.... "death turns all men into great lovers. Would that they were equally ardent while the lady was still alive!

But he is an Italian," was Umberto's sensible reply. "He doesn't care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you?...principessa?" I looked down at my flip-flops. "I guess I'm toast.

Perhaps. But the firstborn of hope is tragedy.

There is a trick to flying. The angels told me." He had smiled at my wide-eyed awe. "You need to forget everything you know as a human being. When you are human, you discover that there is great power in hating the earth. And it can almost make you fly. But it never will." I had frowned, not quite understanding him. "So, what's the trick?" "Love the sky.

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

The Amazons is a stupendous achievement--a long-anticipated centerpiece in the great puzzle of humankind. The story of these forbidden women, silenced for so long by the rigidity of traditional scholarship, is as exciting and surprising as a bestselling murder mystery; I simply couldn't put it down. Through scholarly brilliance and passion, Adrienne Mayor has opened the door to a forgotten world of gender equality, and her book ought to be required reading in every college history course.

Who is more amateurish, more vulnerable---those who rely on machines that need to be plugged in, or logged on, or in some other way connected in order to be more than a useless slab of plastic ... or those who have learned to master life without?