After college, Jason Hardy finds himself selling watches at J.C. Penney’s. Totally unsuited for the job he decides to try his hand at being a Probation and Parole Officer in one of America’s toughest cities, New Orleans. Coming on board just when criminal justice is taking a hard look at methods and trying to keep people out of prisons, Jason is confronted with helping people immersed in poverty, drug addiction, gangs and violence with very few resources. An amazing look inside a part of the justice system that is rarely talked about and the benefits of “social supervision.”
The title is based on a Dolly Parton song, and the lives of the characters in Holding on to Nothing are steeped in East Tennessee bluegrass along with alcoholism and tragedy. The only way out for our heroine, Lucy Kilgore, is to leave town and try for a better life and higher education in the big town of Knoxville, Tennessee - but things get in the way of her plans. This beautiful and haunting story will stay with you for a while.
The Metropolitain Museum of Art in NYC is the setting for Metropolitan Stories, and after working there for twenty five years, Christine Coulson knows every underground tunnel and upstairs corridor. She is familiar with the staff cafeteria gossip. She knows the curators, the guards, the wealthy donors, the fundraisers. The result is this slim collection of wonderfully imaginative essays and fables about the Met, where in some cases the art itself is personified. It’s so witty and clever and I doubt you’ll never look at a museum quite the same way again.
