic high school. I cut a deliberate swath through Yonkers, a city that had become too small for me, and headed west to explore America.

I lost touch with Sue for many years. I moved to Seattle, built my own public relations firm, and wrote press materials, articles, essays and books. My business frequently brought me back to New York City. I learned Sue had stayed in New York to become a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. I was astonished that the things we did as little kids predicted who we would become as adults.

I think we might have been acorns.

A theory about acorns asserts who we are destined to become is imprinted on our souls from the first moment of our lives. Jungian psychologist James Hillman wrote “The Soul’s Code,” emphasizing that each person is like an acorn that has the potential to become a great oak tree. No matter what obstacles the acorn encounters, one day it will grow to be an impressive oak tree, with the following caveat. No one knows how long the tree will live. It depends on the acorn’s distinct destiny.

I began to wonder what would have happened to me had I not met Sue.

Whenever I traveled to New York, I visited her at the Museum, making up for the time lost between us. We both marveled that we had escaped a blue collar fate. Other Yonkers girls took service jobs as health care workers or waitressing, a few taught in public schools. There wasn’t anything intrinsically wrong with these jobs, except they were so Yonkas.

Sue and I used to go to Big Nick’s Burger & Pizza Joint on 77th and Broadway. It was hard to pick a burger from Big Nick’s forty-page menu. Sue liked the Sumo Burger; over a pound of beef, it was as large as her head. Sue loved going to the Silk Road, a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side that served wine and beer for free. Cream puffs, the New York Mets, her small apartment in the Bronx, where she lived with her two cats, were among her favorite things.

In her work as a paleontologist, she had a penchant for Cephalopod Fossils, and co-authored several peer-review articles with her boss Neil H. Landman. She worked on the sixth floor of the Museum, outside of Neil Landman’s grand corner office, in a cramped, dusty room full of long wooden tables covered with fossil collections. Many of the fossils sat in open trays, awaiting her expert classification. She explained that Fossil Cephalopods were related to the Octopus, but they had hard shells that could be curved or straight.

Sue rarely ventured outside of New York. Once a year she went on an archeological dig somewhere on American soil in fossil country: Colorado, Arizona, Nevada. The way she spoke about these trips made her face soften to resemble the child who had once swapped books with me. She reconnected with her peers and adored the comradery. Everyone knew everyone else in this community that celebrated Cephalopods.

Even when she didn’t leave New York, her assignments took her beyond our working-class neighborhood in Yonkers. One year the Museum had an exhibition on Pearls, featuring more than eight hundred specimens. The exhibit touted the natural history and exquisite role pearls have played in human civilization. Sue met with a wealthy donor who was loaning her personal collection to the Museum. She traveled across town to the 5^th Avenue home of a Persian Princess, who entrusted Sue with a cache of jumbo pearls. The Princess confessed she had played with the pearls as a child because she thought they were marbles.

Sue knew pearls have been revered for their beauty since antiquity. It is only befitting that a Princess from Iran should own a treasure chest full of perfectly round, iridescent orbs. The Museum’s exhibit on pearls promoted cultural awareness as part of an effort to help New York City heal from the horrific events that had happened on September 11, 2001. Pearls notwithstanding, Sue was not inclined to wear a classic pearl necklace like the one bought by Joe DiMaggio for Marilyn Monroe, which was also part of the exhibit. She’d rather talk about the pearly nautilus, a living fossil that has wandered the South Pacific for 500 million years.

We all know people whose lives have been cut short.

Sue’s last trip outside of New York took her to an archeological dig in Nevada. On the first night of the conference, there was a reception. Sue felt a headache coming on. The pain mounted until she couldn’t bear it any longer, and she checked into her room for the night. She went to bed and never woke up. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage, aneurysm, a burst in the brain that bleeds.

There was no warning that this mighty oak tree would fall.

Sue had an indelible essence, the imprint of an acorn. She and I were destined to meet as children. Swapping books became the bedrock between us, foretelling who we would become. The mission of the acorn is to keep growing by putting down one root after another. Sue’s beloved Cephalopod means head, foot in Greek. The head guides the feet, or fast traveling feet bring the head along for the journey, until we become the extraordinary oak tree that will stand with time, even though no one knows how long that time will be.

My Friend Sue is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

My mother told me I had a way with words. She was proud of my poetry and stories, and said I was a natural born writer. I was flattered but I didn’t entirely believe her. She was a high school dropout and suffered from schizophrenia. I’m not sure if schizophrenia caused her to drop out of high school at sixteen. She often heard voices telling her to do things.

I have an old Remington typewriter that was a gift from my Aunt Jo. My mother planted a bug in her ear, and told her I wanted to be a writer. Becoming a writer was a wildly crazy notion for my working-class Aunt Jo. She had never learned to drive a car, and thought driving was a man’s job. Aunt Jo gave me the typewriter, so I could hone secretarial skills.

My mother planted other bugs, too. She rarely left the house and when I came home from school, she asked me who I had seen throughout the day. I went into great detail about the clothes they wore, how well they moved, or if they were in a car, and embellished what they said to me. My descriptions made her happy and led me to spin yarns. I used my typewriter to bang out my first unfinished novel, Beneath the Passion of the Angelic Mystery Rose.

Despite my mother’s best intentions, I did not get a good education. My small classroom was crammed with fifty-one squirming students who were smacked in the head because they couldn’t sit still. We were taught to diagram sentences, and no mention was made of the fluency of language. Most of my teachers were not in awe of my writing. They whispered in my ear, “Did you write this yourself, or did you copy it from somewhere?”

Everyone knew my mother was quirky, a little off. Most people avoided her, including other family members, and that made me ashamed, because I thought she was a really beautiful person, and had every right not to be like everyone else.

She encouraged me to develop my own voice.

In spite of my teachers, I had a flair for writing. I wrote by ear, the same way a musician plays music by ear. I heard the vocalic rhythm in language, and effortlessly created alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. I had an affinity for turning phrases that were virginal—they had not been used or sullied by other authors.

I wasn’t bred to write. No toney schools for this working-class girl. I had the audacity to major in English, but it was at a State University. My sophomore English teacher washed red ink across the pages of my essays. He said I had conveyed interesting ideas, but he was dismayed by my inability to grasp the rules of grammar. He was a small man with a sphinxlike countenance and always wore a bow tie.

It took me years to master the technical aspects of grammar. I wrote countless arbitrary sentences every day to examine the flow, substance, and rhythm of one new word. I strangled toxic words, learned to stab the oxford comma, enjoyed eviscerating appositives, and perfected pyrotechnics with precisely placed semicolons; all these ruthless habits set me on fire.

My mother said, “Don’t let education ruin your writing.”

Beneath the Passion of the Angelic Mystery Rose, along with my countless other false starts, have long been trashed. I wanted my writing to be unblemished, without flaws, and that’s not possible. The novel is the most perfect form of literature because it is full of characters who are deeply flawed.

My mother was different, and that made her a truth teller, an authority on voice. She wanted me to find what was raw in my own voice. I still have my Remington typewriter, and will always hear my mother’s words. I seek people who are like my mother, quirky, a little off. They find me and I find them.

The Mother of My Words is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

On a cold day in the Spring of 1982, Mrs. Elizabeth “Lee” Hipius made her way through the parking lot behind Yonkers City Hall. Small and compact, the 53-year-old Italian American woman moved briskly between her mother and her brother, who had joined her on this day to give her their moral support. Lee Hipius’s fingers grew numb as she clutched a sheath of papers to her chest. While she had always been active in her community, the prospect of talking to a group of public officials made her heart flutter.

Lee Hipius had formed a committee to save the Yonkers Carnegie Library from demolition. As President of the Committee, she had asked the Yonkers City Council if she could make a presentation, but she had been stonewalled. After many months of making polite but persistent entreaties, the City Council finally granted her request. Her tireless effort to save the library was finally paying off. As she came around the corner from City Hall, the moment she saw the library her anticipation plummeted to horror. One side of the library had already been bashed in.

By the time I spoke to Lee Hipius, she was in her nineties. She remembered that Spring day as surely as if it were yesterday. “I did appear before the City Council and talk about how we wanted to save the library,” she said. “But when we got up to the library, the building had already been punched out with a wrecking ball. The message was: ‘You can come here and talk all you want but it won’t do you a bit of good.’”

A few weeks after Lee Hipius made her presentation to the Yonkers City Council, the library was destroyed. A grainy black and white photo, taken by the Yonkers Herald Statesman in May 1982, reveals the library’s inner sanctum looking as dark as the collapse of a bludgeoned heart. A bulldozer is stuck in the library’s entrails. All that remains is a shell-shocked corpse, a pile of rubble, steel girders, twisted coil, shards of granite and yards of broken brick.

The Yonkers Carnegie Library was once commonly held to be the most beautiful building in the city. I remember the library sat high on the hill and seemed to see the far corners of the world, beyond the Hudson River. The library took Yonkers for what it was—a city hovering in an undefined limbo, blurring the distinction among urban, suburban, and rural; and the rich, middle and working-classes, and the poor; and the people, black, brown, and white.

The most magical element of the library was the children’s room on the second floor. The sound of my footsteps to the second floor was hushed by the honed, low-luster, grainy white marble steps. Indiscriminate sharp lines bordered the edge of each step. The vertical-shaped window had frames forming ten panes of a certain X pattern. Sunlight streamed in through the window and fell on the mosaic floor, where the X shapes now seemed to be transformed by the light into ethereal images of many crosses.

