LaVonne Neff > LIVELY DUST

I asked Google to find the cover of the book I'm about to praise. "Everything happens for a reason," I typed, and clicked ...

Ancient Egyptians brought skeletons to their feasts, exhorting guests to drink and make merry while they still could. American Puritans in...

[Moose's last photo] Twelve years ago we took our beloved Maltese dog, Moose, to the vet and came home without him. Moose was in the...

On an autumn day in 2007, while I was visiting from California, my mother made a request I both dreaded and longed to fulfill. She'd ...

[Africa, with Tanzania highlighted] I spent all day Monday in an outpatient clinic (I'm fine; thanks for asking). I met a lot of nur...

This is not a blog post about gun control. Everything that can possibly be said about that subject, pro or con, has already been said mill...

Seneca the Younger committing suicide with the help of his friends, A.D. 65 (Luca Giordano, 1684) Next month Massachusetts voters wil...

J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults was released a week ago, and a lot of reviewers have weighed in since then (Google them, if you ca...

Before yesterday, I had read no books by Christopher Hitchens. I had read about him, to be sure. His name kept popping up everywhere.  ...

In June my husband, who gets lots of review copies unbidden, asked me if I wanted to read Mark Shriver's memoir about his father, Sargen...

Dorothy keeps popping up unexpectedly. Aaron, her husband, first sees her at the house the oak tree fell on. She then starts joining him at ...

Book publisher's marketing department's hypothetical dream plot, 2012 version: Jacqueline Kennedy's toy poodle, having been tran...

"Susan Jacoby has long made it her project to uncover ill-formed, cynical 'junk thought' and administer a cold dose of reason a...

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn lo...

Last week two articles highlighted America's split over health-care policy. One likened the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force* to a ...

Twenty years ago, a woman in her mid-thirties wrote a book that would become an environmental classic. I finally read it last week. Still in...

Heart and blood vessels (Leonardo da Vinci) I am scheduled to have open-heart surgery next week. They will open my chest, slicing righ...

CNN reports that Claude Choules, 110, has died in Perth, Australia. Mr Choules was "the last known survivor of the 70 million combatan...

Quotation of the Day from "Today's Headlines," an e-newsletter from the New York Times : "My Medicaid card is useless fo...

When my father died in 1995, he immediately strode back into my imagination as the healthy, middle-aged man of my childhood, adolescence, an...