Edith G. Tolchin

“When we first arrived in the United States, my father made me dictate everything I could remember about the years while we were apart.” These valuable notes form the basis for Janet Singer Applefi

“It was a magical place. Building such a grand train station without computer-aided design plans . . . or modern equipment, was difficult.”

“‘I was born to be a rocker chick, forever in blue jeans.’”

“When the sun quits, my heart starts ticking. . . . The night is what we live for.”

“by the time I was fourteen, the Taliban threatened to hurt me if I kept speaking out.”

“‘Barely had you arrived in this world that you had to leave it, sweetheart . . . Too precocious, too uncompromising, too talented.’”

“‘I grew up in an Italian family that, not unusually, put great import on food.’”

“Partly autobiographical, often funny, and entirely insightful from a cannabis-loving man who’s fully experienced every one of his 88 years, Willie Nelson’s Letters to America

“‘Don’t you have to be born with a voice?’ it was as if my mother had cast a spell on me that I spent a lifetime trying to break.”

“’Being an opera singer was fun, but the people on Bank Street, caring for and about each other, taught me what it means to be human.’”

“‘I have often said that my songs are my children and that I expect them to support me when I’m old. Well, I am old, and they are!’”

“Selling the Farm by Debra Di Blasi is a creative work for those who enjoy poetic prose in a familial memoir.”

“I felt as if I were in an enormous shadowy cavern, a void empty of anything or any sensation.”

“‘All I could think was, this can’t be right. Patsy’s too young to die.’”

“When the earth is cracking behind your feet and it feels like the whole world is going to swallow you up, you put one foot in front of the other and you keep going.

“‘I’d allowed myself to get to the stage where I shaved and wiped my arse and paid other people to do everything else for me. I had no idea how to work a washing machine.’”

“It smelled like a combination of mud and shit. But the fact that 400,000 people could be in an environment like that and generally be so euphoric is pretty extraordinary.“

“What you do in the darkness comes out in the light.”

 “‘I am a mother and a grandmother, a friend and a teacher, a wife and a sister.

“After more than forty years as the physician, I was about to be the patient.”

“My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”

The recent retake on A Star is Born, with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, got wonderful reviews.

Wouldn’t young people—and even old people—be interested in the real goings-on during presidential press conferences and world-wide travel?

By all appearances, the Bernsteins were a loving family.