In the final years of the library’s life, its exterior walls faded the same way an older woman bears grey streaks in her hair but is still beautiful enough to turn heads. The library invited the attention of Hollywood. Its exterior was captured in the film Goodbye Columbus, shot there in 1968. Based on the novel by Phillip Roth, Goodbye Columbus spun the yarn of young librarian Neil Klugman, played by Richard Benjamin, who falls in love with a young woman, played by Ali McGraw. Both are Jewish, but the relationship is doomed; he is working-class, and she is from an upscale family in New Jersey.

Although Phillip Roth’s 1960s story focused on a rich man - poor man view of the world, its central theme related to class and money could easily be applied to the city of Yonkers circa 1982. Only by that time in Yonkers, the real divisions existed among the white east side and everyone else in the west; black, brown, white, poor, and working-class. Like Richard Benjamin’s character in the film, the library had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the tracks.

Even if people in Yonkers hadn’t used the library since they were kids, they were aware of its presence, sitting on top of the hill next to City Hall. The library was beloved by the city’s inhabitants, and no one could conceive of its death.

As President of the Committee to Save the Public Library, Mrs. Hipius had drafted thousands of leaflets, made countless phone calls, and rang doorbells with the tenacity of a politician campaigning for reëlection. Hipius was not alone in her mission to save the library.

Frank Cardone was born and raised within walking distance of the library in the Park Hill “Little Italy” section of Yonkers. As an amateur history buff (especially of old theaters and Yonkers history), his voice is passionate when he talks about the library. To Frank Cardone the library was more than a beautiful building but the yardstick by which he measured his early life—he “grew-up at the library.” Frank Cardone joined Lee Hipius to save the library.

By April 1982, the clock was ticking down on the Carnegie Library. Lee Hipius and Frank Cardone, along with other members of the Committee, had gathered over 5,000 signatures. It really didn’t matter how many people signed the petition; it would never be enough to stop the city from cleaving the library’s heart in two.

As a working-class kid growing up in Yonkers, the library was my beacon. No one who lived in Yonkers during the library’s life can mention its death without getting teary-eyed; there is a collective weeping and gnashing of teeth. Many rumors flew about the library’s destruction. Nearly forty years later, the real reasons were still unknown. I made it my mission to write a feature article about what had happened.

I pored over thousands of media clippings. I read large collections, ranging from the history of the Carnegie Libraries to urban renewal. I studied the legendary Andrew Carnegie, the urban Kingpin Robert Moses and the highly respected author and urban planning visionary Jane Jacobs. I relied on periodicals, white papers, archived testimony, and legal documents, including the lawsuit U.S. vs. City of Yonkers Board of Education.

I interviewed a dozen people, some of whom were integral in the campaign to save the library. Aside from Lee Hipius and Frank Cardone, former Yonkers City Council member Andrew MacDonald had worked to save the library. Michael P. Rebic, who worked for the city of Yonkers for ten years as the Principal Historic Restoration Planner, also tried to save the library.

After many hours of research, a clear picture began to emerge. The library had been destroyed due to political corruption, cronyism, and racism. Four years later, the story evolved beyond an article and into the slim volume of the book The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy.

My small book was first published shortly before Mrs. Lee Hipius died. Her son Mike Hipius told me how much the book meant to her. She sent me a note of gratitude along with a small prayer card to keep in my wallet. She wished me courage, strength, and great grace. I didn’t put the card in my wallet. I keep the card on my desk as a reminder that a small book can be powerful enough to make a difference in people’s lives.

My Small Book is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

BRAWLER: Stories by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff’s collection of stories share only one common thread: the loud, squawking desperation of working-class lives that inevitably come to an end in a one-two knockout punch. I’m glad to see a writer of considerable merit depicting working-class characters that no one really wants to know about. People are dying, rotting away, flicking cigarette ashes on the food they are about to eat, before blowing out their brains with a shotgun.

“What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” sets forth a series of vignettes as harmless as a game of musical chairs being played by middle-class white folk. The people here are slightly better off money-wise than the characters in all the other stories, but they are no less weary from the monstrously stubborn burdens they must carry.

After reading the entire collection, I can’t remember any of the characters’ names, nor did I prefer one story over another, and, for the life of me, I cannot discern if that was the author’s intent. The collective grief of the characters is so huge that it obliterates their individual identities. Characters can’t be memorable when they are so lost in the grainy shadows that there is no hope of redemption.

Lauren Groff’s craft as a writer is spectacular. Her ultra-long, fluid sentences boast of endless muscularity and athletic prowess. I can see the author knows how to dance, metaphorically speaking; when she falls on her face, she gets up from the floor, pretending nothing happened, and even though she’s bruised and bloodied, she keeps dancing.

Suffering and pain are mundane, almost humdrum, and just when you’re about to fall asleep from boredom, you experience a shock that feels as dramatic as a defibrillator. The people who inhabit BRAWLER live ordinary, horrible lives, eking out one more sorry-assed day. By the time I had finished reading BRAWLER, I didn’t know my breath had been taken away until I was sucker-punched and nothing was left.

BRAWLER Screams Desperation is an essay in my collection Notes From The Working-Class.

Tommy Wooten was a working-class kid who went to Gorton High School in Yonkers. He lived in a two-story wood-frame house, a walk-up, on Voss Avenue. Multiple families shared apartments under its flat, dilapidated roof, connected by a common front door and a single stairwell. Tommy’s family had an apartment with five cramped rooms. Each room had a small built-in wall heater that looked like it was held together by duct tape.

Tommy’s bedroom, small as a prison cell, had a metal peek-a-boo window looking out to a shrub-shaped tree. White-painted water pipes suspended from the ceiling assured slow running water.

I never knew Tommy, but I knew a lot of boys like him. He set the de facto standard for Yonkers boys in the late 1970s: poor students, all bluster, fun to hang out with, always looking for the next big party. The Yonkers culture celebrated boys like Tommy. There was no reward for taking the path of the straight and narrow. Without an education, the most Tommy could hope for was a blue collar job at Con Ed.

I heard about Tommy’s death from my sister. She liked him, not in the romantic sense; it was just a like, before there were likes on Facebook. The last time she saw him at Untermyer Park, he told her he had bought a car, and he was going to quit drinking.

Even today I’m haunted by Tommy Wooten because of what became of him. He died in a car crash. There are car accidents every day, but the brutality of Tommy’s car crash lingers.

Tommy Wooten died on a Monday night in September, a school night. Looks like he didn’t plan to go to school the next day. Neither did his friends. Technically, they died on Tuesday. It was three in the morning. It took several days to identify one boy; the other, Kenneth J. Vinchkowksi, also a student at Gorton High School, died at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. The unidentified boy turned out to be Michael Flynn, the son of Yonkers Fire Captain Bert P. Flynn.

There are more Irish Pubs per capita in the Bronx than in all of Ireland. Evidence gathered at scene of the accident indicated the boys had been drinking. Tommy stepped full throttle on the gas of his 1966 Buick Opel. Traveling at high speed, the car suddenly swung into the southbound lane and hit a steel subway stanchion.

Tommy attempted to swing the car into the northbound lane. The car split in two on impact. The boys slammed under the car engine like a broken nesting doll, one jammed into the other. Tommy and the unidentified boy (Michael Flynn) died instantly. The third boy (Kenneth J. Vinchkowksi) died a few hours later at the hospital.

The wake for Tommy Wooten was held at Whelan Funeral Home. Tommy had possessed enough charm to make both girls and boys sob. Throngs of grim, pinched-white onlookers passed by his open casket. His mother wanted to display the full carnage of his body. No one wanted to look but everyone did. A large bandage swathed his head that had been smashed like a turnip. And despite the undertaker’s best efforts, it was evident that his body had been cleaved in two.

It seemed cruel and punitive for Tommy’s family to expose his broken body to the world, but people do terrible things when they’re suffering from grief. His friends wanted to remember him the way he was when he was alive, all bluster, fun to hang out with, always looking for the next big party.

Tommy’s open casket might resemble the showing of the brutally murdered Emmett Till, but Tommy wasn’t a victim of racism or a national symbol of white men’s hatred for people of color. Tommy was a victim of himself, and the culture that encouraged young men to be their own worst enemies and admired them for being losers.

Tommy Wooten’s death made an impact on me; he not only killed himself, but he took the lives of two other kids. I left Yonkers, a culture that exalted guys like Tommy. I left a culture that wanted to show Tommy’s broken body to teach us a lesson.

Unlike Tommy Wooten, I left Yonkers alive and in one piece, but I keep going back there to understand myself. There are also other things I want to understand. I want to know why boys like Tommy Wooten never stood a chance. Like Tommy, I am lost but in a much different way—no matter how far I travel, Yonkers travels with me. Some of us are more lost than others, and it is not always easy to understand the difference.

It’s Too Bad Tommy Wooten is an essay in my collection Notes From The Working-Class.

In the Twentieth Century, there were influencers who wanted to make Yonkers the sixth borough of New York City, but the initiative failed. Today Yonkers, the third largest city in New York State, hovers in limbo, blurring the distinction among urban, suburban, and rural; and the rich, middle and working-classes, and the poor; and the people, black, brown, and white.

