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…

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 July publication of Go Set a Watchman revealed Harper Lee changed point of view when she rewrote it as To Kill a Mockingbird. The new book is an unedited version and shows Harper Lee sloppily slip-sliding between first-person and third. The difference between a story narrated by Jean Louise Finch, a 26-year-old daughter, about her disillusionment in Atticus and small town bigotry, and the one narrated by a 6-year-old Scout is significant. To Kill a Mockingbird is written in third-person limited point of view. Scout tells the story of what happened in her Alabama hometown when a black man was falsely accused of raping a white woman and her father served as his defense attorney. The narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird is an adult, Jean Louise, who tells the story of what Scout witnessed as a child. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a manuscript, Pioneer Girl, published for the first time in December 2014 by the South Dakota Historical Society and edited by Pamela Smith Hill. This first-person account of growing up with hardships and tragedies as white settlers didn’t find interest from a publisher. It did, however, inspire 11 novels and multiple short stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. An editor and successful Bobbs-Merrill author, Rose suggested ‘Mama Bess’ (the nickname she called her mother) consider fictionalizing the stories for the juvenile market. Wilder revised and based her first novel, Little House in the Big Woods, on Pioneer Girl. Developmental editing of Wilder’s…