“From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot in front of the other, but when books are opened you have wings.” -Helen Hayes

I’m a traveler and a reader and those two pursuits go together like gravy and rice (as we say in New Orleans.)  I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately (after Dean’s death I started speaking at recovdery conferences again) so, naturally, I’ve been reading a bit.  Add to the traveling the fact that I do not sleep well and we have the perfect storm to create the traveling insomniac reader!  These are the last three books I’ve read and that I highly recommend.

MOLLY IVINS: A Rebel Life by W. Michael Smith and Bill Minutaglio                                                                                                 Lord, I miss Molly Ivins - think of the fun she would have with the “trashbaggers,”  Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman and Sara Palin!  Smith was for years Molly’s faithful researcher and Bill Minutaglio knew her well and knew the political milieu in which she lived and worked.  She was the exquisitely educated daughter of a Texas oil executive and a major player in Houston society.  She was a tall redheaded beauty who drank and smoked too much and took great pleasure in the betrayal of her conservative daddy’s values with a “killer” wit.  Thankfully, the authors, who obviously loved Molly, do not “whitewash” anything.  Anyone who loved Molly will love this book and I did both.

CLEOPATRA: A Life by StacySchiff                                                                                                                                                                    Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian.  She takes the legend of this elusive queen and all that has been written about her and separates the myth from the reality.  She examines what was written about Cleopatra by Romans who hated her and others who romanticized her then shines the light on what we really know about the time in which Cleopatra lived and the mores and customs of that time.  Schiff is an admirer of the well-educated, brilliant ruler Cleopatra really was and paints a picture I loved.

DAY AFTER NIGHT: A Novel by AnitaDiamant                                                                                                                                              Anita Diamant knows women.  She proved that in THE RED TENT!  This is the story of four young women (ages 17-20) who after the holocaust flee separately to Palestine.  They meet in a British internment camp near Haifa where they have been imprisoned because they have no official identity papers.  There is Shayndel, a Polish resistance heroine; Zorah, a Polish concentration camp survivor; Tedi, a Dutch refugee who was hidden, but turned in to the Nazis by her “protectors” and Leoni, a French teenager who was separated from her family in Paris and forced  into a brutal life by an older woman.  This is an uplifting story about the resilience of the human race.  The story includes an exciting escape planned and executed by the young Israeli Palmachniks.             

Enjoy!