1 Publishers’ summaries are promotions for readers looking for something new. You find them on Amazon, Audible, Goodreads and most other bookseller websites. Their most notable characteristics are cliches, exaggeration and urgency—altogether,
The Only Time I Ran for Office
Darien High School’s chess club, of which I was one of seven members, met to elect a new president. I'd begun at the club two years earlier by beating another new member twice in a row. My opponent, Jeff, now a senior like me, turned out to be our
Monty
As a wedding gift, Grandma Spratt gave my parents a cat from a litter born in her backyard. He was black except for a white stripe on his chest, and Mum and Dad named him Monty. They said that when I was born two years later, they’d worried they’d
A Time for Euphemisms
Toward the end of eighth grade, when kids turn fourteen, a girl I’ll call Delia volunteered to visit my home one afternoon a week to read class assignments to me. I was new to America and to blindness. During our reading sessions, work gave way to
Bullying: What’s a Parent To Do?
1 My most painful experience of bullying occurred in a taxi. Each day for two years, from the age of eleven to thirteen, I shared a taxi with three or four other children to and from school. Why the taxi? We were in the first group of partially
Moral Compass
1 The subject that afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Slater, told us, would be how to play chess. "Chess is about checkmate, about trapping your opponent’s king,” he said from the front of the classroom. “It isn't about taking pieces. Only mediocre