Dick Martin is perfectly at home recounting his childhood and family escapades, many of which would curl the hair of a daredevil. Yet, he is equally adept reporting the hope for the future he finds in the students he has mentored over a long career as a teacher. He is a wide-ranging and trenchant columnist whose observations run the gamut of life's experiences, and he is as skilled at writing with humor as he is with pathos. His subject is the world around him and his place in it, and he treats it with versatility and ample measures of irony and wonder. - Laurence J. Sasso, Jr., publisher...