Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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For pilgrims and seekers Over the centuries Christians have considered Rome almost as sacred as Jerusalem. Nothing proves this better than a stunning new book entitled Pilgrimage: A Chronicle of Christianity Through the Churches of Rome (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, $40, 0297825178). The book unites a respectful but nicely gossipy text by June Hager, who has been writing about the churches of Rome for 15 years, with hundreds of beautiful photos by Grzegorz Galazka, who is one of the official papal photographers. All of the requisite stops on the tour are here, of course the Sistine ceiling, the towering dome of Saint Peter’s. But you encounter more than the top ten tourist sights. From Filippino Lippi’s amazing frescoes in Rome’s only Gothic church, S. Maria Sopra Minerva, to the S. Andrea della Valle’s Barberini Chapel, where Puccini set the first act of Tosca, the tour rambles engagingly from one unexpected stop to the next.

Pilgrimage will make you yearn to go to Rome, and you will need a guidebook worthy of your new ambition. Fortunately Fodor’s has anticipated your every wish with a new full-color guide in their Thematic Itineraries series, Holy Rome: Exploring the Eternal City: A Millennium Guide to the Christian Sights ($21, 0679004548).

Handy cross-referencing allows you to move easily between essays and site maps. Sidebars provide useful historical and cultural information. Calendars give schedules of millennial celebrations. More than 200 photos show an up-to-date Rome, after the current restorations of many monuments. Where is the only evidence of an Arian cult in the whole of Rome? Which church claims to have the chalice from which St. John drank poison? What are the best times to visit the most popular sites? The answers are all here.

Before you go, you may want to read up on Christianity and other beliefs in the newest contribution to Merriam-Webster’s lineup of world-class reference books the fat, gorgeous Encyclopedia of World Religions. These 1,181 pages literally range from the African Methodist Episcopal Church to Zen, with stopovers in between for Halloween and the Qabbalah. You will find the dietary restrictions of the Jains and the Sermon on the Mount, Joan of Arc and the apocryphal Pope Joan, the concept of Limbo and a biography of spiritualist Madame Blavatsky. Whether you seek information on the Twelve Tribes of Israel or the Five Pillars of Islam, on Odin or Billy Graham, this impressive, exhaustive work will provide the answer.

For pilgrims and seekers Over the centuries Christians have considered Rome almost as sacred as Jerusalem. Nothing proves this better than a stunning new book entitled Pilgrimage: A Chronicle of Christianity Through the Churches of Rome (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, $40, 0297825178). The book unites a…

David Sedaris’ latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky, finds the author in late midlife, mining his life, the lives of his family—including his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, his siblings and his 98-year-old dad—and their surroundings for comedic stories. In the book’s opening essay, “Active Shooter,” Sedaris and his sister Lisa visit a firing range in North Carolina, which offers him a chance to plunge into the oddities of gun culture as they learn to shoot pistols. It’s a perfect David Sedaris essay: one that lures you in with funny family anecdotes and self-deprecation, gives a sideways look at some aspect of society, then ends with an unexpected emotional punch. This essay, like several others here, also offers deft, sharp commentary on masculinity. One of the collection’s delights is a commencement address delivered at Oberlin College that skates along on the surface with funny throwaway lines and ridiculousness while offering slyly sensible life advice underneath.

The collection progresses somewhat chronologically, beginning with essays that look back to Sedaris’ childhood and to his young adult years when he was writing plays with his sister Amy in New York City. Later essays recount Sedaris’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, walking New York’s empty streets and wondering if his livelihood—reading works-in-progress to audiences all over the country—is gone for good. But in 2021, he returned to the road in a changed America, making pointed observations about different states’ vastly different approaches to the pandemic along the way.

These essays offer plenty of laughs, but the tone is often dark as Sedaris contemplates his dad’s failings, and his own. “I’m the worst son in the world,” Sedaris jokes to a nursing home aide about not visiting his dad more often. At first these confessions feel callous, but as the essays reveal more about his dad’s abusive, competitive behavior, such remarks take on a different feel. In “Unbuttoned,” I teared up at Sedaris’ evocation of both the pain of such abuse and the unexpected moment of connection between the two men at the end of the elder Sedaris’ life.

