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 Patricia Fitzmaurice's new book The Blue Camaro is a memoir about raising, loving, and ultimately, losing her son. In 2013, her son John Fitzmaurice, Jr. took his own life. Now at age eighty-seven, Patricia is fulfilling her promise to her son to tell his story so that others might understand what it is like to lose a child to suicide and what his journey must have been like that it led him to that decision. The Blue Camaro offers no easy answers because there are none . To this day, Patricia still wonders what caused her son to kill himself. She documents in this book the story of John's childhood, including their family's many moves to various places from Pennsylvania to Connecticut to Florida, the birth of his sisters, his love for his dog, his difficulty in making friends, his entrepreneurial efforts from a young age, and how he saved up money to buy his first car: a Blue Camaro. The book's title reflects what may have been the happiest time in John's life. ...

 Fyodor Dostoyevsky's From The House of the Dead is not a novel, though its principal character, its narrator, the upper-class Goryanchikov , is probably the author, himself, masquerading. We do not know if the other inmates of the prison camp where the book is set are faithful descriptions of real people, but they certainly come across as such. If there is anything that lingers after reading this book, then it is the immediacy of its realism. Dostoevsky spent years in such a camp, in Siberia, of course, after surviving his own execution via a last minute reprieve which arrived, apparently, as his executioners as were ready to take aim. It was a bit of a wheeze and quite often used by the Russian royals and their system. Perhaps they were always late in the signing of such orders, since they were probably preoccupied with the counting of their serfs' earnings, or should I say the earnings from the serfs. One has to be careful to look after the welfare of one's subjects, af...