I had no idea when I started reading Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth that I’d be interested in the building of a church. Yet the plot and counterplots surrounding the lives of the principal characters were so captivating and engrossing that I found myself reading far into the night and early morning, not wanting to put the book down.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

A 90-year-old man—or is he 93?—narrates the story of his one summer as a veterinarian with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth during the summer of 1931 in depression-era America. Jacob Jankowski resides in an assisted living home with other elderly people, many of whom require more medical attention than he. He is quite mentally astute for his age, yet because of his age, most of the people in charge of the facility treat him as mentally incompetent, all but Rosemary, a forty-seven-year-old nurse, who treats him and the rest of the patients/residents with the loving care, dignity, and respect they deserve as human beings.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

The two books below helped me put a face to a country I had only envisioned politically and, of course, negatively. However, reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns has enabled me to humanize this country. In the midst of all the turmoil in Afghanistan, there is still living…and loving…just as in any other country.

(By Lee L. Peoples)

After reading Paulina Porizkova’s novel, A Model Summer , I find it difficult to enjoy, as I previously did, the innocent-looking faces of the young models I encounter in the magazines and elsewhere; for fiction as we very well know is based on fact, and I shudder at the fact that to become a top model, young people often endure terrible trials and temptations.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

Trapped Inside the Story is so good I predict a best seller! Written by Leslie Cohen, it is the biography of Holocaust survivor Naomi Kalsky, born Sonya Hebenstreit..

Only with the help of the muse could the author pull off this manipulation of point of view from first person, with Calliope, the heroine, and later, Cal, the hero, as narrator, to third person omniscient: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel of survival in post-apocalyptic America. The world as it was no longer exists. Black ash years later continue to rain down on everything. There are no specifics as to what actually happened to cause this apocalypse, but the few clues the author gives us suggest a nuclear bomb: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions … A dull rose glow in the windowglass” (52). A father and his young son, survivors, are traveling “the road” from their home in the north in expectation of reaching the south, where they expect to survive the winter.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

Having always thought of Sidney Poitier as a gifted consummate actor, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the trials he went through to become that way. A current Oprah’s pick, his memoir, The Measure of a Man , is the story of how a young man with so limited advantages and resources rises to become the consummate actor. Among his many awards for his performances both on stage and in the movies he received the Academy Award in 1964 for best actor in Lilies of the Field.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

“Dr. William Hablitzel, a practicing physician and medical educator, shares stories of inspiration from his patients’ lives. He balances details of the medical world with more humanistic elements–the importance of friends and family, staying in the moment, and giving of one’s self.”

(Reviewed By Lee Lemon Peopl

Stacey Phillips’s book is not just for couples contemplating divorce. It is beneficial for anyone in a relationship, for heeding her advice can in many cases avoid that dreaded breakup. Taking a good look at one’s interaction with his/her mate can definitely give insight into a better relationship.

(Reviewed By Lee Lemon