Unlike the large sprawling cities of Los Angeles and Denver, Yonkers is small and compact, measuring only about three miles wide, five miles long, taking up a total area of approximately eighteen square miles. The city is flanked on the west by the Hudson River and on the east by the Bronx River. The Saw Mill River is the natural dividing line between east and west Yonkers. Further divided by natural ridges and valleys, Yonkers is congested. At the mercy of an unforgiving geography, neighborhoods are tranches, and tend to evolve as stubborn silos that are worlds apart from one another, culturally and economically.

Downtown Yonkers once looked like Greenwich Village because of its narrow streets and alleys and many pre-war buildings. Until modernization took root in the 1960s with its trend toward urban renewal, the Getty Square area, centrally located downtown, was a hodgepodge of stores, tenements, and old apartment buildings, a cornucopia of small merchants and retailers. With its hairpin turns and one-way streets going nowhere, it has always been hard to get around Yonkers. And still is today. The city is sadly lacking in effective mass transportation, no subway, no light rail or trolley; people would rather drive than take a bus.

What makes Yonkers exceptional and different from many other cities are its many hills. The city’s inhabitants speak pridefully of having so many impossibly steep hills. Like Rome, Italy, Yonkers is called by some the city of seven hills: Nodine Hill, Park Hill, Church Hill, Cross Hill, Glen Hill, Ridge Hill and Locust Hill. A popular urban legend claimed Elisha Graves Otis chose Yonkers to build the first elevator because he had been inspired by the city’s treacherous hills.

Yonkers is often perceived as a suburb, and not as a city, because of its unique geographical location—it shares its border with New York City. Eclipsed by its neighboring cosmopolitan mecca, Yonkers has often been dismissed as a working-class town on the Hudson River with a funny-sounding name. The name Yonkers is a potent reminder of the city’s age that dates to the colonial era and the early Dutch settlers who once lived everywhere in lower New York, née New Amsterdam. Yonkers was named for Adriaen van der Donck, who was a young Dutch lord, a Jonkheer or Jonker.

Despite the city’s age, spanning back to the colonial era, and its rich cultural heritage and diversity, there are few books, fiction, or nonfiction, that are set in Yonkers or depict life in Yonkers. Among the heavyweight celebrity writers, Bronx born and bred Neil Simon wrote Lost in Yonkers, but it was a mediocre play, not his best work. Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, but that fact is frequently missing from his biography. Don DeLillo lived in Yonkers for many years but never wrote about it or based any of his works in Yonkers.

With its long history, there is no explanation why few books are set in Yonkers or depict life in Yonkers. The traditional publishing world has not paid much attention to this small city on the Hudson River, the same way, and at their own peril, they have largely ignored the working-class—and that might be one reason why today we have a cultural and political backlash against the literary elite.

During these turbulent times, there is a need to tell great stories about real people who have to work for a living and are doing their best to get by in life. It takes gifted storytelling to get people to embrace their own humanity. Authors, artists, filmmakers, publishers—all creative professionals—have the talent to inspire working-class people to have more compassion for themselves, and to develop empathy for other people who are different.

I think it’s time to give the working-class a fair shake in the book world. My books, both fiction and nonfiction, have been inspired by my observation of the hopes, dreams, and ambitions of working-class heroes. I aim to keep telling their stories. Their voices will be heard.

Why Yonkers is an essay in my collection Notes From the Working-Class.

Love 22 slid unannounced into my life on a blustery day in November. He looked like he had been blown like a tumbleweed across the campus quadrangle. The sun was hidden behind a blank slate of sky. Wind sheared through the tops of plain gray trees that had shed their leaves.

I’ve had close encounters with fascinating people, but none as quirky as Love 22. Yes, that is his legal name. (Born in Westerly, Rhode Island, as Lawrence Edmund Wagner, he changed has name legally to Love 22 in 1976.)

Love 22 sat across the desk from me. There wasn’t a wide span between us. With his hangdog expression, messy shoulder-length brown hair and bulging eyes, he looked guilty of something. He told me I shouldn’t be working on 11/11 because it was a high-frequency day. He didn’t mention that it was Veterans’ Day, a legal holiday.

I might have been the only student at the University of Rhode Island who had her own tiny office with a desk, a file cabinet, a black dial phone, a trash can, and two chairs. My office was located on the bottom floor of the Student Union, next door to the campus newspaper The Good 5-cent Cigar. A small brass nameplate outside of my door read Student Ombudsman. Being Student Ombudsman was a real job—The University paid me a stipend of sixty dollars a month. I was determined to save the world, as seen through the eyes of a twenty-year-old radically hip feminist chick.

I didn’t know why Love 22 had come by to see me. I guess he wanted to give me a $22 bill. He had printed stockpiles of $22 bills, and distributed them at public venues, coast to coast. A few times, he stirred trouble when people tried to cash his $22 bills at banks and corner grocery stores. With his signature Uncle Sam top hat, riding a three-wheeled bike, he became a public figure of sorts. The local media loved to write about this one-of-a-kind gent who carved out a living for himself that was based on his own peculiar notions about the number 22.

He carefully explained that while an Ohm was a unit of measurement of electric resistance and a hardwired principle of electrical engineering, it was also an ‘Om,” the humming sound repeated in yoga. Om or Aum is Sanskrit for source or supreme, the supreme life force. This was God, talking though the man named Love 22! Toward the end of the conversation I began to feel my throat vibrate, especially when he told me that 11/11 or 11 + 11 = 22!

The more he talked, and he talked a lot, I couldn’t tell if he was deranged or on drugs. I quickly ruled out insanity. He was too happy to be plagued by demons. As for drugs, back in those days everyone was stoned to a large degree. Love 22 talked about rockets. He was excited that NASA’s Voyager program had discovered a once-in-a-life time alignment that allowed a spacecraft to fly past some of the planets by using their gravitational field, and could hardly wait until the spacecraft explored the moons of Jupiter!

Love 22 seemed to be having the time of his life talking to me. I wasn’t too sure about him, and maybe he sensed that. As quickly as he had flown into my office like an errant fall leaf, he blew out the door and never came back. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.

Love 22 is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE ROAD.

Book lovers might return to their first bookstore with as much emotion as they would remember a first love. They will remember every nuance of their first encounters, from the sound of a cash register’s ring to the slight crinkling of the book being stowed into a paper bag, and how the store looked in the late afternoon light with its thick shades rolled up or slightly tattered and fading, curling down. They recall the scent of new books with shiny covers or old musty tomes with yellowed pages as conjuring as much emotion as the scent of their lovers’ hair.

People who love books love them that much.

Book lovers feel very much at home in community bookstores. Independent “indie” bookstores give people a place to experience books. People who own indie bookstores curate their collections and know how to conjure the magical fit between a book and a reader. In this way, indie bookstores are crucial for creating a sense of community around books. The number of indie bookstores in a town or city often mirrors the demographics of a culture.

In the city of Yonkers, where I grew up, there was only one indie bookstore, the Alicat Bookshop on 287 South Broadway. The store smelled as musty as a pair of my grandfather’s old leather boots, finely crafted but cracking at the seams. Books overflowed on tables and were piled high to the ceilings, much taller than I could reach at age ten.

I held one paperback classic, Nana by Emile Zola in my small hands, flipped the tattered pages, and for the first time in my life I made a book mine for a quarter. It took years before I could fully appreciate the French novel Nana. Emile Zola was a little over my head, but even then I longed to reach higher than my hands could grasp. I owned Nana and it became part of me.

The Alicat was legendary in the book world. The bookshop had actually expanded into a small press, publishing a series of chapbooks with a limited print run of 750 copies that were each sold for a dollar. Alicat’s owners, Oscar and Florenz Baron, claimed to have been the first to publish Henry Miller’s works that had originally been banned in America. The Alicat Bookshop also published other outcast chapbooks: Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and William Carlos Williams (Paterson).

Oscar Baron ran the bookshop. Florenz was rumored to have a small art studio next door. She was a frequent visitor to Beauford Delaney’s studio in Soho, where he painted two portraits of her.

The Barons considered themselves to be radical lefties who hobnobbed with the literary likes of Anais Nin, Maya Deren, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams and James Baldwin. But as a kid I didn’t know that.

I did know they sold brown-paper-wrapped mystery packages of eight or ten old books for a quarter. Buy, trade or sell, you could return two books for a new one.

Due to a lease dispute with their landlord, the Alicat shut its doors in 1974. Oscar Baron died two years later, but Florenz Baron continued to sell books from her home on Ludlow Street in Yonkers well into the 1980s.

Today Yonkers, the third most populous city in New York State, only has one bookstore, a Barnes & Noble, which is hardly an indie. The complete absence of indie bookstores in Yonkers might be a reflection of the city’s working-class culture.

Book lovers find more than solace in a book. They remember the parts of themselves that they left behind, as well as the parts that still travel with them. There is a much larger story surrounding the Alicat Bookshop, one I aim to tell. The Alicat Bookshop was my first love and I will always find a way to go there.

Alicat Bookshop Blues is an essay in my collection NOTES From the Working-class. I’m also the author of the Yonkers Trilogy, and the nonfiction work “The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy.”

New Deal Art captures a time when America was in the throes of the Great Depression. The Family depicted in this mural is disconnected, weary, and full of despair. Even the baby’s eyes are hugely sad. The father might not know where to get his next job, and the mother is overwhelmed by trying to make ends meet. There isn’t much food on the table to feed a family.

The “Family Mural” is one of many New Deal works of art. Most of these murals show people working, carrying sacks, plowing fields, building roads, bridges, tunnels. The working-class is a source of resilience and renewal, the heart of America.