Happy-Go-Lucky is an entertaining collection, both cringey and poignant as it celebrates love, family and even aging in an inimitably Sedaris way.

Happy-Go-Lucky is both entertaining and poignant as it celebrates love, family and even aging in an inimitably David Sedaris way.
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The wild life Wild Discovery Guide to Your Cat: Understanding and Caring for the Tiger Within and Wild Discovery Guide to Your Dog: Understanding and Caring for the Wolf Within ($24.95, 1563318059) are the perfect gifts for pet lovers, but they offer something for everyone. The 300 superb photographs of dogs and cats in domestic life and in the wild provide visual delight for any age reader. For the student, the books offer clear, authoritative information for a school report. Would-be and new pet owners can learn everything they need to know in detailed instructions on how to select, care for, and understand dogs or cats. Author Margaret E. Lewis, Ph.

D., specializes in the behavior and evolution of carnivores and provides scientific information for dog and cat fanciers. In her introduction, Elizabeth Marshall, Thomas, anthropologist and author of popular books on dogs and cats, writes [this] new material with old wisdom . . . is a window on the natural world.

The wild life Wild Discovery Guide to Your Cat: Understanding and Caring for the Tiger Within and Wild Discovery Guide to Your Dog: Understanding and Caring for the Wolf Within ($24.95, 1563318059) are the perfect gifts for pet lovers, but they offer something for everyone.…

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For the record The Guinness Book of Records, the fact-filled annual compilation of the world’s superlatives, has decided to usher in the new millennium in a big way. Guinness World Records 2000, Millennium Edition is a dramatically different book than its predecessors. A large format hardcover, its silver-coated binding and raised lettering make an immediate visual impact. Inside, a lavish, full-color design, heavy on photos and light on text, is a browser’s delight. It contains not just updates of existing world records, but new ones as well, in areas such as extreme sports, technology, and the Internet. Whether it’s used as a reference guide to settle friendly wagers, or left casually lying around for family and friends to thumb through, Guinness World Records 2000 is sure to be a favorite in countless households.

For the record The Guinness Book of Records, the fact-filled annual compilation of the world's superlatives, has decided to usher in the new millennium in a big way. Guinness World Records 2000, Millennium Edition is a dramatically different book than its predecessors. A large format…

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If you’re not familiar with Jon Mooallem’s writing, his new book of essays, Serious Face, is calling your name. Mooallem (This Is Chance!) has been writing for The New York Times Magazine for more than 15 years, and his latest book rounds up 11 of his best pieces from those years, plus one more written in 2022, into a transporting series of deep dives into surprising characters and situations.

Mooallem excels at writing about everything from climate change-fueled natural disasters to eccentric individuals. In “The Precise Center of a Dream,” for example, readers meet a man named Jacques-André Istel, who happens to be the father of modern skydiving and who created his own town (Felicity, California) in the middle of the desert. Mooallem’s observations can be beautifully delicate; about Felicity, he writes, “It was as if the entire town had sprouted from some preverbal place in his imagination—some need for beauty and meaning.” From that quirky end of the spectrum, Mooallem’s range as a writer stretches all the way across to quieter, more poignant essays like “A House at the End of the World,” his portrait of noted hospice worker B.J. Miller of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and of a 27-year-old man who died from mesothelioma under Miller’s care.

Mooallem can also be deeply personal. The title essay describes his uncanny resemblance to the Spanish bullfighter Manolete, who was hugely famous not only for his bullfighting skills but also for being ugly. “Why These Instead of Others?” is his completely captivating, edge-of-your-seat account of a remote kayaking trip he took with two friends at age 23 to Glacier Bay, Alaska—and the life-and-death rescue that ensued. His writing is equally riveting in “We Have Fire Everywhere,” about a group of people’s narrow escape from the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in 2018. Mooallem typically lets his subjects speak for themselves and isn’t one to make many pronouncements, but here he writes, “It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce.”

