Oleander Girl is a coming of age novel in the best tradition, with a heroine who is both infuriating and endearing, and most importantly, brave.

There are lessons to be learned inside its pages but it is not a preachy story in any sense. It is simply a story of people faced with bad events, rising above them to carry on with the help of God's grace.

Now that Kelly Clarkson has called Clive Davis a liar and a bully, and revealed that she felt violated by his account of their relationship in his autobiography The Soundtrack of My Life, I thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of a man who worked under Clive.

This tragic coming-of-age story chronicles the parallel disintegrations of the world and the life and family of Julia, a sensitive 12-year-old girl living in a sleepy suburb of California.

In men there is something that is not well understood or accepted by the more gentle aspects of modern society. Few writers have captured the full-bodied compulsive pull of it as well as Deni Béchard does in Cures for Hunger.

Is this merely coincidence, or is there something else at work here? Do American writers absorb Bildungsroman aptitude alongside fluoridated water and...

This week time spun me around. I traveled back to South Jersey to work against Alzheimer's undignified rip across my mother's golden years. In ...