A journalist for over thirty years, Lisa Napoli was among the pioneering team of reporters at the New York Times who covered the early days of the dot-com era. Her new book is Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Napoli's reply:
I’ve been obsessed lately with aging and ageism in our culture; like many of my age peers—I’m 53—I’m grappling with much-older relatives, far-away, ageism in the workplace, and general questions about how to grow old gracefully while imbuing our lives with meaning and purpose. So I’ve started a podcast with that title—Gracefully—and gravitate toward stories on those themes. When I saw a recentVisit Lisa Napoli's website.essay in The New Yorker by the 87-year old poet Donald Hall about his daily routine, I became intrigued, as I knew little about him. As I often do when I get excited about a subject, I requisitioned a number of books from the Los Angeles Public Library, right up the street from me. In addition to several volumes of his poetry, I’ve been immersed in the biography he wrote about his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, The Best Day The Worst Day. His recounting of her untimely decline due to leukemia is every bit as wrenching and illuminating as you’d imagine an accomplished man of letter’s articulation of love, lust, and grief might be.
--Marshal Zeringue
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