Recommendations for Summer Reading
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Though it was a long time coming, warm temperatures and summer days are finally here. With the kids gone -- or at least at camp for the day -- and calendars cleared of commitments and meetings, there's finally time to catch up on your reading. What to read? We turned to Elizabeth Bermel, Director of the Scarsdale Library, for her list of what Scarsdale is reading – and also threw in a few books on our list of favorites.
Here are a few suggestions – and if you have books to share, please tell us about them in the comments section below.
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
If you like Kate Atking's #1 bestseller Life After Life, pick up A God in Ruins, that re-examines the lives of some of the characters in the earlier book.
Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances and the power of choices, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century over and over again.
A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th Century through Ursula's beloved younger brother Teddy--would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather-as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have.
"He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future."
An ingenious and moving exploration of one ordinary man's path through extraordinary times, A God in Ruins proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age.
The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant
From the "New York Times" bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night, comes an unforgettable novel about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century.
Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.
Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her "How did you get to be the woman you are today." She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naive girl she was and a wicked sense of humor.
Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Anita Diamant's previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman's complicated life in twentieth century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world.
For those who prefer to listen rather than read, the audio version is narrated by actress Linda Lavin.
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir By Wednesday Martin
When anthropologist Wednesday Martin suggested that the wives of Manhattan's most successful men get their own annual "Wife Bonus," she created a stir. Do these wives really receive a paycheck for serving as the spouse to their successful man? Here's the book that looks behind the doormen on the Upper East Side and tells the real story of marriage for the one percent in 2015.
Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe.
After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected.
Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want--safety, happiness, and success--and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are.
Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world--the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood.
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." ...This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.
Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish."
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.
The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.
Ferrante is the author of three previous works of critically acclaimed fiction: The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter. With this novel, the first in a trilogy, she proves herself to be one of Italy's great storytellers. She has given her readers a masterfully plotted page-turner, abundant and generous in its narrative details and characterizations, that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight her many fans and win new readers to her fiction.
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer:
From the "New York Times" bestselling, award-winning author of The Dive From Clausen's Pier, a sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades.
Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems compelling and answerable, and they marry and have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, at a time when women chafed at the conventions imposed on them. She finds salvation in art, but the cost is high.
Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family's future. One by one, the siblings take turns telling the story--Robert, a doctor like their father; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; Ryan, a schoolteacher; and James, the malcontent, the problem child, the only one who hasn't settled down--their narratives interwoven with portraits of the family at crucial points in their history.
Reviewers have praised Ann Packer's "brilliant ear for character" ("The New York Times Book Review"), her "naturalist's vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented" ("The New Yorker"), and the "utterly lifelike quality of her book's everyday detail" ("The New York Times"). Her talents are on dazzling display in "The Children's Crusade," an extraordinary study in character, a rare and wise examination of the legacy of early life on adult children attempting to create successful families and identities of their own. This is Ann Packer's most deeply affecting book yet.
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarity
Finally available in paperback the #1 "New York Times" bestseller from the Australian author of Big Little Lies and What Alice Forgot. At the heart of The Husband s Secret is a letter that is not meant to be read... "My darling Cecilia, If you re reading this, then I've died..."
Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret something with the potential to destroy not only the life you have built together, but the lives of others as well. And then imagine that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive.
Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all she s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything and not just for her. There are other women who barely know Cecilia or each other but they, too, are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband's secret.
See more great book selections on the Scarsdale Library website.
Books and Volunteers Wanted for the 2015 Friends of the Scarsdale Library Book Sale
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Volunteers are needed to help sort and organize books for the Friends of the Scarsdale Library Book Sale, to be held in September. Librarian Kathy Steves will hold two training sessions for all interested in volunteering to help sort, plan and organize book donations. Both training session will be on Thursday July 9th – at 10 am and at 7:30 pm.
Bring in your books to sell. The Friends of the Scarsdale Library is accepting lightly used books on or after Monday, July 6th for its annual book sale September. Donations will be accepted through Friday, August 28, and should be left inside the gray door to the side of the Scarsdale Library entrance, 54 Olmsted Road.