The current economic forces (technology, industry, AI) are placing extraordinary stress on today’s working-class, even among the college-educated working-class, who are stuck selling coffee, smartphones, groceries-in-bulk. No one knows which end is up. If you feel that the game is rigged against you, it is.

The poor are just screwed.

The war for oil is driving up all prices, and especially the price of food.

The current economic forces (technology, industry, AI) do not consider that revolutions, uprisings, upheavals are triggered by food insecurity. There is grave danger afoot when leadership does not have a context on history. Women with empty stomachs, unable to feed their children, sparked the Russian Revolution.

What is more important than putting food on the table?

Food On The Table is an Essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

I have a mystical attachment to pennies. Found money is extraordinarily lucky. Everywhere I go, I’m in the habit of finding lucky money on the street. Sums range from the single penny stuck in a puddle to the fifty-dollar bill that had blown into my driveway the day after a gale-force windstorm.

I’ve also encountered freakishly placed piles of coins. One day as I walked through Downtown Seattle, I encountered three separate piles of coins. The total haul accumulated from all three piles was over three dollars. One of my favorite finds was exiting Grand Central Station onto Lexington Avenue during rush hour, where I found two crumpled one-dollar bills; it was as if someone tossed them at me like a ball, solely for my amusement.

I stash lucky money in funny places. Coins are deposited into piggy banks made from ceramic, bronze, leather or glass. Dollar bills are stuck surreptitiously in between the pages of well-worn books. I save my lucky money. The coins, I keep forever. The tens, twenties, and the fifty, are used to buy a unique present for someone I love.

Jump-cut to Seaside, Oregon, where I walk the Promenade (known as the Prom), sometimes alone, but more often I walk the Prom with my husband. The Prom is a one-and-a-half-mile paved walkway bordering the Pacific Ocean that extends from 12^thAvenue in the North to Avenue U in the South. Paths from the Prom break out into tall, windswept grass, groves of pine trees opening to the beach, and a yawning stretch of the Pacific Ocean. In the fifteen years that I’ve walked the prom, I’ve only found one penny.

Finding the second penny on the Prom happened quite mysteriously.

One day in September, my husband and I had already walked the length of the Prom and were now heading back to our starting point. There is a roundabout in the center of the Prom where people can turn around. A bronze statue of Lewis and Clark stands in the Promenade as a memorial capturing the end of their long journey, where they turned around, away from the Pacific Ocean, to travel home.

Now my husband and I were traveling home. It was one of those times between us that can only be described as pensive. There is a lot of dissonance going on in life and it’s a great ballast to get out of this world to experience renewal, all of which means, we were walking together, but not talking. A thought popped into my mind: Here’s a penny for your thoughts.

In the next instance, I looked to the ground. On the side of the walkway in a thatch of dried-out, brown sea grass sat a lonely penny. I picked it up and handed it to my husband. “Here’s a penny for your thoughts,” I told him.

The quote “A penny saved is a penny earned” is attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Known for being frugal, Ben Franklin thought it was as useful to save money, even pennies, as it was to earn more money. There is a childish artistic rendering of Ben Franklin carrying three huge puffy rolls that he had purchase for a mere three pennies, while his wife Deborah Read looks on and laughs at him for such a paltry offering: Three rolls for three pennies!

Pennies have been deemed to be a prodigious failure as a mete of currency. Yet pennies still retain a certain cachet that is related to the state of which the lucky penny is found. If it’s heads-up, it’s lucky. If tails, then you must turn over the penny before picking it up and placing it into your pocket. A tails-up penny is a sure sign that there will be no windfalls, jackpots, grand inheritance, or trust funds in store for you. You will have to work for your money. One friend places her tails-up pennies inside of her shoe and must walk for a while, curing it to make it lucky.

One time I rode an elevator with a man whom I knew to be very wealthy. On the floor of the elevator car, a lone penny gleamed and called my name. I dove for the penny and stuffed it into my pocket. Looking chagrined, the man confessed, “I was waiting until you got off the elevator before I picked it up.”

It’s all about luck, you see. Once a well-known designer and I crossed a street in Downtown Seattle, where a stark penny loomed in the crosswalk. I thought we would wrestle to the ground to see who would first get the penny, but that did not happen. The designer intentionally stepped over the penny and said, “I’ll leave it there for someone else.”

That someone else was me. I exhibited no shame when I dove to the ground to claim my bounty. As for the designer, the rejection of the penny was commensurate with his waning career and earning power. Soon he would spiral into a tailspin that resulted in his steep decline. I doubt he realizes how powerful a message he sent to the universe when he stepped over the lowly penny.

So here is where the subject of pennies becomes odd and tricky. I am moving on to an altogether different topic that is seemingly disconnected but very relevant. It has to do with little people.

When my children were young, nine, six and one, to be precise, my car had suffered a mishap and was in the garage for repairs. My son’s summer camp was a mile from our home. Getting up early and walking to the camp was a healthy thing to do. Plus, we had time to talk about those things we never had a chance to discuss. I did not know then what I know now. The question my son asked me that day has instilled within me the firm resolution that some things cannot be explained.

As we approached a crosswalk, my son suddenly asked me about midgets. He wanted to know how midgets came to be. While his question seemed to be out of ordinary, I respected his curiosity. My response relied on my limited knowledge of genetics. He seemed satisfied with my explanation and admitted he had never actually seen a little person. Now here is where the story turns.

At the end of my work day, when camp was over, I returned to get my son, so we could walk home. As we approached the same crosswalk where we had discussed midgets in the morning, a middle-aged man, undoubtedly a little person, appeared in the crosswalk and walked in the opposite direction. I looked at my son; he looked at me; our eyes said everything. Was this a coincidence?

One of the best things about being human is that all of us have experienced the sensation of being stared at. We’re walking through a mall or sitting in a restaurant or about to get into our cars and we can just feel someone looking at us. We turn to see and sure enough there is someone watching our every move. We’ve also experienced thinking about someone, it could be about someone you have not thought of in years, and within minutes that person phones you. And why is it that your dog or cat knows you are close to home, long before they hear your footsteps or the sound of your car?

So now our story turns to energy. There are many forms of energy. The energy that heats our home might be derived from oil, gas, coal, electricity, hydropower, the sun or the wind. A very different form of energy emanates from life, from being physically active, mentally alert and working at the top of your game, and, of course, there are those forms of energy in the universe that are still not satisfactorily explained.

Rupert Sheldrake, who coined the term morphic field, proposed that memory is inherent in nature: in plants, trees, animals, and certainly in human beings. It’s why we just instinctively know things without actually having to learn them. Sheldrake further asserts that morphic fields extend beyond physical objects and people to tether us together, the same way the earth’s gravitational field extends far enough beyond the earth’s crust to keep the moon in orbit.

There are social groups of living creatures, fish and birds, for example, that embody the existence of morphic fields. Its why birds flying in a flock all turn in direction at the same time without crashing into one another.

There might be a metaphysical realm between this time and physical space or another dimension. As human beings, we’re always at a crosswalk. We will either descend into the depths of hell, hate, war, or evolve into a culture where sharing, compassion and collaboration is taken on face value. Heads up.

Maybe we all share the collective memory derived from what happened to our ancestors long before we were born into this world, and we don’t want to make the same mistakes. Maybe we’re all connected. Maybe not. I cannot explain the unexplained. Nor do I have a theory to offer you about energy, except to say that the next time you find a penny on the ground or see a little person, you will find it to be a good omen, and meaningful.

A Penny For Your Thoughts is an Essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

The Tell, a memoir by Amy Griffin, published by The Dial Press, is a harrowing account of sexual abuse. Ms. Griffin alleges that while she was undergoing therapy using the psychedelic drug MDMA, long repressed memories came to the surface. Bound and gagged, she was raped by her middle school teacher. The sexual assaults occurred in the 1980s at her middle school in Amarillo, Texas.

“I knew that these memories were real,” Griffin explains in her book. “My body knew what had happened to me.”

What turns out to be true about The Tell is stranger than autofiction. Writers often write autofiction about the things that have happened to them in real life. Writers might artfully craft their own experiences to become larger, bolder, more dramatic, more poignant, more imaginative, (sometimes more understated too), and, ultimately, more meaningful than what really happened.

The Tell, however, isn’t a memoir, nor is it autofiction. It’s a big lie. Not-so-grand theft. Slowly the facts about what lurks behind The Tell have been dribbling out. A woman, Jane Doe, has sued Amy Griffin, alleging that the author’s descriptions of childhood sexual abuse were stolen from her. The plaintiff claims Griffin’s descriptions of rape are exactly what happened to her at a school dance in a school bathroom. Jane Doe alleges Amy Griffin had reason to know about the assaults; they attended the same school.

Furthermore, Amy Griffin met and interviewed Jane Doe to snatch her scoop. Most astonishing of all, Griffin’s husband, John A. Griffin, invested in the drive to get the Food and Drug Administration to approve MDMA for use in therapy. This power couple has a foundation with strong ties to a company that plans to sell MDMA.

Jane Doe’s lawsuit against Amy Griffin also names The Dial Press and the book’s ghostwriter as defendants. The Dial Press admitted they never conducted fact checking before publishing The Tell.Upon release, The Tell received the big book marketing rollout, was touted as an Oprah Book Club selection, and received accolades by Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The rollout for this book is very similar to another recent best-selling memoir. The Dial Press also published the hokey book by Belle Burden. (Please see Belle’s Big Burden.)

