The case of Leo Frank—the Cornell-educated, Jewish supervisor of the Atlanta Pencil Factory who was convicted for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913 and lynched for the same in 1915—has been with me much as of late. In the last three weeks, I have reviewed Steve Oney’s And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Pantheon, 2003); attended another performance of Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical “Parade” (this time with my 13-year-old daughter); and shopped the Austin Jewish Book Fair where I bought a young adult book by Elaine Marie Alphin: An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank (CarolRhoda Books, 2010). Would that for every superb work of adult nonfiction (such as Mr. Oney’s), there were another equally compelling, young adult version (such as Ms. Alphin’s). Let’s face it: We can’t all invest the time to read the definitive work on every topic of interest. And the Dead Shall Rise is over 700 pages long. An Unspeakable Crime is only 152. If you want concise, yet substantial information on an important subject, look to the young adult section of your bookstore or library. You may even find, as I have, that reading the young adult version enhances your experience of the adult version. For instance, Alphin provides a timeline and a list of characters—something I had wished for while reading Oney. Most importantly, Alphin offers a trim storyline which is worth reading before the Oney…

The 29th Austin Jewish Book Fair was held October 28 through November 1 at the Dell Jewish Community Campus. It was a pleasure to sit with my “sistahs” again at the fair (Sisterhood members of Congregation Agudas Achim), but the contrast between last year and this was noticeable. Last year the fair opened with the book lover’s luncheon, and this year it closed with it, so at this year’s lunch the book shelves were relatively empty as earlier shoppers had already cleaned them out. I did, however, find enough selections in the children’s section for holiday gifts, including Jane Yolen and Mark Teague’s remake of their best-seller, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? Their new, equally charming title: How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah? How could I resist?   Two book fair events were cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Matti Friedman, author of The Aleppo Codex, and Harry Ostrer, author of Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, were unable to fly out of New York. Maggie Anton, author of the Rashi’s Daughters trilogy (somewhere between I.B. Singer’s Yentl and Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent), was the featured speaker for the book lover’s luncheon. She was able to attend as she was traveling from Los Angeles. Anton was promoting her latest release, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, described as a “novel of love, the Talmud, and sorcery in third-century Babylonia.” I’m sure it is a fine novel, but Anton was not a fine presenter. The take-away lesson from her talk was: How…

Author Melissa Fay Greene I had the pleasure of meeting Melissa Faye Greene at the Austin Jewish Book Fair in November. She was there to sign No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (Sarah Crichton Books, 2011) and to provide the opening address. No Biking is a memoir chronicling how she and her family of six (mom, dad, four kids) adopted five orphans from overseas—one Bulgarian-Romani and four Ethiopian—over a period of eight years. Gotta love this woman, gotta read her book. Smart, witty, warm—in person and in print. Greene is an award-winning journalist best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. NYU’s journalism department named Praying for Sheetrock one of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th Century. But at the lectern, she’s a poet-performer. She belongs on the Chauttauqua lecture circuit of yore, delighting audiences with her wisdom and charm. For Greene, writing in the first person was both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Clearly, she overcame these obstacles. But this memoir is no bildungsroman in that it’s not about her. It’s about her family—the decisions they made, the antics they performed, and the travails they passed through. Greene readily acknowledges the depression she slipped into and the seemingly insurmountable challenges presented by children whose starts in life were so tumultuous. With the clear-headedness that comes with her profession, she observes her surroundings, arms herself with information, weighs possible outcomes, and soldiers on. At the lectern, Greene is something of a…