While we refer to a few books in the discussion that follows, this discussion with my dear old friend Albert Lerman is primarily about his experience as an 18 year old infantryman in World War II.

And when I say old friend, I really mean it. Albert turned 100 earlier this year and Albert’s son Bill, a dear and old friend as well, suggested that it would be timely to have this discussion. Albert was a grunt in the Army, an infantryman, tough, resilient, essential, the backbone of the army, and part of The Greatest Generation.

Carol and I have known and loved Albert for more than 50 years, and he's exemplified The Greatest Generation his entire life. I’m so pleased to have had this discussion with Albert and Bill.

(U.S. forces met allied Russian forces at the Elbe River in Germany on April 25, 1945, effectively splitting Nazi Germany in half and symbolizing the imminent end to the war. In the picture above, Albert is the grunt with the cigarette in his mouth greeting Russian soldiers at the Elbe.)

Albert discusses the drafting of the entire freshman and sophomore classes from Penn into the Army gearing up to fight the war; the hell of war for the soldiers (“you know, the guy beside you, all of a sudden, he ain’t alive anymore. That’s tough. That’s tough”), including the misery of living in foxholes, and for the German civilians as well (“absolutely, war is hell for them too, the people that we flushed out of these houses were women and children“); his war injuries; the historic meeting of U.S. and allied Russian forces at the Elbe River; the preference of the Germans to surrender to American forces (“they were deathly afraid of the Russians”); his extended honeymoon with Evelyn after the war; and his hope for the U.S. to avoid war in the future.

My 2018 discussion with Evelyn, who we all loved beyond measure - Tell Me What You’re Reading No. 32: Evelyn Lerman - Ev's tribute to her Mom, and my tribute to Ev - can be found on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Books referred to in my discussion with Albert.

D-Day, June 9, 1944, by Stephen Ambrose

The Greatest Generation, by Tom Brokaw

When Time Stopped, A Memoir of my Father’s War and What Remains, by Ariana Neumann

Some of the other WWII books I’ve read.

Roosevelt the Soldier of Freedom, by James MacGregor Burns

No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Eleanor and Franklin, by Joseph P Lash

Roosevelt and Hopkins, by Robert E Sherwood

Leadership in Turbulent Times, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Five Days in London, May 1940, by John Lucas
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts

The Last Lion, by William Manchester

The Conquerors, by Michael Beschloss

From the Crash to the Blitz 1929 1939, by Cabel Phillips

In the Garden of Beasts, by Eric Larson

Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer

The Brass Ring,by Bill Mauldin

Unbroken, A World War II Story, by Laura Hillenbrand

Hiroshima, by John Hersey

Truman, by David McCullough

The Winds of War, by Herman Wouk

War and Remembrance, by Herman Wouk

#WWII #Veterans #104th Infantry #First Army #First Canadian Army #The Big Red One - The First Infantry Division #General Patton - The Third Army #Terrible Terry Allen.

My interview on October 24, 2025, of storyteller Martha Frankel, a memoirist, essayist, celebrity profiler, book editor and reviewer, and founder and producer of Woodstock’s Bookfests and Story Slams. A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on November 7, 2025, in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken, and Woodstock, New York. The full text of the interview can be found on my website, and the interview can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else you listen to podcasts. (Photo Credit: Dion Ogust)

Writers of the Catskills: In Conversation with Elizabeth Lesser

A series of self-portraits by Catskills’ literary voices

My interview on August 15, 2025, of Elizabeth Lesser, New York Times bestselling author and the co-founder of Omega Institute, the renowned conference and retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York.

A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on October 17, 2025, in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken and Woodstock, New York. The full text of the interview can be found on my website, and the interview can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Susan Brown is a professional editor, writing coach, and book doctor. She’s had forty years of teaching college creative writing and book editing, and has guided dozens of books into print as an editor, and as a writing coach.

My friend Jeff Moran in Woodstock had previously mentioned Susan to me, and so I was intrigued when I heard that Susan was going to run a five week online writing workshop called “The Secrets of the Great Writers”.

Jeff had told me that Susan was a James Joyce scholar. That was a little bit intimidating, but also immediately credentializing. I’ve appreciated a number of books on writing, by Stephen King, George Saunders, Anne Lamotte, Mary Karr and others, and thought it might also be instructive, and interesting, to be part of a writing workshop, so I signed up for Susan’s class.

I learned a lot in the workshop, we had a terrific group of very talented fiction and memoir writers in the class, and it was a lot of fun. ​

One of the dozens of sources Susan identified for us during the workshop was a book called Hit Lit - Cracking the Code of the 20th Century’s Biggest Bestsellers, by James Hall. In his book, Hall identifies the features common to the biggest bestsellers of all time.

Susan and I discussed her Secrets of the Great Writers Workshop. Susan actually conducted an abbreviated Workshop on the Air. We discussed Hall’s Hit Lit and we discussed Ulysses.

We discussed storytelling. I loved this discussion.

The books examined in Hit-Lit, many of which are referred to in our discussion.

1. Gone with the Wind*
2. Peyton Place
3. To Kill a Mockingbird*
4. Valley of the Dolls
5. The Godfather*
6. The Exorcist
7. Jaws
8. The Dead Zone
9. The Hunt for Red October*
10. The Firm*
11. The Bridges of Madison County; and
12. The Da Vinci Code*

*I’ve read these.

Some of the other books referred to by Susan:

Moby Dick

The Scarlet Letter

The Lighthouse

Sound and the Fury

The Lincoln Lawyer

Black Cherry Blues

Gone Baby Gone

Pride and Prejudice

Let the Great World Spin

Madame Bovary

The Glass Castle

Angela’s Ashes

Wild

Catcher in the Rye

Lolita

Ulysses

I encouraged Susan to run a class guiding us through Ulysses!

I had a delightful discussion with Hank Neimark, one of the Directors and Eric Hefler, who plays Falstaff, in The Bird-On-A-Ciff’s Woodstock Shakespeare Festival production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, Shakespeare’s light heartened, and raucous, comedy, truly a farce, which focuses on middle class domestic issues and the agency of its female characters.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare’s only contemporaneous play, and features two very clever and able women who turn the tables on the bumptious, raucous, drunken rogue and scoundrel, womanizing, egotistical, deceitful, epicure and glutton, the fragile and fearful, morbidly obese and impoverished knight, Sir John Falstaff.

“Tell Me What You’re Reading” wherever you listen to podcasts. #Shakespeare #Bird-On-A-CliffTheatreCompany #WoodstockShakespeareFestival #communitytheater #summerstock #woodstock #bookwormsinthewild

Jenni Knight, an artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony (Bard MFA grad with a background in sculpture, drawing, painting and working with New York City experimental culture institutions, and currently writing about bodily integrity), discusses Autoportrait by Édouard Levé, 112 pages of mostly unconnected sentences, profound and mundane, serious and lighthearted, many irreverent, several entries referring to suicide, all in just one paragraph; a stream of consciousness exercise perhaps. Comic, unsettling, tragic.

Jeffrey Gurock is the author of a great new comprehensive biography of the premier voice of New York sports from the 1940s through the 1990s. The book is Marty Glickman, The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend. I loved the book and our podcast discussion.

It's a sweet, sweet, bittersweet biography. Romania, the Bronx and Brooklyn, the example set by Hank Greenberg and by Sandy Koufax, track and football in high school and college, quotas limiting the number of Jews in certain colleges, the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Jews who were precipitously excluded from the competition, American Nazis (truly, American Nazis), the great Jessie Owens, and a phenomenal sportscasting career for a gracious and generous gentleman. Really terrific.