Books should be in saleable condition. Damaged, moldy or dog-chewed books cannot be accepted; nor will textbooks, encyclopedias, magazines or VCR tapes.
The event offers more than 60,000 almost-new and out-of-print books, including bestsellers, classics, biographies, fiction, parenting, cooking, art, graphic novels, humor self-help, drama, religion, philosophy, poetry, history, political science, and business. There is also a huge selection of children's books, plus DVDs, CDs, LPs, audiobooks and sheet music.
The sale will begin with a Members' Preview on Friday, September 11, from 6-9 pm. New members may join at the door that evening for $25. The sale will run daily through Sunday, September 20. A daily schedule is on the Friends' Annual Book Sale page at www.scarsdalelibrary.com.
With the help of a dedicated team of adult and teen volunteers, the Friends' Book Sale raised a record amount last year to support library programs and services.
Interested in volunteering to help make the Book Sale a success while setting your own hours? Contact the Library, 914-722-1300 or Kathy Steves, Book Sale Manager, by email or phone ([email protected] or 914-472-0611).
Edgemont High School Prom Photo Gallery
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Edgemont High School students were blessed with good weather for their prom on Friday June 12th at the VIP Club in New Rochelle. The events of the day started early, with some gathering at family homes for pictures, followed by a reception and send off at the school. Fashions were bright, with girls in colorful gowns and boys with vests and bowties to match their dates' attire. According to graduating senior Julie Miner, "Prom was awesome! I would say about 95% of the grade was there. Lots of dancing, pretty good food and a really great way to end the year and our time in Edgemont. It was definitely memorable!!"
Below find pictures from former Edgemont resident and photographer Mariela Melamed. See more here. And if you have prom photos you would like to add to our gallery, please email them to [email protected].
© Mariela Dujovne Melamed Photography
Marvin Rafeld Sentenced to Serve 3 to 9 years
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Former Scarsdale resident Marvin Rafeld was sentenced to three to nine years in jail on his 61st birthday, June 16, for stealing more than $2 million from his customers and vendors. Rafeld, who owned Wall Street Jewelers at 14 Wall Street for over twenty years appeared to be an honorable businessman until the terrorist attack on 9/11 caused a major downturn in his business. It seems that financial pressure got the best of him and he turned to defrauding trusted customers to stem his losses. In May, Rafeld pleaded guilty to six counts of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree and one count of Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree.
Rafeld lived on Walworth Avenue for years and drew many customers from Scarsdale. Tall, gregarious and handsome, he was a popular coach, a Director of Scarsdale Youth Basketball and volunteer firefighter. More recently, perhaps while he awaited trial, Rafeld was seen working as a busboy at the Larchmont restaurant Lusardi's.
On Tuesday June 16, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., announced that Rafeld would serve three to nine years in state prison. Vance said, "In addition to defrauding his customers and vendors out of approximately $2 million, the defendant also admitted to stealing priceless pieces of jewelry, such as wedding bands, from victims who entrusted him with precious family heirlooms," said District Attorney Vance. "For certain types of criminals, trust is capital—and in this case—the defendant leveraged the cachet of Wall Street and the customer confidence he cultivated over many years to steal from victims under the guise of legitimate business."
According to his guilty plea beginning in 2013 Rafeld convinced customers to pay large sums of money for jewelry that Rafeld never bought. Additionally, he stole jewelry provided to him by both vendors and customers. In some cases, he promised to pay his vendors for pieces post-receipt, and in other cases, he appropriated for himself certain sentimental pieces of jewelry that his customers entrusted to him for repair.
In one such case, reported to the Scarsdale Police in 2013 a Bell Road woman complained that Rafeld had not given her the proceeds from the sale of her diamond ring. She brought the ring to him in November 2013. The ring was originally appraised at $16,000 but he said he would sell it for $3,600. She did not hear from him for a few months and in April 2014 he told her that he had sold the ring but could not pay her as he had declared bankruptcy. He paid her $750 and said he would pay the balance but never responded to her requests for the balance.