What is the difference between the fraud committed by a team of editors, along with a ghostwriter and the purported author, and AI? Both are deceptive and deliver books of dreadful quality to the discerning reader. The machine language of AI is an affront to those who respect good writing. The Tell, however, was intentionally fabricated by a bunch of dunces who are dialing for dollars.

Enter the Sweepstakes to get a big book deal with The Dial Press! But keep in mind that you must have a whole lot of money to be a contender.

Dialing For Dollars is an Essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

“Fish Shop” by Georges-Henri Fauvel is a tableau of fish workers (poissoniers), who are cleaning fish, making them palatable for sale. The women are in a class below scullery maids, not nearly as well off as sex workers. They worked not far from the types of neighborhoods once stalked by Jack the Ripper. In the foreground only two fish ladies can be seen in their entirety. With heads hung and hands steady at work, their pallor is as gray as the floor. The rest of the fish ladies are shadowy, unformed, disappearing into the background, where the last vestiges of women are vanishing before our eyes.

French Artist Georges-Henri Fauvel (1861–1930) had a penchant for painting royal dogs, especially hunting dogs. His Fish Shop is a radical departure from his usual repertoire. He was probably paid handsomely by patrons for painting their beloved hounds. What made him paint “Fish Shop” is anyone’s guess. These fish ladies were undoubtedly deemed to be less valuable than dogs.

Fish Ladies are still around. They don’t work in fish shops per se, but they are among a class lower than working-class—the working poor: clerks at Walmart, janitors, chain hotel maids, dishwashers, fruit pickers, and fast-food counter workers. Little has changed since the ashen-faced ladies inhabited the Fish Shop. Today these women are still invisible.

Fish Shop was part of the collection of French Impressionist paintings in the exhibition “Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism” that recently toured the United States. Although the tour is over, perhaps “Fish Shop” will resurface again and rear its scaly head. “Fish Shop” (1881), an oil on canvas, was on loan from Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre.

Fish Shop is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

I stumbled upon Keith McNally’s memoir in my usual awkward, almost bumbling fashion. I happened to be in New York City with a friend. I had long promised to take her to Balthazar for breakfast. Four empty tables away sat a man alone with his laptop and a book. Astonished that he sat at a table for so long without being gently prodded to get on with it to make room for the next guest, I struck up a conversation.

I asked him what he was working on.

He pointed to the book on his table: I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally.

I still didn’t make the connection.

I told him: I was just a working-class girl from Yonkers.

Unbeknownst to me, he was holding court at his table in an informal author event. He owned Balthazar and had been hailed by the New York Times as “The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown.” I was relieved that he didn’t try to make me feel like a rube for not knowing who he was. Instead of learning a lesson in humiliation, my faux pas ended up becoming a New York Story.

One New York Story leads to another.

I told Mr. McNally that I would review his memoir. I’ve read and reviewed plenty of books so doing so would be my way of saving face.

Most memoirs are not good stories, or memorable enough to inspire an authentic following. I’ve been unkind to memoirists. The great Irish writer Edna O’Brien had “a sotto voce literary voice that was both gravelly and haunting with the melodic fluidity of aging wine,” but her memoir Country Girl took all the fun out of the bawdy escapades of her life. And most recently, Belle Burden’s Memoir Stranger was a “tell-all about nothing at all.”

Mr. McNally’s book is different. He imparts lessons about life that you were too afraid to know. At the pinnacle of his career, he was an extremely fit sixty-five year old man who through “no stroke of luck,” had a massive stroke, and lost his speech and the ability to use the right side of his body. “So much for the restaurateur who invented downtown,” he stated blithely in his book.

When the stroke leaves him disabled and dependent, he contemplates taking his own life and almost succeeds. Between the man he is now and the man he was during his heyday, there is an inevitable clash, a vivid rendering of a work in progress that is worthy of our attention. McNally delivers more than a memoir, he gives us a conceptual blueprint for how to succeed against the odds.

His background was decidedly hardscrabble—that is quickly established, but what hasn’t been spelled-out is that being from the working-class is both a great blessing and a great curse. McNally grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Bethnal Green in east London. His two older brothers spared him no mercy, neither did his parents, his friends, or the schools where he found himself dislocated from his primary ambition—to find a way to get out of there.

By sixteen he was out of there, and onto a life in the theater world, somewhat; he landed a role in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On. For the most part, playwright Alan Bennett became McNally’s long-term mentor, and at one point, his romantic partner. It is through Alan Bennett and director Jonathan Miller that McNally first experiences art and culture that far exceed life among the working-class in Bethnal Green.

Once a working-class person musters the courage to leave home, inevitably a rare form of claustrophobia creeps into every new environment. In McNally’s case, the London theater scene becomes as stifling as growing up in Bethnal Green. Once unrest sets in, it’s time to go on the road again. He embarks on a solo journey that takes him all over the world. He quotes Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, “one can travel this world and see nothing.” McNally obviously traveled the world and saw everything.

While traveling thirty miles from the Nepalese border, he embraces his confounding habit “of abandoning goals once they became graspable.” Throwing off the shackles of what creatively confines him ultimately becomes the great pattern of his life. The constant pursuit of one gargantuan project after another, from filmmaking to the many restaurants he famously opened in New York City, is where McNally’s story begins and also where it ends.

In 1975, McNally moved to New York City, where he took entry level restaurant jobs and quickly rose through the ranks. This is the upside of having a strong working-class ethic. Now for the curse: he was often beset by self-loathing and self-recrimination—those twin conditions bedevil him, and at the same time, they are the very traits that will forever keep him out of Bethnal Green.

His talent as a storyteller is borne of masterful self-education, and curiosity. Leaving school at age sixteen did him no harm. Celebrities, friends, family members, wives and lovers make entrances and exits with the aplomb of actors in a cast of thousands. Everyday people, physical therapists, orderlies, massage therapists, are bit players who walk on and upstage the big stars in the show.

Make no mistake, Keith McNally’s memoir is a New York Story.

Any person who goes to New York City, like McNally did, and is young, smart, ambitious, willing to work hard, with a sprinkling of verve, raw talent, and a modicum of good looks to wit, will almost always get a come-up from the right people.

“It’s never about wealth, religion, or politics. It’s always about the individual. Always,” McNally said. He is a real person whose bluster hardly masks profound sensitivity. This is a must-read for anyone who grapples with life’s lessons, including the questions you have been too afraid to ask of yourself.

Keith McNally: Fanfare For The Uncommon Man is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

Remember The Godfather? Don Vito Corleone was ruthless, but he had a good heart and a sense of fair play. Italian immigrants were treated unfairly in America and called Wops, Dagos, Greaseballs. The Mafia took root and grew in America, so people could make a living. The way Don Corleone worked with the five families is the same way Jeffrey Epstein worked with the Elite.

Networks like the Mafia or Jeffrey Epstein’s Cabal never go out of fashion. It’s a very tribal undertaking when you think about it. To get anywhere in this world, you have to build your own network. Jeffrey Epstein was the ultimate connector. He collected people. He curried favors among rich and powerful people across industries and sectors: law, government, banking, academia, science and technology, royalty, entertainment.

He made instant introductions between people who thought they were too important to go through channels.

The litany of people beholding to Epstein blurs the distinction between conservative and liberal, democrats and republicans. Political affiliations are cast asunder when high stakes involve money, power, sex. Many of the Elite who’ve been identified in the Epstein files claim they did not know Epstein was engaged in the sex trafficking of underage children. No whispers. Tête-à-tête gossip. Persistent rumors.

Really?

In The Godfather, we meet Amerigo Bonasera, an undertaker and a good man. As an Italian immigrant, he came to America and played by the rules. Then two boys savagely beat his daughter when she resisted their sexual advances. She suffered a broken jaw and was permanently disfigured. The two punks got off with a suspended sentence because they were from wealthy families.

Seeking justice, Amerigo Bonasera comes to Don Corleone for help. Don Corleone arranges for his goombahs to brutally beat the two punks, intentionally not killing them, leaving them with grave injuries, so they suffer the way the young woman had suffered.

Cù duna pì primo, duna a’ncarzari, cu duna d’appressu duna cu tuttu u versu. Those who cause harm first, can expect greater harm in return.

Don Corleone empowered working-class Italians. Italian boys growing up in Brooklyn and the Bronx learned to become Mafiosi by imitating him. While the 1970s blockbuster film was a romanticized ideal of the Mafia, this crime syndicate did end up controlling loansharking, money laundering, gambling, the unions, drugs and the garbage industry. Not bad for a bunch of Wops who had been shut out of the conventional paths to power and glory in America.

The true meaning of the word Mafia is Arabic, and means stone, refuge. These people took care of one another.

The RICO Act was created in 1970 to target the leaders of organized crime, specifically the Mafia, because it had become too powerful, pervasive, and corrupt. Many members of Mafia crime families were indicted under the RICO laws. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was designed to destroy organized crime by targeting its leaders rather than its foot soldiers. It focused on murder, bribery and fraud committed by low-level members doing the dirty deeds to establish a pattern of racketeering activity that implicated the Capodecina (head of ten) and Caporegime (head of the regime).

It was guilt by association.

