Tomorrow, June 7th, my memoir entitled Tolstoy and the Purple Chair will be released. In anticipation, and as a gift to all my wonderful readers, many of whom have shared this long journey of reading and writing with me, I am posting an excerpt from the book today. You have shared your book recommendations with [...]
Continue Reading →Father’s Day is right around the corner and two recently released books offer loving and inspiring portraits of men who have sought to be the very best father they could be, in the ways they best knew how. Alice Ozma Brozina’s father did it through books and reading. An elementary school librarian, Jim Brozina believed [...]
Continue Reading →I put this video together with old photos, some new photos, and stacks and stacks of the books I read during my year of reading a book a day. Then I asked my youngest son to provide the music and voilà! Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: Joy Tweet
Continue Reading →When Patti Smith was just a kid, with her eyes on the stars and her heart open to adventure, she met Robert Mapplethorpe: “On a simple iron bed,a boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with massess of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened [...]
Continue Reading →In his marvelous book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart presents a rich and vivid portrait of what Americans of the time were all about at the start of the Civil War; he explores what ordinary people and extraordinary people, from east to west, north to south, from shopkeepers to housewives, pioneer farmers to [...]
Continue Reading →Sarah Kemble Knight was an early American teacher, traveler, adventurer, and diarist. Her travel diaries of a journey she took from Boston to New York in 1704-05 provide wonderfully vivid and entertaining accounts of the people she met on her way, the landscape she passed through, and the troubles she encountered. A woman traveling alone [...]
Continue Reading →I recently heard Adam Goodheart talk on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC about the music of the Civil War. Social historian and author of the recently-released book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Goodheart talked about how the music of the 1860s roused people politically and spiritually but in response to Lopate’s question of what [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I sat down and read straight through Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Seven volumes, over 4000 pages. What a treat. And speaking of a treat, does anyone know of a good place to buy madeleines in Connecticut? Remembrance of Things Past is a journey back to the taste of madeleines, the smell [...]
Continue Reading →I am so thrilled and excited and happy. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Kirkus Reviews, for naming Tolstoy and the Purple Chair as one of twelve “Outstanding Debuts of 2011.” The review, linking from that page, is wonderful — ”Intelligent, insightful and eloquent, Sankovitch takes the leader on the literary journey” — and promises [...]
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