Like the very best essay collections, Serious Face takes readers to unexpected places, exploring a meaningful mix of joy, tragedy and downright absurdity. The subjects vary widely, but Mooallem is such a gifted storyteller that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s writing about; readers like myself will be ready to follow.

The subjects in Serious Face vary widely, but Mooallem is such a gifted storyteller that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s writing about. All of it is gripping.
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Women’s Work Maybe someday there won’t be a genre of women in business books. Maybe someday the experiences of women in the business world won’t be all that different from men’s experiences. For now, though, the shelves groan with women’s biz books that tellingly share one characteristic: They all deal with women’s struggles to triumph over obstacles strewn into their financial and career paths by human biology, corporate tradition, and, of course, men. This month, we look at four new releases in this still-rich vein.

Anne E. Francis probes an especially thorny phenomenon in The Daughter Also Rises: How Women Overcome Obstacles and Advance in the Family-Owned Business (Rudi Publishing, $16.95, 0945213387). This is not a book of caricature. It shows, among other truths, that Dad does not have to be Archie Bunker to stand in the way of his little girl’s success at the family company. In fact, sometimes a father’s (or mother’s) best intentions may be just the problem, trapping the adult daughter in a childlike workplace dependency.

Francis, a business consultant with a doctorate in social work, draws on her experience of counseling families on the broad spectrum of issues business and (often deeply) personal that arise when blood and business mix. Through cogent, real-world examples and incisive analysis, she sheds light on topics that might seem unfathomable and might seem unrelated to the running of a business. It turns out, for instance, that a mother’s repressed envy of her daughter’s success, and a father’s unspoken discomfort in the presence of his adolescent daughter long ago, can have plenty to do with business when families work together.

The author’s language is refreshingly free of psychobabble, taking on daunting psychological subject matter with admirable clarity. For ambitious women and the people who love them, The Daughter Also Rises offers a roadmap to uncharted territory.

It has been argued before that women have their own way of doing business, distinct from the structures of traditional, male-dominated corporate life. Bearing out that argument are many of the extraordinary life stories sketched out in Conversations with Uncommon Women: Insights from Women Who’ve Risen Above Life’s Challenges to Achieve Extraordinary Success (Amacom, $22.95, 0814405207), by Ellie Wymard.

Of the 100 women we meet here, some are famous (former Texas Governor Ann Richards, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, Ruth Fertel of Ruth’s Chris Steak House), others lesser-known. But they’re all in business, whether the business is working behind the scenes in a political campaign or running an arts organization or starting a small business on the kitchen table.

As Wymard’s women stretch the bounds of what we normally think of as business, they puncture stereotypes along the way. There’s a surprise on nearly every page. When we meet Mary Agee, who gained brief and unwanted fame some years ago as the female executive whose romantic involvement with the CEO led to chaos at Bendix Corp., we don’t read some Oprah story of how she has personally grown from the experience. What Mary Agee does these days is not about Mary Agee; it’s about making a difference in the lives of troubled women. Productively, without fanfare and without taking sides in the abortion debate, the foundation she runs helps women cope with unexpected pregnancies.

Wymard vividly sketches the turning points in many of these women’s lives. In one portrait, for instance, we see successful ad exec Kip Tiernan stopped dead in her tracks in a church aisle, suddenly uttering Holy something (not a word one says in church): It’s not a prayer; it’s an epiphany, after which she is destined to spend the rest of her life as a gadfly activist on behalf of Boston’s homeless.

The author also offers trenchant insights on how women run organizations. One female CEO tells Wymard she wishes she could be tougher on some employees, but senses that she is expected to have a more collaborative style of management because of her gender. People think I’m nice, this executive says, and I’m not sure that’s true. They don’t give me any choice! Kathleen Neville’s Internal Affairs: The Abuse of Power, Sexual Harassment, and Hypocrisy in the Workplace (McGraw-Hill, $24.95, 0071342567) takes us to a darker corner of the working world. It’s a little hard to believe that a book like this needed to be written, almost a decade after the nationwide sexual-harassment-sensitivity stand-down brought on by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. Yet here we are on the cusp of a new millennium, and women can’t be assured they won’t be accosted by a creep while they work. Nor that the creep won’t be the boss.

