HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW: The backdrop of Joseph Jay Deiss and Susanna Deiss' delightful historical novel Justa may be familiar to most readers: the city of Herculaneum, doomed to be buried under molten lava at the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. Excavations are ongoing in a small fraction of what was once a sprawling, bustling city, and like similar works at Pompeii, those excavations have yielded tantalizing clues about the lives of the ordinary people who were trapped and killed there two thousand years ago. One such story involves a young woman named Justa whose mother was a freed...

"RENOIR: The Magic of Childhood" is an unusual introduction to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's art. Thematically centered on Renoir's family and friends, many of the illustrations portray children. Selected to appeal to the young reader, they offer an intimate glimpse into the life of this extraordinary man. Renoir was one of the founders of the Impressionist movement that developed in France in the latter half of the 19th century. The impressionists introduced a radical style of painting that used short strokes and dabs of paint to convey the changing quality of light. Renoir's art conveys his...

Claude Monet's painting "Impression, Sunrise," first exhibited in 1874, established him as the leader of the Impressionist movement in France. The innovative style of Monet and the other Impressionist painters (including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Camille Pissarro) broke from past traditions of figurative painting. Impressionists used short brushstrokes and juxtaposed color and light in new ways that captured fleeting moments, or impressions, of a scene. "Impressions of Monet" introduces young readers to the everyday details of the painter's life and...

In 1959, I traveled to Lipari, one of the Aeolean Islands off the coast of Sicily. Now, long afterward, looking back into the past, events obscured by the passage of time are magnified as though viewed through the lens of a magic lantern; that summer, when I was just bursting into womanhood, is illuminated in my memory as a time of enchantment.