RICO resulted in the successful conviction of The Lucchese crime family, the Bonanno crime family, and The Gambino crime family. John Gotti and Frank Locascio were convicted under the RICO Act and received life sentences. Both men died in prison. Four other members of the Gambino family (Capo Ronald Trucchio, Terry Scaglione, Steven Catallono, and Anthony Mucciarone) also succumbed to RICO statutes.

Joseph Massino, boss of the Bonanno crime family, broke omerta and ratted on those who know to avoid getting the death penalty. He lived the rest of his life incognito in the Federal Witness Protection Program. New York crime families were not the only casualties of RICO. The Chicago Outfit ( known as Chicago Mafia) also took a RICO hit.

Originally intended to target the Mafia, RICO was expanded to be used against all types of corrupt organizations. Several members of the Puerto Rican street gang Latin Kings have been convicted of RICO offenses. The Key West Police Department in Florida was declared a criminal enterprise under RICO statues. A far right terrorist group The Order was convicted of racketeering and conspiracy charges.

Other noteworthy RICO prosecutions include financier Michael Milken, Osama bin Laden in absentia and al-Qaeda, Trump University, and most recently P.Diddy. In the case of Sean “Diddy” Combs, he was found not guilty of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking under RICO. He was, however, found guilty on two lesser counts of transporting individuals across state lines for prostitution.

While RICO has been applied to a broad range of illegal activities, including drug dealing, money laundering, counterfeiting, fraud, extortion and influence peddling, increased weight has been accorded to sex trafficking. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) and its subsequent iterations have been bolstered using RICO to prosecute sex traffickers. The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 further amended federal law to expand the scope of prosecuting sex trafficking enterprises.

RICO is now used to target entire criminal enterprises involved in sex trafficking rather than just individual perpetrators like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Epstein relied on an inner circle of people who enabled his criminal activities for over twenty years. A coterie of workers made up the organizational infrastructure that included Epstein’s personal lawyer Darren Indyke; Epstein’s accountant Richard Kahn; Epstein’s financial adviser Harry Beller; and Epstein’s executive assistant Lesley Groff. There were many others. And they need to be prosecuted under the RICO statutes.

Among the Elite identified in the Epstein files, many of them continued to associate with Epstein, even after his crimes were revealed. With each passing day, the list grows longer and takes on greater ramifications. Here is the list of people named, thus far.

And it’s guilt by association.

Admittedly, the Mafia knew they were breaking the law. They didn’t put things in writing. They didn’t discuss business on the phone. They were careful about where, when, and how they met. Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, capo of the Genovese crime family, feigned mental illness and shuffled through the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a bathrobe. He covered his mouth when he spoke, so his words would not be picked up by surveillance.

There is an old Italian proverb: Chi parla poco sbaglia. Immagina chi parla molto. One who speaks little makes mistakes. Imagine the one who speaks a lot.

Unlike the working-class Mafia who knew they were breaking the law, the Elite think they are above the law. The Elite put things in writing and contributed mightily to the six million documents that comprise the Epstein files, leaving an electronic tail longer than a comet.

Don Corleone would say these people are stupid, thick in the head. He would say if these are the people who are running our country, and making decisions globally, then we are in deep trouble. It is why the American dream doesn’t work for working-class people like Amerigo Bonasera. And it’s why the Mafia took matters into their own hands.

I miss Don Vito Corleone. I wonder what he would say about Epstein and Maxwell, two sicko pervs, who regularly visited schools like the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, seeking tween and teen girls that could be pimped to wealthy old white men.

I wonder what Don Corleone would say about the people who continued to do business with Jeffrey Epstein, enabling him to continue trafficking young girls. Some of these people gave Epstein free legal advice so he could repair his tarnished image. Some sought advice about dating and how to deal with accusations of sexual harassment. Others shared insider information. And all of dem put dees things in writing!

Il sole siciliano ti ha cotto il cervello? Has the Sicilian sun cooked your brain?

It’s a major mistake to think the Epstein scandal is only one more attempt by the Left to oust Trump. Trump is only a symptom of the widespread corruption of the Elite across political spectrums on both sides of the aisle. All of those who associated with Epstein after he had become a registered sex offender most certainly knew what he was doing, and, by their continued association with him, became complicit in his crimes.

Where is Don Corleone when we need him now, more than ever, to even the playing field?

Countless young women and girls were victimized. There is a mounting body count of both the living and the dead. For America to turn away makes the entire nation complicit in the crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein and his Cabal. Justice must be served. Britain has arrested the former Prince Andrew and Norway has charged a former prime minister. The United States must open a wide-scale investigation under the RICO laws.

The Rich, RICO and The Godfather is an essay in my collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS.

Courage is a forgotten virtue. Too often courage is shoved aside and replaced with bluster, anger, and abuse. Just ask the actor Robert De Niro. Outside the courthouse during Donald Trump’s criminal trial, De Niro expressed his fears about what another Trump presidency would bring to America.

De Niro was met with the maelstrom of an angry mob. The nasty words hurled at him were false displays of strength and sadly lacking in courage. Yet these insults were amplified by the news cycle and the tirades trending on social media. We are seeing a lot of mob action in the political arena and are bound to see a lot more of this sort of mob spectacle in the coming year.

The irony is Robert De Niro and Donald Trump are approximately the same age, and both are from New York City. There is, however, a significant difference between the two men. Trump, who hails from wealth and privilege, has conned the white working class. De Niro is a working-class kid who is too savvy to be duped by a con man. Make no mistake, Robert De Niro is one of us. (Trump pretends to be one of us.)

Seeing Robert De Niro take a courageous stand when so many other talented creative professionals are too afraid to speak the truth might make us shudder. So, let’s take a look at the heart of courage.

Courage is the ability to do something even when we’re afraid, or there is great danger present. Courage always means we are at great risk to do the brave and noble act that can save a life or spare someone from harm.

A courageous act might be as simple as a child who is afraid of speaking up in class and raises her hand for the first time. Courageous acts can be as harrowing as the mother who arrives at the scene where an active shooter is still at large and does everything in her power to save her child.

Courage is very evident among first responders, who have jobs that demand bravery: firefighters, EMTs, police officers—the first to go in and the last to leave the scene until everyone has been brought to safety. While first responders have jobs to ensure public safety, many of us might also be called at a moment’s notice to act with courage.

Consider this: Robert De Niro has fame, wealth, and creative success on multiple levels. He didn’t have to put himself into a situation where he was inevitably bound to draw heat. We don’t have to ask why. It’s evident that he could not live with himself unless he stood up for what was right.

Courage is a rare confluence of the heart, mind, body and soul. A bit of pluck is needed to do the right thing when we might be cursed, reviled or physically harmed. Courage is often the act of one brave soul versus a raging mob whose participants fuel each other in a feeding frenzy of hate and anger. Mobs find safety in numbers because fundamentally mobs are made up of cowards.

Being courageous can be a lonely pursuit. Instead of following the lemmings going over the cliff, the courageous person stands tall above the crowd and does the right thing.

What will any of us do when we are called to be brave in the face of danger? We can speak up like De Niro and take heat for a couple of days, or we can skulk off to the sidelines and crawl into our shells that will never give us the long-lasting protection we crave.

Courage is often quiet but demonstrative. We can easily spot courage because it makes us cringe to see a brave soul getting a public hazing and going up in flames. On the other hand, only the brave go down in history as shining examples of true strength and integrity. These stories of courage are the only stories that, in the long run, we will hold in our hearts and pass on to our children.

On Courage is part of my essay collection NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS

I’ve been an avid reader most of my life and make a careful distinction between reading nonfiction and reading fiction. Current nonfiction offers me crisp information, data, and analytical substance from which I can draw conclusions. With nonfiction, I add to my knowledge base.

The novel, however, is quite different. The novel is a gift. The novel gives me the experience of having visited another world, and even though it’s fiction, its premise is grounded in a larger truth. I meet characters who are unlike me, or maybe they are very much like me. I have come to know many types of people I would not have known had I not read the stories of their lives; and as I came to understand them, I felt compassion.

I am grateful for the many novels I have read, and I adore the authors who have written them. Some books are better than others, but every book I have read has become part of me. A Seattle bookseller, John Siscoe, once told me, “There is no such thing as a bad book,” and I believe he’s right.

I remember what it is like to fall so in love with a book that my life was changed in immeasurable ways. “Green Mansions,” by W.H. Hudson, is a seemingly unlikely story to transform the life of a child, but there I was traveling with a young man “Abel” who had embarked on an adventure in the wild, uncharted jungles of Guyana. The land was inhabited by lush forests, mountains and rivers that were pristine, untouched. Wild animals never before seen appeared within the infinite walls of the “green mansions.”

The most magnificent being of all is the beautiful and wild Rima, a young woman who speaks in a strange, lilting language only known to birds and her lost tribe. While Abel’s journey is fraught with peril: gold hunting, warring bands of native tribes, petty rivalries, superstition, and magic, he becomes forever smitten with Rima.

My childish response to the glorious Rima put me squarely on the path to becoming a bird woman in the jungle. I practiced bird calls in the small woods beside my home and explored abandoned trails along the aqueduct behind Untermyer Park in Yonkers. I thought I was a bird woman like Rima and fashioned my hair in a tangled nest of curls. I acquired the ability to whistle profusely, albeit street whistles, and made singsong calls, keening sounds that scared other kids.

Rima the bird woman transformed my life and made me want to become a writer. There isn’t anything scarier than a weird child wanting to write books. I added a hooting sound to my repertoire of bird language. I like to think that reading “Green Mansions” when I was ten made me become a slightly better person. At the very least, I became talented at uttering fantastic bird calls.

