Amy Reiter

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, Melissa Fay Greene’s new book about life with her nine children—four biological, five adopted—is a more revealing, richer book than its cutesy-parenting title might lead you to expect. In it, Greene, a two-time National Book Award finalist, recounts with warmth and humor how she and her criminal defense attorney husband, Donny, came to adopt first a 4-year-old Romani boy from an orphanage in Bulgaria, and then a daughter and three sons from Ethiopia, absorbing each into their upper-middle-class, Jewish, Atlanta home. “This book is the story of the creation of a family,” she writes. “It began in the usual way: a woman, a man, some babies. But then it took off in a modern direction, roping in a few older children from distant countries.” …

Review: “No Biking in the House Without a Helmet” (The Barnes and Noble Review)

On December 8, 2007, Roger Rosenblatt’s 38-year-old daughter, Amy, collapsed while running on her treadmill in her Bethesda, Maryland, home. The two eldest of her three children, ages 6, 4 and 1, were playing nearby and ran for help. Amy’s husband, a hand surgeon, rushed to her and performed CPR, but it was too late. Amy — mother, daughter, sister, friend, doctor — had died instantly of a heart defect she hadn’t known she had. What happened in the months following this unimaginable event, how a family reassembles itself after a devastating loss and moves on, is the subject of Rosenblatt’s spare, moving book Making Toast …

Review: “Making Toast” by Roger Rosenblatt (The Barnes & Noble Review)

As anyone who has ever devoured an episode of Top Chef knows, even if you can’t taste the food, cooking competitions can be a sensual feast to watch: the thrilling mix of colors and textures; the urgent rhythm of knife work and quiet fluidity of kitchen choreography; the mounting tension as empty plates and persnickety palates await; the pleasure of presentation — the imagined tastes and aromas — followed by the painfully attenuated moment of judgment. And then there are all of those riveting chef personalities …

In Brief: “Knives at Dawn” by Andrew Friedman (The Barnes & Noble Review)

At the tail end of the 1980s, shortly after I’d first arrived in New York, an earnest young grad student — straight and more or less straitlaced, all midwestern chirp — I took an administrative job at a midtown office in which the only other employees were two buff and beautiful gay men. AIDS was ravaging the city then. Classmates in my theater program were disappearing with heartbreaking regularity. It was a frightening, dangerous time. But there, in that office, gay New York seemed like one big, wild, raunchy, ridiculously fun party …

Review: “City Boy” by Edmund White (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Time and again, while reading Melanie Gideon’s sharply insightful “The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After,” I had the vaguely unsettling feeling that someone else had written the story of my own current life. No, it’s true, my husband is not prone to buying hulking, macho adventure vans on the Internet, as Gideon’s is, nor have I had to contend with the death of a beloved family dog or, to my knowledge, ever had Julia Child over to my home for dinner. But (I say, waving these plot points away with the back of my hand) these are mere technicalities. Gideon has cast a hook down through the amusing surface details of her own more-or-less happy modern middle-class family life and come up with deep truths about marriage, motherhood, aging, friendship and other things that occupy women who’ve confidently cruised past 40 — only to panic and weave as 50 looms large ahead …

Review: “The Slippery Year” by Melanie Gideon (The Barnes & Noble Review)