This remarkable book, A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Life Lessons From an Unlikely Teacher (Riverhead, $26.95), by Sue Halpern, writer and editor at The New York Review of Books, tells the story of how Halpern and her six-year-old dog, Pransky, become a therapy team at a county-run facility for the elderly near their home in Vermont. The writer, whose previous books have explored the brain’s connections to aging and memory, among other topics, frames this story through her experiences of the seven life virtues while she and Pransky form extraordinary relationships with residents at the home. Pransky is the star of this deeply touching and humane book, and it is through the dog that the author offers a provocative and brilliant examination of what really matters in life and how we might find grace, happiness, and humor while dealing with the real challenges of growing older.
William Seward received welcome attention from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her landmark study of Lincoln and the men he appointed to his cabinet, Team of Rivals. But decades after the last major biography of Seward, the one-time presidential aspirant and Secretary of State deserved another thorough examination, which Walter Stahr offers in Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (Simon & Schuster, $32.50). Stahr, who had a career in law and finance before turning full time to writing biographies (his first book was about another behind-the-scenes power, John Jay), unearthed a trove of documents that enabled him to challenge some of the conventional wisdom about Seward’s role in several of Lincoln’s most important decisions regarding treatment of the South during the Civil War—and more.