Novels enrich our lives because we touch the fragile threads of the diverse fabrics that weave us together. We begin to see the connections in things and become spellbound by the certainty that no one person is on this earth alone. All of us are slogging through the muck and the mire, navigating the joy, the sorrow, the grief, and the pratfalls that throw us haphazardly off course only to be consumed by a reckless wind. A good novel teaches us that it is noble to be a human being.

A much different novel transformed my life as a young woman. “The World is Made of Glass” by Morris L. West seduced me into believing that no human being, no matter how evil, is beyond hope. The Australian Author Morris West also wrote “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” about intrigue at the Vatican when the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Morris West had a flair for telling stories that explored redemption.

In “The World is Made of Glass,” Magda is a brilliant medical doctor and a wealthy society diva, but she is also a sociopath who murdered her best friend and stole her husband. While Magda’s strength is over-the-top, she is also entirely credible as a woman who wants to develop compassion and a conscience but is clueless as to how to begin the journey to get there.

To have this powerful woman seek help from the father of modern psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, seems improbable, but the way the story is told makes the reader have a deep understanding and awareness for these two characters’ humanity and the existential pain we all face as human beings that is inherent in the human condition.

I read the novel three times. I wanted to understand what caused a human being to lack a conscience. I wanted to know why there are people in this world who lack empathy for other human beings. I wanted to know why some people are willing to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill to get what they want. I wanted to understand the nature of evil. And while I’m still pondering these issues today, I have come to know that even the most damaged human beings among us can still undergo a transformation that allows them to embrace the soul of humanity.

The oddest book to captivate my attention is by Willa Cather. I read her novel “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” shortly after I returned from a trip to New Mexico. The unlikely pairing of two men who happen to be Catholic Priests is far afield from my life experience, but I could not help but be moved by their journey that began when they were very young men in France.

Now as missionaries in New Mexico, their journeys are intertwined, but often quite separate, too. Father Latour aims to build a mighty cathedral in this wild country, where the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Sandias loom above the painted desert that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving. Father Valliant seeks his own metaphorical cathedral by ministering to the people, Native Americans, Mexicans, and all of those who have traveled west to the new frontier, to give them faith where little is to be had.

Willa Cather conjured New Mexico as a dream that turns out to be true. Ochre and yellow, half shades of green lay between the sea and groves of olives, old, old tamarisks, and the rainbow flowers of quivering blood-red tubes. “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

The beauty found in novels both astonishes and confounds me. I am perpetually surprised by travelling to new worlds, without having to navigate an airport. I can’t read enough in a day to satisfy my craving for the temporal beauty that a good novel provides. So, it distresses me to see so many people who do not read. I travel frequently by plane and train. Few people have a book in hand, but plenty are fixated on their not-so-smart-phones. On a recent flight from Denver to Seattle, I sat next to a young woman who spent the entire time looking at photos of herself. She is not an extreme case. The world is indeed made of glass.

The number of people reading novels has dropped precipitously. There was a slight increase in people reading novels during the pandemic. Two years later, a national endowment for the arts survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults read more than one book in 2022. Based on the results of that survey, there is every indication that since 2022 a large number of American adults have not read a single book in a year.

Dire reports abound about the decline in reading. An August, 2025 article in The Guardian noted that reading for fun in the U.S. has fallen by forty percent. This data was based on research conducted by the University of Florida and University College London. Between 2003 and 2023, daily reading, for reasons other than work and study, fell by about 3% each year. The definition of reading encompassed more than books, and included magazines and newspapers in print, digital or audio. Example to wit, the young woman on the plane who exhibited insatiable lust looking at her selfies.

High School reading skills have plummeted to a new low. An October, 2025 article in the New York Times stated, “New national testing data, reported in September, shows that the reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades. A third of the 12th graders who were tested did not have basic reading skills.” One expert explained the decline in reading was due to the pandemic and increased use of screen time, but that is not entirely true.

The reading rate among high school students has been on the decline for years. One private school librarian, Kathy Johnson, told me twelve years ago that she had observed a marked decline in high school students wanting to read. Evan Frankl, a librarian at the New York Public Library in Bronxville, commented that my first novel in The Yonkers Trilogywas too long for young adults. “At almost 450 pages, 50+ pages could easily be cut without affecting the story or its feel. Attracting a younger audience to this book would not be difficult - getting them to finish the book might be.”

The use of smartphones takes time away from other activities, especially reading. Reading habitually is a trait acquired by practice. If a person is not in the habit of reading, of living the “reading life,” then having to plod through a book is achingly dull. It’s no wonder that both children and adults are reading fewer books than in the past.

The drumbeat marking the decline of reading takes on a more dangerous rhythm when experts assert that we have entered “The Dawn of a Post-literate Society.” New York Times Columnist James Marriott writes about society, ideas and the pervading cultural issues of our times. He notes how the world as we once knew it was forged during the reading revolution, and argues that we are now living through a counter-revolution—books are dying.

Marriott asserts that “the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.” The ramifications of fewer people reading has a direct impact on American Democracy. The literacy level in the U.S. is estimated to be about 79%, ranking 36th globally. Declining literacy does not bode well for the future of Democracy, in which citizens must be able to make informed, intelligent decisions that are essential to participate in elections.

Amid gloom and doom, there is a glimmer of a silver lining. Not all reading is in decline. The 2022 national endowment for the arts survey revealed that there was an uptick in readership covering books about science and technology. This nonfiction category showed an increase from 12.9% in 2017 to 13.5% in 2022. Science and Technology is also the only category in which men showed greater participation than women (14.9% v. 12.2%). Graphic novels also held a steady readership among both men and women.

Readers who prefer books about science and technology eagerly await the annual list of titles curated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. While he recommends mostly nonfiction and memoir, a few books that make his list are novels. Another pundit recommending books is popular science author and psychologist Steven Pinker. Of the 75+ books on Pinker’s list, the great majority are nonfiction. Of the fifteen novels he recommends, four were written by his wife, Rebecca Goldstein.

You’ve heard of all the usual tropes explaining why people should read novels: Books open new worlds. Books are a portal into the past. Books open new windows into the future. Books allow you to meet people of a different race, ethnicity, gender, age, and sex. Books connect the dots. Books teach us compassion. Books save lives.

In my wildest imaginings, I cannot envision government control over what we read and write, a world where AI-generated memes dictate what we see, read, hear and think. Too many people are unruly, smart, rebellious, and unwilling to settle for a reality that is not of their own making. The writing on the wall is clear: people will never abandon books.

The greatest advocates for the novel are writers. Many novelists don’t write to capture an audience, and they don’t write merely to please themselves. Authors write novels because a story demands to be told. W.H. Hudson’s quest to write “Green Mansions” came to symbolize the attainment of perfect love and beauty in life—that is futile, yet accomplished. His pursuit of the natural beauty of the jungle is all that mattered.

Likewise, Magda in “The World is Made of Glass” seeks help from Carl Jung because she has fallen into a black hole of living a life with no meaning. Ironically, after Jung dismisses her as a patient, as someone he cannot help, she embarks on her own journey and is able to find redemption.

In “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” the friendship between the two priests seeps powerfully into our consciousness and wins our heart and soul. This tender novel shows us what love is without ever once mentioning the word.

The three novels I have noted here are not on any pundit’s top-books-lists, nor have they ever been on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Yet, in all of these novels, the beauty of humanity triumphs over injustice in a profound story of love. The ultimate victory of humanity reminds us there is no power on earth—technology, AI, war, governments—that will stop a person from becoming a gifted storyteller. And there is also no power on earth that will stop people from reading great novels.

LINKS:

Publishers Weekly, NEA Finds Worrying Drop in Reading Participation by Jim Milliot, Nov 3, 2023

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/93659-nea-finds-worrying-drop-in-reading participation.html#:~:text=The%20NEA’s%20%E2%80%9CArts%20Participation%20Patterns,four%20percentage%20points%20from%202017

The Guardian, ‘Deeply concerning’: reading for fun in the US has fallen by 40%, new study says, by Benjamin Lee, Aug 20, 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/reading-for-pleasure-study

New York Times, High School Reading Skills Are at a New Low. What Does That Mean for Young People?, by Natalie Proulx, Oct 23, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/learning/high-school-reading-skills-are-at-a-new-low-what-does-that-mean-for-young-people.html

J.Marriot.substack, The dawn of the post-literate society And the end of civilization by James Mariott, Sept 18, 2025

The National Literacy Institute, 2025 Literacy Statistics

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics

Book Reviews:

^{Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson}

^{The World is Made of Glass by Morris L. West}

^{Death Comes For The Archbishop by Willa Cather}

When History: A Novel (Italian: La Storia), by Italian Author Elsa Morante, was published in 1974, it received a wave of nasty criticism. The most scathing criticism of all came from the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini’s ruthless rant ridiculed the accents of the young boys in the story as inauthentic and accused Elsa Morante of almost criminal intent in her portrayal of the animals—two dogs and a cat.

Pasolini’s main criticism appeared to have been spawned by the story itself—he felt it was too far out of sync with the surging wave of optimism espoused by the political left. Of the many critics who swarmed like stinging wasps, attacking Morante’s work, Pasolini’s diatribe stung her the most. He and Morante had been close friends and creative colleagues among Italy’s literary elite for years. After his public attack on her work, the two never spoke again.

