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Margo's Picks
By MARGO HAMMOND
Published September 18, 2005
1. Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel
A laugh-out-loud coming-of-age memoir. At 28, Dwight B. Wilmerding travels to Ecuador to cure the malady of his generation - chronic indecision - and ends up discovering the secret to life. Read this and you'll know it, too.
2. Three Horses by Erri de Luca
Who can resist a novel that begins, "I only read used books"? Narrated by a 50-year-old man who flees to Italy to try to forget the sorrows of his past in Argentina, this gem of a novel - it's only 124 pages long - is a parable about how the world can heal us after we suffer a great loss.
3. Good Poems for Hard Times, collected by Garrison Keillor
When the host of A Prairie Home Companion compiled this collection of unstuffy but consoling verses, a follow-up to his bestselling Good Poems, he had no idea how much we would be needing it. As Ted Berrigan puts it in Last Poem: "Love, & work,/Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source/Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief."
FLORIDA FAVORITE: Frolicking Bears, Wet Vultures & Other Oddities: A New York City Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Florida by Jerald T. Milanich
From 1873-1893, a New York journalist using the name Ziska came to Florida to write about the rascals and racists, sea turtles and music-loving cows he found here. Archaeologist Milanich has unearthed his observations and tracked down who he was: Amos Jay Cummings, a precursor Carl Hiaasen who looked behind the facade of Florida tourist brochures and found the real thing.
[Last modified September 17, 2005, 08:50:03]
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