Final Gifts book

I’d leap out of my chair and go find my sister Christy to read her some snippets aloud from this book — all while getting choked up on tears. Author Maggie Callanan is a nurse specializing in end-of-life care. Her stories and insights come directly from her experiences in that field. It’s insightful and brings …

An Odyssey

Nearly finished with best-selling author Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey” It’s a memoir in which the author, a college professor who often teaches on the Greek classics, finds that his father enrolled in one of his courses. Specifically the course on Homer’s “The Odyssey.” An epic adventure unfolds in more ways than one, more than two …

How To Avoid The Cutting Room Floor – Editor’s Advice For On-Camera Actors

Written by Emmy-winning editor Jordan Goldman, A.C.E. (editor on such shows as The Shield & Homeland) who takes you inside the cutting room and pulls back the curtain on how and why directors, showrunners, and editors decide whether your performance makes it on screen.  A good friend of mine in Hollywood mentioned she had been …

Good Read… When To Speak Up & When To Shut Up

After getting two chapters into this pocket-sized book, I shut it. Place it atop my will-get-to-it-sometime stack of books. It isn’t the quick fix magazine article “Five sure-fire tips to get your way” that I was hoping it would be. Nope. Instead it delves into gray areas of communication where the reader has to use …

Good Read… The Little Book of Perfumes (Cologne too.)

Wandering the shelves of the library this morning I glimpse Luca Turin’s latest addition to his series of perfume review books. The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics. I’ve read some of Luca’s work before and always bust out laughing from his sometimes snarky words. Not that it’s all acid, there’s some very beautiful …