Despite the controversy, La Storia became a best-seller, selling over 600,000 copies in Italy alone. Regardless of what the critics said, word on the street heralded this book for its poignant storytelling that was powerfully executed by a brilliant writer.

Unlike World War II stories told from a German, British or American point-of-view, Italy is the epicenter of La Storia. This novel’s name is ambiguous; it can either be called “History” or “Story,” depending not only on the literal Italian translation to English, but also on the subtlety of the word’s true meaning. It is precisely this ambiguity that is at the root of its brilliance. Each of the novel’s eight sections begins with a succinct narration of events and trends that were taking place in real time all over the world—history in the making.

As the story of Ida Ramundo unfolds, La Storia weaves a heart-wrenching spell. A young woman of Rome, Ida Ramundo is partly Jewish, and struggling for her life. Her father’s non-Jewish bloodline gives her the Italian ethnic cloak to hide from being herded from the Roman Ghetto into the Auschwitz train from the Tiburtina Station and into the throes of the death camp.

Ida is widowed; she struggles to raise her teen son Nino by teaching at a local school. Soon all hell breaks loose. Ida is raped by Gunther, a German soldier who never learns he has sired a son before he is soon killed in combat on the front lines in Africa. Ida hides her pregnancy with the same tenacity that she hides her Jewishness and gives birth to Useppe. A musical sprite of a boy, his laughter and curiosity radiate with pure joy in this war-ravaged city. Useppe grows slowly, painstakingly so, with the impish charm of Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim. Useppe skips through his day-to-day life like a normal little boy, never knowing that the air strikes, mass starvation, and death looming all around him are not normal at all.

During a time in Italy’s history when many left-wing intellectuals regarded communism to be the new holy grail, Morante’s La Storia depicted sympathetic characters whose lives were destroyed by the atrocities committed against ordinary people. Morante must have realized that all political ideologies that incite hatred are ruses used by men who want to attain power and will ruthlessly destroy anyone or anything that stands in their way of getting it.

One character in La Storia, Davide Segre, at first goes by the name of Carlo Vivaldi to hide the fact that he is Jewish. He comes to the realization that all ideologues are the same. Whether it be fascism, communism, anarchism, or even in the 21^st Century what we have come to know as trumpism, all of these ideologies are weaponized by corrupt men who are intent on taking control by subjugating the masses with the cruel opium of their messianic and evil notions about humanity. In the end, it is always men of power, greed and corruption who rise to the top on the backs of the working people who mistakenly thought they were being saved.

La Storia was never a story that was rendered through a fanatical ideological lens. It is a story where the characters jump out at you and draw you into their world. Many minor characters come and go, each one adding another dimension in the human capacity to create great beauty and joy in the midst of great sadness and tragedy. You will never forget the many facets of light sweeping through the trees and streets of Rome, or the joy two young brothers share with one another upon their discovery of the dog Blitz, a mutt who has street smarts greater than any ghetto kid. As the little boy Useppe wanders through the streets of Rome, fluffy white Bella, a Maremma Shepherd, protects him with ferocious love as strong as death. And we feel Useppe’s child-like confusion when the cat Rossella gives birth to a single kitten but is too malnourished to feed it.

Although the book chronicles the history of the first half of the twentieth century, its laser-like focus homes-in on the years leading up to World War II, from 1941, throughout the duration of the war, and immediately after, to 1947. Morante’s keen eye and powerful prose spare no detail. Writers in the 21^st Century might find her style to be dense, but it is never florid or sentimental. Morante rarely wastes a word on the superfluous and sets a fine example of the way writers ought to write. Too many books by 21^st Century authors pull out all of stops by removing their richly textured language as if these words have been censored and edited by publishing executives who want to package books and sell them like opioids to the masses.

La Storia is powerful because of its many layers that defy language—the nuances in what can be gained or lost in translation. Who among us has had misgivings reading the work of Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy or Gabriel Garcia Marquez because its original language is not English? You can be reassured that in this case, Elsa Morante worked obsessively closely with La Storia’s translator, William Weaver, often entailing daily phone conversations where they discussed the most picayune precision of language.The very essence of this story as seen through the eyes of great characters cannot possibly have gotten lost in translation.

One facet of this story is subtle and not easily perceptible. We see the woman Ida Ramundo age before our eyes, as she endures one blow after another, always picking herself up and pressing on so she can take care of her sons. Ida is as virtuous and as holy as the Virgin Mary, trying to conceal her Jewishness and her pregnancy the way Mary never had to because she was preordained to be the mother of God. Some historical accounts of Mary, mother of Jesus of Nazareth, suggest she was raped by a Roman soldier named Panther (Panthera or Pantera), the same way Ida was raped by a German soldier named Gunther. Without a husband named Joseph or a guardian angel to protect her, if Ida ever felt abandoned by God, she never said so, but we know that she has been. We feel her pain when she joins a queue, standing in line for hours, to wait for rations of milk or flour, only to arrive at the top of the line to find the food supply has run out just as she got there.

Ida witnesses the rounding up of the Jews from the Roman Ghetto, where they were herded into cattle cars and led away to the gas chamber. According to Elsa Morante, of the 1,056 passengers on the Rome – Auschwitz train from the Tiburtina Station, there were 15 survivors. Of the 15 survivors only one was a woman. After the allied liberation of the death camps, each of the survivors were given a second-class railway ticket to return home to Rome. Upon their arrival in Italy they were each given a small cake of soap, and for the men, a packet of razor blades.

Elsa Morante writes, “Even those who were once tall seemed little and walked hunched over, with a long and mechanical tread, like puppets. In the place of their cheeks were two holes; many of them had hardly any teeth left and, on their shaved, emaciated heads, a feathery down had just begun to grow, like a baby’s. Their ears stuck out, and their hollow eyes, black or brown, didn’t seem to reflect the images of their present surroundings, but some host of haunting figures, like a magic lantern of constantly changing absurd forms…Because of their ridiculously scant weight and their strange appearance, people looked at them as they were jests of nature.”

They were easily recognized. On the streets of Rome, people called out, “That’s a Jew.”

La Storia begs the question: Must history always repeat itself? Yes, of course. Can humans evolve to the point where this could never happen again? No. No matter what, human beings are condemned to repeat their crimes against humanity because in the aftermath no one listens to the survivors or learns enough from them to not make the same mistake again. Men of great ambition with a lust for power have no problem trampling on the hallowed ground of the dead.

As Morante noted, upon their return to Rome, the death camp survivors weren’t exactly shunned, but no one cared much about what had happened to them. “Soon they learned that nobody wanted to listen to their stories: some people’s minds wandered at the start, others interrupted them promptly with an excuse, and others actually stepped away from them, snickering, as if to say: ‘Brother, I feel sorry for you, but I have other things to do right now.’”

Toward the end of this story, the young Jewish man Davide Segre drunkenly announces in a bar, “I’m a Jew.” No one cares and no one pays him much mind. It’s only two years after the concentration camps were liberated, but already it was as if it had not happened. The men in the bar shrug as if to say, So what? You were hunted yesterday but you are hunted no more. Life is normal again. For Davide Segre, it will never be normal again, a haunting realization that destroys his life.

Read La Storia slowly, ten pages at a sitting, until you reach the last quarter of the book. By then you will be so filled with angst and concern for the well-being of the characters that you will be drawn into the story’s momentum as it reaches the pacing of a page-turner. You will want to kill Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and all of their cronies again and again for all of the pain and suffering that they caused to so many innocent people—the dead and the dying who never knew what had hit them or why.

The literary world is not always kind to any writer who bucks the prevailing trend. In 1974 La Storia was deemed to be so controversial among Italian intellectuals that for a time, the book was banned in Franco’s Spain. The intellectual zeitgeist had not yet arrived at the conclusion that all ideologies that ascribe to demonizing one social class at the expense of another, even communism, are hard-wired for failure. There was still faith and credence in the idea that communism was a pragmatic solution to the world’s income inequality. Intellectuals like Pier Paolo Pasolini could not look past the leitmotif of ideology to see the beauty of the characters whose lives are fully-fleshed-out in La Storia, which is indeed both history and a story—pure tragedy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini later met his own tragic end. He was bludgeoned to death at a beach close to Ostia. His murder was at first thought to be at the hands of seventeen-year-old Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, but later it was thought Pasolini might have been conspiratorially murdered by several men from southern Italy who had described Pasolini as “a dirty communist.”

Beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany to the new market economies emerging in Vietnam and Cuba, communism has faded in the 21^st Century. La Storia’s Ida Ramundo did not live long enough to see the decline of communism. Although Ida escapes being carted off to Auschwitz, every step of the way she encounters her own private holocaust. Fortunately, she did not have to bear witness to the rise of a new form of fascism in the Twenty-first Century. Through her own suffering, a suffering as great as the biblical Job, she comes to the realization that throughout all human history, corrupt power mongers have always used hateful ideologies to destroy the lives of good, kind, ordinary people, like you and me, all of us.

The world is not always kind to authors who tell the truth. Eventually new life rises from the charred embers of the dead. A great book is found again, sometimes accidentally, and suddenly discovered as if it is new. The characters live on to talk about their suffering, regardless if anyone wants to listen long enough to learn how to stop the carnage from ever happening again. In the end, this profound beauty of a book has endured and will continue to stand the test of time. Maybe one day, someone will listen.