Two friends wrote books

Two young, friends of ours are married to one another. They each write book reviews for serious intellectual journals and at dinner recently they both joked about how book reviews all need to take the same form. They all have to start out with an amusing anecdote that connects the reviewer to the topics covered by the books.



Well, to be honest, I hang out in a kind of a bookish crowd and lots of my friends have written books, but two dear friends wrote books that got published within a few weeks of one another. At first glance, the books have very little to do with one another. However the underlying themes of both books are very similar.

Celia Reiss' book is a memoir of her mother, who died far too young in the form of a cookbook. It is a poignant book full of loss and memory and the power of love (in the form of pie). 

Sacred Shelter by my dear friend and neighbor Susan Greenfield is in many ways a harder more bitter meal to consume. Susan has edited the stories of homelessness of thirteen New Yorkers. I had to put the book down for several days at a time because it was hard to take in the suffering experienced by the participants in this book. And yet, like Celia's pie book, it is a story of lives transformed through the power of love and caring and community.