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OUT OF MULBERRY STREET by Jacob A. Riis STORIES OF TENEMENT LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY Imagine it’s 1880. The Lower East Side of New York City is the most densely populated place on earth…block after block of tenements house the working poor as well as unemployed immigrants of the city, including Italians, Irish, Germans,… Read more

Searching for new home… Freedom across the ocean- Tears flooding the seas Michael and I visited New York City recently…before the Coronavirus scare exploded…and we spent quite a bit of time exploring the Lower East Side of the city…the area where most immigrants coming to our shores settled, at least, for a time… Note: Click… Read more

“My Heart Remembers” “Take care o’ the wee ones. Don’t let them o’ yer sight. D’ya hear me, lass?” Those were the last words 8 year old Maelle Gallagher heard from her Da as he pushed her and her two younger siblings out the door, away from the raging fire, to the safety of the… Read more

THE SWEETNESS OF FORGETTING by Kristin Harmel Your very worst memories, put behind you, may become more vague as years advance…there is a SWEETNESS of FORGETTING. But those memories are part of who you are for as long as you live. That’s one of the lessons…one of the premises behind Kristin Harmel’s best-seller, “The Sweetness… Read more

The hip, urban heart of Florida’s Gulf Coast beats in Tampa, our destination for a long weekend…not so much to see Tampa, but to bask in the extraordinary voice of Andrea Bocelli!! Just recovering from a week’s bout with laryngitis (for the first time in his career,) we were fortunate that he didn’t postpone our… Read more

There are strange and mysterious sounds when the winds of winter blow, the long nights are crystal clear and cold and my world is covered with snow. The stars are frosty against the sky and the wind’s whistle is shrill as the snow blows against the house and drifts against the hill. Yet, in winter… Read more

“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens Once upon a time , in the mid-twentieth century North Carolina wetlands, there lived a forgotten girl named Kya…aka Catherine…aka “The Marsh Girl” Clark. Abandoned by her parents and siblings at a very young age and further rejected by the school system, the entire town surrounding her and… Read more

THE HUNTRESS by Kate Quinn Ok, I admit it! I’m obsessed, morbidly fascinated with…and appalled by WWII books and the horrors of the time…before, during and after the war. I love the genre of Historical Fiction as it never fails to introduce me to little known areas of history that school and history books never… Read more

Their parents are longtime friends. Andrew was my first charter pilot on the earliest trips to Africa. He and his wife, Ingrid, have become dear friends… special people in my life. Naturally, I’ve known their daughters, Emma and Holly, since they were born…I visit with them in their South African town, East London, every couple… Read more

September-October, 2019 WHY MONGOLIA? Think about Mongolia for just a moment. What visions come to mind? (It’s the land that gave us Genghis Khan…remember him from our history classes? He was Mongolia’s founding father…their George Washington.) Yes, he was a brutal warrior, amassing the largest contiguous empire in history… but he also established Mongolia’s first… Read more