All We Need Are Freinds

A Widows Pursuit of Happiness

Dream Walking in Jan's Memorial Garden

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 5 seconds
All We Need Are Freinds

Patty, Jan, and I are sitting on one of My Wife’s Benches!

On the morning of July 4, 2023, while taking a walk, I pondered what would have happened if one word in the Declaration of Independence had been different. Specifically, the sentence “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Although it may seem strange, starting my walk thinking about inalienable rights, it made sense. Things could have turned out differently if everyone had equal rights and opportunities throughout history. Though I am saddened by the loss of Jan, I am grateful for my freedom and try to live life to the fullest. As a widow, finding happiness without our loved ones can be difficult. However, a fortuitous encounter with a couple on my route may have given me some insight.

While walking around Hanson Park and along the Rahway River, I saw a couple sitting on Jan’s memorial bench. They looked familiar, so I slowed down and greeted them with a cheerful “Have a happy day!” The woman was drawing a beautiful stained-glass design, and I couldn’t help but stop and compliment her work. We chatted about how lovely the park had become, and they expressed their admiration for the garden and wind sculpture. They even thought we might have met at a park fundraiser before. As we continued talking, I mentioned they were sitting on one of Jan’s memorial benches and pointed it out to them. Seeing their smiles as they read the inscription on the bench warmed my soul.

Finding joy in helping others has always been a fulfilling experience for me. Today, I had the opportunity to brighten someone’s day, which made my heart swell with gratitude. As I walked away from Jan’s memorial, I reflected on the effort to create it and was reminded to appreciate each moment of my life.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Jan’s Memorial Garden

Working with the Hanson Park Conservancy, we have taken significant steps in building Jan's Memorial Triangle Garden at Hanson Park including installing the Wind Sculpture.

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All We Need Are Freinds
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Interpreter of Maladies

Read: June 2022

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Interpreter of Maladies

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is an incredible book. Each short story is a page-turner that I will re-read many times. As Ms. Lahiri writes, “The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children.”

Since 2000, Interpreter of Maladies has been on my reading list. For what is a writer, if not an interpreter of maladies? Perhaps, I waited until now so that I would have grief to help guide me thru this collection of short stories. I highly recommend Interpreter of Maladies.

The Goodreads summary provides a concise overview.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth. At the same time, their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.


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The Fire and the Ore

Read: September 2022

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The Fire and the Ore

by Olivia Hawker

The Fire and the Ore by Olivia Hawker is a novel set in 1856 when three women—once strangers—come together in unpredictable Utah Territory. Hopeful, desperate, and willful, they’ll allow nothing on earth or Heaven to stand in their way. I have always enjoyed the history of the movement of people across the plains. Tamar, Jane, and Tabitha, along with their shared husband, Thomas Ricks, were real people, and Olivia Hawker compellingly describes them as people living in difficult times.

Olivia Hawker is a descendant of Jane and a former Mormon. She writes eloquently about the unnecessary Utah War (AKA Buchanan’s Blunder) and how the sister-wives grow to love and support each other. Tamar’s sister Patience, although a minor character, wrote a memoir of the time that the author used as a resource.

Reading a compelling historical fiction novel about family, sisterhood, and survival about three women like Jan was an easy choice. It was a page-turner from the first page to the last.

The Washington Post bestselling author of One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow is a compelling novel of family, sisterhood, and survival.

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,

Following the call of their newfound Mormon faith, Tamar Loader and her family weather a brutal pilgrimage from England to Utah, where Tamar is united with her destined husband, Thomas Ricks. Clinging to a promise for the future, she abides a surprise: Thomas is already wedded to one woman—Tabitha, a local healer—and betrothed to another.

Orphaned by tragedy and stranded in the Salt Lake Valley, Jane Shupe struggles to provide for herself and her younger sister. Out of necessity, with no love lost, she too must bear the trials of a sister-wife. She is no member of the Mormon migration, yet Jane agrees to marry Thomas.

But when the US Army’s invasion brings the rebellious Mormon community to heel, Tamar, Jane, and Tabitha are forced to retreat into the hostile desert wilderness with little in common but the same man—and the resolve to keep themselves and their children alive. What they discover, as one, is redemption, a new definition of family, and a bond stronger than matrimony that is tested like never before.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

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1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History

Read: October 2019

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1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History

by Jay Winik

1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History by Jay Winik is a book that I had put off reading several times. When I finally did read it, I could not remember why I had not read it sooner. Had I gone to graduate school and become a professor, it might have been the type of book I might write, and I certainly would have had on my list of books for my classes. 

As The NY Times wrote, “Jay Winik brings to life in gripping detail the year 1944, which determined the outcome of World War II and put more pressure than any other on an ailing yet determined President Roosevelt.” Reading a book about events five years before my birth that transformed the world I live in becomes an easy page-turner.

It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did or that it would even end well. Nineteen forty-four was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler’s waning power. Instead it saved those democracies – but with a fateful cost. Now, in a superbly told story, Jay Winik, the acclaimed author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval, captures the epic images and extraordinary history as never before.

