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Margot Greenbaum Mustich
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
James Mustich
There’s no greater tribute to the pleasures of L. Frank Baum’s book than to say that the story is so good that it isn’t overwhelmed by the images from the wonderful Judy Garland movie. The story unfolds with a declarative matter-of-factness that puts no barrier between the real and the imagined; bec...show more
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Village School
Miss Read
Calm is not a virtue much prized by literary critics, yet, as many readers are well aware, a wisely calm book can be both restful and, paradoxically, deeply stimulating. That is the case with the “Miss Read” books, a modest yet addictively absorbing series of novels by Dora Jessie Saint. Saint was a...show more
Tender at the Bone
Ruth Reichl
Since Ruth Reichl would grow up to become a New York Times restaurant critic and the last editor of Gourmet magazine, we might assume she was nurtured in a family kitchen rich with culinary accomplishment. But nothing could be further from the truth. “I had three grandmothers and none of them could ...show more
The Walls Came Tumbling Down
Henriette Roosenburg
“This is the story of the liberation of four Dutch political prisoners at the end of World War II, and about their trek home to Holland after Russian soldiers had freed them from the prison in Waldheim, a small village in south-eastern Germany.” Thus begins this firsthand account of the adventures o...show more
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was an intrepid pilot, a pioneer in the early days of commercial aviation who flew mail routes and, later, military reconnaissance missions for the Allies until his plane disappeared in 1944 off the coast of Marseille. During his lifetime, Saint-Exupéry also earned an intern...show more
Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak
“It is a constant miracle to me that children manage to grow up,” Maurice Sendak once said, citing the unseen and inchoate dangers that well up from within—anxiety, pain, fear, anger, boredom, even love—that make kids’ emotional survival such a prodigious feat. It is the slightly spooky magic of Sen...show more
The Sonnets
William Shakespeare
The consummate exemplar of the Elizabethan love affair with the sonnet, Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems is replete with luxurious, and lingering, literary melodies. Music amply rewards any reader’s attention, yet there is more to The Sonnets than a considerable catalog of lovely an...show more
Richard II
William Shakespeare
Richard II is a history play distinguished by its poetry. In portraying the downfall of a monarch and the historic violation of the divine right of kings by Henry Bolingbroke, who usurped Richard’s throne to launch the Lancastrian dynasty as Henry IV, Shakespeare gives his title character a lyric el...show more
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
At a fundamental level, Henrietta Lacks’s contribution to the advance of medical science may be as great as that of anyone who has ever lived. Her cells, obtained without her permission or knowledge during treatment for terminal cancer in 1951, were the first human cells to be replicated and kept al...show more
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
An immediate popular success, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks; by the time of Smith’s death three decades later, more than six million copies had been sold, and the adventures of her protagonist, Francie Nolan, had been translated into more than a dozen languages....show more
I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith
From the first sentence—“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”—Dodie Smith weaves a spell over her readers as she relates, in the voice of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the adventures of a remarkable family that lives, in impoverished eccentricity, in the ruins of a six-hundred-year-old...show more
Sailing Alone Around the Room
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is a very funny guy, and there aren’t too many former Poet Laureates of whom that can be said. Be his subject poetry workshops or forgetfulness, saxophones or cows, canceling a vacation or nursing a hangover, Collins shapes his poems with a gentle but incisive humor that is ingratiatin...show more
The Road from Coorain
Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway’s account of her coming-of-age in Australia in the middle of the twentieth century is a deft evocation of landscape and memory. Through those two dimensions a small girl grows, against cultural and familial odds, into a determined young woman on the verge of a voyage to America, wher...show more
Memories of the Great & the Good
Alistair Cooke
There’s so much “personality” journalism around these days that it’s easy to forget just how absorbing and memorable profiles can be when they’re as well crafted and thoughtful as those found here. In these twenty-three shrewd and insightful exercises in “appreciative criticism” (“Most of these piec...show more
Middlemarch
George Eliot
At the center of George Eliot’s vast portrait of the provincial city of Middlemarch, its society and inhabitants, is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a “home epic” of a bright, brave young woman learning how to live and what to live for. Most memorable of Middlemarch’s characters, however, is no charac...show more
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A book of shimmering social surfaces and hauntingly evanescent private depths, The Great Gatsby imbues its fleet narrative with a formal elegance that has been readily apparent even to the generations of high school students to whom it has been assigned—generally long before they might understand th...show more
Offshore
Penelope Fitzgerald
This beguiling novel—for which Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize—concerns a colorful bunch of misfits living on houseboats and barges along the Battersea reach of the Thames River in London. With a comic choreography worthy of Jane Austen, and an affectionate perspicacity regarding human natu...show more
Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is one of the great novels of Paris, its story of a young man’s love for an older woman unfolding against the backdrop of the revolution of 1848, which ended with the abdication of King Louis-Philippe and the establishment of the Second Republic. Flaubert’s biting vi...show more
The Art of Eating
M. F. K. Fisher
The Art of Eating is an omnibus that collects M. F. K. Fisher’s first five gastronomical books, written between 1937 and 1949. The singularity of Fisher’s early work is evidenced by the fact that the New York Times called her debut—a book about food with no pretense of being a cookbook—“unique,” “di...show more
Flour Water Salt Yeast
Ken Forkish
Beginning with his discovery, in 1995, of an article about Paris’s legendary Poilâne bakery in Smithsonian magazine, Ken Forkish’s transformation from IBM salesman to one of America’s most celebrated bakers and one of the most successful restaurateurs in Portland, Oregon (where he owns Ken’s Artisan...show more