Reviewing, Coping, Healing and Hoping: Four Micah Authors Featured at Annual Book Fair

Books pile up on bedside tables and next to favorite armchairs until many of us want to shout: "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."

And that is the title of Micah member Maureen Corrigan's delightful memoir of her life as a book reviewer for National Public Radio and the Washington Post.

Corrigan is one of four Micah authors who will discuss their work at Friday evening services in the weeks leading up to the annual Micah Book Fair at Politics & Prose Nov. 18. The temple will receive 20 percent of the price of books bought at P&P that Sunday by those who present Micah Book Fair coupons at the register.

Claire B. Rubin will lead off the Shabbat series on Oct. 19 with a discussion of how American communities have coped with disasters. A consultant on disaster research, Rubin was editor of Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900-2005. Her book covers more than a century of American responses to disasters starting with the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and culminating with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Corrigan, author of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, will speak Oct. 26 about her experiences as a reviewer for the NPR program "Fresh Air"--and what it's like to receive about 50 new books a week. She describes herself as an "obsessive reader."

Alan M. and Deborah A. Kraut will appear Nov. 9 to discuss their book, Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America. A professor of history at American University, Alan Kraut told the university newspaper that first Catholics and then Jews began establishing hospitals to make sure poor immigrants were treated with respect for their religious beliefs.

"Catholics began building hospitals to fend off deathbed conversions by Protestants," he told the newspaper, American Weekly. "For Jews, the issue was kosher food and access to rabbis."

On Nov. 16, Richard C. Harwood will discuss his book, Hope Unraveled: The People's Retreat and Our Way Back, in which he argues that in recent years Americans have retreated from public life because they don't see themselves reflected in the political debate.

The founder and president of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, Harwood recently posted what he called "a plea" on his blog.

"Simply put, my wish is for each of us to make room to remember where we came from, why that is important to us and how we seek to engage those around us," he wrote.

"I read for a living," wrote Corrigan, who, along with being a reviewer, is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She admits that being a book reviewer often requires slogging through bad books.

"But there's always another, possibly better book on the horizon that I'm curious about," she says, "another world to lose myself in."
[By Don Rothberg; from October 2007 Vine]