1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris, and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history, the Final Solution. Just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis were accelerating the killing of millions of European Jews.

Winik shows how escalating pressures fell on an all but dying Roosevelt, whose rapidly deteriorating health was a closely guarded secret. Here then, as with D-Day, was a momentous decision for the president. Was winning the war the best way to rescue the Jews? Was a rescue even possible? Or would it get in the way of defeating Hitler? In a year when even the most audacious undertakings were within the world’s reach, including the liberation of Europe, one challenge – saving Europe’s Jews – seemed to remain beyond Roosevelt’s grasp.

I recommend this book.

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An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder

Read: February 2023

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An Assassin in Utopia

by Susan Wels

An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder by Susan Wels is a true crime odyssey that explores a forgotten, astonishing chapter of American history, leading the reader from a free-love community in upstate New York to the shocking assassination of President James Garfield. I had read about this historical period in several other books, most recently Civil War by Other Means.

Susan Wels has written an excellent historical overview of a period we often overlook. I highly recommend An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder.

The Oneida Community, even though it was the most successful utopian community, is often overlooked. Ms. Wels connects the dots and places the experiment in the center of a transitional period. It is not merely the connection between Charles Julius Guitea and his assassination of President James Garfield, albeit a brutal crime, that shook America to its core, but all of the other linkages. These include “John Humphrey Noyes; his idol, the eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley (founder of the New Yorker and the New York Tribune).”

She also resurrects the importance of the Wormely Compromise and the African-American family that was an instrumental part of public society.

I have found fiction to be something I enjoy, but I knew it was time for a non-fiction book to balance my reading. The New York Times and other publications highly rated An Assassin in Utopia.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden.

Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts. The men and women of this strange outpost worked and slept together—without sin, they claimed.

From 1848 to 1881, a small utopian colony in upstate New York—the Oneida Community—was known for its shocking sexual practices, from open marriage and free love to the sexual training of young boys by older women. And in 1881, a one-time member of the Oneida Community—Charles Julius Guiteau—assassinated President James Garfield in a brutal crime that shook America to its core.

An Assassin in Utopia is the first book that weaves together these explosive stories in a tale of utopian experiments, political machinations, and murder. This deeply researched narrative—by bestselling author Susan Wels—tells the true, interlocking stories of the Oneida Community and its radical founder, John Humphrey Noyes; his idol, the eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley (founder of the New Yorker and the New York Tribune); and the gloomy, indecisive President James Garfield—who was assassinated after his first six months in office.

Juxtaposed to their stories is the odd tale of Garfield’s assassin, the demented Charles Julius Guiteau, who was connected to all of them in extraordinary, surprising ways.

Against a vivid backdrop of ambition, hucksterism, epidemics, and spectacle, the book’s interwoven stories fuse together in the climactic murder of President Garfield in 1881—at the same time as the Oneida Community collapsed.

Colorful and compelling, An Assassin in Utopia is a page-turning odyssey through America’s nineteenth-century cultural and political landscape.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.



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Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy

Read: November 2022

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Civil War by Other Means

by Jeremi Suri

Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri is the perfect book to help us understand our failures at creating a multi-racial democracy in the nineteenth century and how this has weakened and divided our nation. Jeremi Suri chronicles the events after the civil war, from Lincoln’s assassination to Garfield’s, and how they were a continuation of the war by other means.

I purchased a signed copy and watched a video presentation by Dr. Suri due to my membership at One Day University. Civil War by Other Means is a vivid and unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. 

I highly recommend Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri.

In addition, the documentary, on Apple TV+, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power is a companion piece that illustrates the continued failure to create a multi-racial democracy. Jeremi Suri makes a convincing case that the eternal struggle for democracy continues in our time.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before.

In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point.

What emerges is a vivid and, at times, unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.



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Lone Women

Read: March 2023

Lone Women: A Novel

by Victor LaValle

As an amateur historian, I have always enjoyed historical fiction, especially when It helps us redefine the past to be more accurate. Lone Women: A Novel by Victor LaValle is a haunting new vision of the American West from the award-winning author of The Changeling. Blue skies, empty land—and enough room to hide away a horrifying secret. Or is there? I recommend this book.

When I began reading this novel, I was unsure where it was going or what might be hidden in the steamer trunk. I was unaware of this story and found this book a well-written account of forgotten history that must be told and shared with all readers. Stay the course as Lone Women: A Novel reveals the secrets in the Trunk and the fantastic story of lone women who lived in and prospered in the old West.

Lone Women is the twenty-fifth book I have read in 2023. Although I have surpassed my reading goal, I will continue to read.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear…

The year is 1914, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can cultivate it—except Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing keeping her alive.

Told in Victor LaValle’s signature style, blending historical fiction, shimmering prose, and inventive horror, Lone Women is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—and a portrait of early twentieth-century America as you’ve never seen.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.



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