That’s the lead from the most recent review of A Roomful of Monkeys posted on Amazon’s web page featuring my book. Along with “playful” from the Kirkus Review, those two words sum up precisely what I was intending to achieve with my first comic novel.   To say I was relieved to see words like those […]

This review reminds me of the admonition from that high school composition teacher of mine who’d admonished me to leave humor for those that can write it. Well, the admonition didn’t stop me then, and it looks like this one won’t stop me now. Still looking for buyers of A Roomful of Monkeys and readers […]

   Carol and I have been talking about our next train trip to Europe, and we’ve already agreed it would be Italy: Her to visit a friend in Tuscany, and me to continue my pursuit of the Best Lasagna in the World.

   And so comes National Geographic Books’ Tasting Italy, A Culinary Journey,  a gorgeously illustrated (no surprise there) volume that may have booksellers scratching their heads whether to display the book in their travel department or their cookbook section. (My suggestion: stack ‘em in both.)

The theme that emerges from these pages is “control.” Control, as in to make the tragic events of the sudden death of a spouse of forty years to “unhappen.” This, of course, is what we all face, waking up that first day as a widow or widower. It’s the shock, the denial, the grief, even the self-pity that we all experience in those first days of mourning.

In 1991, the car author Jerry Sittser was driving on a dark stretch of road with his wife, mother and four children was hit headon by a drunk driver. Sittser’s wife of twenty years, his mother and four-year-old daughter were killed. That night for Sittser became “The End and The Beginning,” as Sittser entitled the first chapter of A Grace Disguised, in which he recounted the accident.

In 2001 writer and humorist Calvin Trillin lost his wife Alice to heart failure. They’d been married for thirty-six years, with all their friends always telling Calvin he’d been the lucky one. Just as I knew that with Carolyn, Calvin knew it with Alice. Just as I’ve chosen to do with Carolyn, Trillin wrote about Alice.