Scraps Of Evidence

Tess has taken some ribbing from her fellow officer, Logan, for her quilting hobby. He finds it hard to align the brisk professional officer he patrols with during the day with the one who quilts in her off-time. Besides, he's been trying to get to know her better and he'd like to be seeing her during those few nights a week she spends with her quilting guild. Then one afternoon Tess and Logan visit her aunt in the nursing home, and the woman acts agitated when Tess covers her with the story quilt. Aunt Susan is attempting to communicate a message to them about Tess's uncle. There's a story behind this quilt, they realize, one that may lead them to a serial killer. Will they have a chance to have a future together, or will the killer choose Tess for his next victim before they find him?

An Angle on the World is a brilliant tribute to Bill Barich's extraordinary range as a writer. Gathering together more than thirty years of work, this book addresses such diverse subjects as a murder trial in the Caribbean, a visit to a juju doctor in Nigeria, and the author's youthful escapades in Italy and the Haight-Ashbury. As the New York Times put it, "An easy, fluid stylist, Barich writes entertainingly about anything." As a staff writer at the New Yorker, Barich found editorial support for his long form dispatches. He makes no pretense of being an objective observer. Instead he's out to capture what Norman Mailer called "the feel of the phenomenon," be it the texture of street life in Belfast or the trails of operating a home for paranoid schizophrenics in San Francisco. He finds heroes in such unlikely places as San Fernando Valley, where former gang members try to prevent teenagers from killing one another in turf wars. The hallmark of An Angle on the World is its compassion. Few writers are as gifted as Barich at making people come alive on the page. His portrait of David Milch, the legendary creator of HBO's Deadwood, offers an inside look at an eccentric genius at work. Here the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia is depicted as a real person, not a rock star cliché. Barich's touch is light, intimate, and acutely aware of our foibles. Whenever he hits the road, whether to London or Barbados, he expresses the sheer joy of being alive. An Angle on the World is an ideal bedside reader, packed with insight, good humor, and razor-sharp prose that has earned Barich his enviable reputation as a writers' writer.

Born in Hungary in 1927, Magda Hollander-Lafon was among the 437,000 Jews deported from Hungary between May and July 1944. Magda, her mother, and her younger sister survived a three-day deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau; there, she was considered fit for work and so spared, while her mother and sister were sent straight to their deaths. Hollander-Lafon recalls an experience she had in Birkenau: “A dying woman gestured to me: as she opened her hand to reveal four scraps of moldy bread, she said to me in a barely audible voice, ‘Take it. You are young. You must live to be a witness to what is happening here. You must tell people so that this never happens again in the world.’ I took those four scraps of bread and ate them in front of her. In her look I read both kindness and release. I was very young and did not understand what this act meant, or the responsibility that it represented.” Years later, the memory of that woman’s act came to the fore, and Magda Hollander-Lafon could be silent no longer. In her words, she wrote her book not to obey the duty of remembering but in loyalty to the memory of those women and men who disappeared before her eyes. Her story is not a simple memoir or chronology of events. Instead, through a series of short chapters, she invites us to reflect on what she has endured. Often centered on one person or place, the scenes of brutality and horror she describes are intermixed with reflections of a more meditative cast. Four Scraps of Bread is both historical and deeply evocative, melancholic, and at times poetic in nature. Following the text is a “Historical Note” with a chronology of the author's life that complements her kaleidoscopic style. After liberation and a period in transit camps, she arrived in Belgium, where she remained. Eventually, she chose to be baptized a Christian and pursued a career as a child psychologist. The author records a journey through extreme suffering and loss that led to radiant personal growth and a life of meaning. As she states: "Today I do not feel like a victim of the Holocaust but a witness reconciled with myself.” Her ability to confront her experiences and free herself from her trauma allowed her to embrace a life of hope and peace. Her account is, finally, an exhortation to us all to discover life-giving joy.

In Without Proof or Evidence O. K. Bouwsma weaves through the central topics of Western religion: the rationality of religious belief, the nature of Christianity, the promise of eternal life, the definition of faith, and proofs of the existence of God. When he works with the problems of Descartes or Moore or Wittgenstein, surveying the marketplace of language in which we all have commerce, he has the familiarity of an experienced trader. But in his work with the problems of Anselm or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, in which the Scriptures move between background and foreground, there is another dimension, a concern with whether the Scriptures have been properly understood, what such an understanding might be, and how it affects someone who so understands them.

The community center reception hall was ablaze with a hundred tiny candles. The wedding rehearsal members were milling around waiting for the bridegroom to return. Josie checked her watch surreptitiously, once again. It had been ten minutes since Brian excused himself to take a phone call. Her fianc was supposed to be on personal leave not taking FBI calls in the middle of their rehearsal dinner. Slipping out the side door, Josie went to remind Brian Miller that their guests were waiting. The playground area beside the center was empty except for the colored chalk blocks of a hopscotch pattern on the concrete. A pair of car keys was lying on the ground at the roots of a rosebush next to the corner of the recreation hall. Where on earth could he be? The PI strolled briskly around the corner to the parking lot but there was no Federal Agent Miller anywhere in sight and his car was still in the parking lot. Taking her cell phone from her jacket pocket, Josie hit #1 on her speed dial and waited. And waited. After the tenth ring with no answer, a knot began to form in her stomach. This was not Brians usual behavior. If he was getting cold feet, he would have just told her, which meant something bad could be going down.