Two or three days ago I got a note from someone who had just finished reading Helping Yourself Grow Old. She wrote: “What you said about dealing with old age, works too in dealing with a pandemic.” Really? I guess I hadn’t thought of that. But it’s reasonable, because old age is definitely a pandemic. […]
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Two weeks ago everything was coming up roses for me and my new book. Though the existence of a new virus for which the world was ill-prepared had shown its ugly face in Seattle, I was getting on an airplane headed for the far side of the country, excited about every author’s dream—a book tour. […]
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People who have read Helping Yourself Grow Old are already asking if I am working on a sequel. The answer is that I can’t even think about another book, because I am too busy trying to make this one fly. But the other day I posted on facebook, feeling a little bold and saying so, […]
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If you are a praying person: Remember Yemen. Recent reports from several news sources tell us that in Yemen, the poorest nation in the Arab world, one of the poorest in the world, seven million civilians are threatened by a developing famine. In addition there is a cholera epidemic that has already infected 300,000 people, […]
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At the publishing house I directed for 24 years in Lebanon our chief translator and editor had unusual editorial skills. As a translator he never wrote a word until he was sure he understood the intention of the English author, and in the end the work seemed to have originated in Arabic. The classical […]
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Grace Kusta writes a personal traumatic experience, enabling us to see both the stress of life in Lebanon during the civil war and how she coped with it. It was the summer of 1985, I had scheduled my annual vacation from work, planning to go spend a week in Cyprus, an island that is […]
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On the day I intended to post this blog I named it “Happy Hiroshima Day.” It was August 6, the birthday of my eldest daughter and the 70th anniversary of the day America, sweet land of liberty, dropped an atom bomb. But on that day I could neither finish nor post the blog because a […]
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