Last May my friend Lynn LaPlante Allaway, the principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, came to our apartment to perform a private concert to help me heal from open-heart surgery. Whitney and I tried to thank Lynn for her music therapy by visiting her kids at St. Petronille School, and gee whiz, now I have […]

Here’s my husband Mike with a terrific guest post about how my Seeing Eye dogs look from his point of view. by Mike Knezovich Beth’s on her fourth Seeing Eye dog—and, in a very real way, so am I. Everyone easily grasps the difference a guide dog can make in its partner’s life. What they […]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt — did polio make FDR stronger?

My husband Mike was at the Greenbuild convention in Philadelphia last week. Left with so much time on my own, I started reading The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s new 771-page novel. I had a hard time putting it down, and I wasn’t the only one. In a New York Times book review, Michiko Kakutani says Donna […]

A writer in the Monday memoir class I lead worked for Life Magazine in 1963. Giovanna Breu was at the magazine’s New York office when legendary editor Richard Stolley was negotiating for the right to reprint stills from footage of the assassination filmed by Abraham Zapruder. The Zapruder film arrived at the Life Magazine office […]