Neville, an educator, arbitrator, and expert on sexual harassment, has spent a lot of time getting inside the heads of victims, harassers, corporate officials, and others affected by harassment cases. Her horror stories of actual cases drive home a point that won’t be lost on senior managers who think it can’t happen in my shop it can happen, no matter how much camaraderie your employees seem to enjoy, no matter how upstanding a guy your scoutmaster-father-of-three-EVP-for-marketing may seem to be, no matter what boilerplate language you have put in your employee handbook about your supposedly zero-tolerance policy on workplace harassment.

Equally valuable are the detailed composite scenarios that Neville presents in order to explain the varying moral and social perspectives that come into play in harassment cases. The book is like a series of role-playing exercises, inviting readers to see things, just briefly, from the point of view of the board of directors (who may consider it more cost-effective to pay off claims than to lose a valued top exec); the competing lawyers (who tend to spring unwelcome surprises on both adversaries and clients in the course of the settlement process); the victim (often tormented by self-doubt about the incidents); and the harasser (who may be a calculating predator in the corner office or may be Lennie from the mail room, who figures the girls upstairs appreciate being told they’re kinda hot).

In these scenarios, the author does not address the possibility of false harassment claims by vindictive employees. (It would be interesting to know whether that omission reflects a partisan stance on her part or the fact that, in her experience, such claims simply don’t happen.) Still, Neville sheds light where there has mostly been heat in the past, moving beyond battle-of-the-sexes polemics to convey real understanding about how sexual harassment happens and how companies can prevent it. Internal Affairs is a comprehensive and eye-opening primer on a subject that today’s corporate honchos wish away at their peril.

Enough about women at work what’s a lady to do with her hard-earned dough? For starters, don’t let some piggish man get his mitts on it. Heidi Evans offers that advice in How to Hide Money from Your Husband . . . and Other Time-Honored Ways to Build a Nest Egg: The Best Kept Secret of a Good Marriage (Simon and Schuster, $20, 0684841878). This is an unabashedly one-sided book. Evans says men are past masters at hiding money from women, whether the purpose is to finance secret affairs or to keep a wife from getting part of the marital estate in a divorce. It’s high time, she argues, that women play the same game.

More intriguingly, Evans finds that women have been hiding money from their husbands since time immemorial. A more than adequate amateur anthropologist, she delves into the unrecorded history of women’s home lives, uncovering stories of women who spent lifetimes building secret, five-figure nest eggs. Some wives do it to protect themselves in shaky marriages. Others do it to protect the feckless men they love from their own bad habits.

The book presents plenty of cautionary tales about women who trusted their cheating husbands too much or too long, until divorce brought financial ruin. There are stories of depressingly mercenary men as well as women. But the most interesting relationships chronicled here are the ones in which a little financial secrecy really has been the key to a strong marriage, enabling the woman to feel a measure of control over her life and providing a slush fund from which the whole family benefits. How to Hide Money is an eye-opening look at how money and power are intertwined in a marriage, and how women can hold onto their share of both.

Briefly noted: Even in today’s booming economy, shocking numbers of Americans still carry crippling credit-card balances and other installment debts that can leave them feeling financially trapped. Slash Your Debt: Save Money and Secure Your Future, by debt counselor Gerri Detweiler and writers Marc Eisenson and Nancy Castleman, offers a concise and understandable roadmap for getting out of the money pit.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace (Amacom, $25, 0814404804), authors Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Bob Filipczak address the conflicting generational values to be found in any large group of employees. And they look to the future, predicting that today’s adolescent Nexters will come full circle, tending to share more values in common with their 60-to-80-year-old Veteran elders than with any social cohorts in-between.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Women's Work Maybe someday there won't be a genre of women in business books. Maybe someday the experiences of women in the business world won't be all that different from men's experiences. For now, though, the shelves groan with women's biz books that tellingly share…

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