In total, the district attorney says Rafeld stole approximately $2.3 million from more than 100 unsuspecting customers and 16 different jewelry vendors. He was convicted of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree, a class C felony, 6 counts and Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree, a class E felony, 1 count.
According to the Daily News, Rafeld, said, "There are no excuses for what I've done," Rafeld said. "I'm simply a coward who chose to give in to my misguided compulsion."
Scarsdale Couple Busted by the Special Narcotics Prosecutor
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A Scarsdale doctor and his wife have been arrested by the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York for conspiracy and illegal prescription sales during a six and half year period in which they sold over $77 million of painkillers. Moreover, a search of their home on Black Birch Lane yielded $600,000 in cash. If Scarsdale was surprised by the "pot" mom, imagine how Quaker Ridge neighbors feel about this foray into harder drugs and bigger time crime.
According to a press release from the prosecutor's office, Dr. Rogelio Lucas, age 77, and his wife Lydia Lucas, age 79, were arrested on the morning of June 9th outside their apartment at 215 West 95th Street in New York. The couple, who also owns a home at 15 Black Birch Lane in Scarsdale, were the subject of a long-term investigation. Prosecutors say that Dr. Lucas - who is a licensed internist - originally ran a regular medical practice where he treated elderly patients who were covered by Medicaid. But in 2009 he converted his business to a "a pill mill ...churning out tens of thousands of prescriptions for oxycodone in exchange for illegal cash payments."
Working out of his office at 215 West 101st Street Dr. Lucas wrote 45 to 50 prescriptions for oxycodone a day. Prosecutors say there was often a crowd in the waiting room, which prompted complaints from neighbors. Lucas relocated his office three times before landing at his current location.
The doctor allegedly wrote oxycodone prescriptions patients with no legitimate medical need for the pain medication. His wife Lydia assisted by collecting approximately $120 cash for each office visit. Since Jan. 2, 2009, the doctor wrote over 23,600 oxycodone prescriptions for approximately 3.1 million pills. The pills would have carried an estimated street value of $77 million on the black market.
In the course of the investigation, agents searched the Lucas' office, apartment in Manhattan and the home at 15 Black Birch Lane in Scarsdale. In Scarsdale, they discovered more than $600,000 in cash. They also seized medical and bank records.
For the year between June 2013 and July 2014, Dr. Lucas and his wife made approximately $500,000 in cash deposits into multiple bank accounts.
Lucas' business extended beyond the walls of his office to drug rings. Investigators 
believe multiple drug rings received oxycodone prescriptions from him. It is alleged that members of the drug ring recruited runners to visit the doctor's office and obtain prescriptions. These runners waited an hour or more to see the doctor, though some received preferential treatment and were moved to the head of the line. Though photo I.D. was required for patients, the doctor only performed "cursory examinations" and took no patient history. Investigators believe that the prescriptions received from the doctor were filled at pharmacies and the pills were turned over to the drug ring for distribution.
In a press release dated June 9, 2015, Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan said, "Dr. Lucas is charged with being one of the city's most prolific illegal prescribers of the black market's favorite pill - 30 mg oxycodone. Instead of healing, doctors who routinely sign orders for unneeded narcotic drugs endanger the health and welfare of the public. Corrupt doctors who exchange prescriptions for cash have stoked the epidemic of addiction gripping our region."
DEA Special Agent in Charge James J. Hunt stated, "When Dr. Lucas first opened his medical practice on the Upper West Side, residents embraced the thought of having a family doctor in the neighborhood. But when Dr. Lucas' illegal medical practices pushed residents out of his office, he replaced them with drug traffickers; exchanging medically unnecessary prescriptions for cash. Law enforcement at all levels continues to investigate and arrest those responsible for enabling the opioid addict population by distributing heroin or diverted prescription pills throughout our communities."
"This doctor allegedly abused his position as a medical professional, profiting from the sale of prescriptions while fueling the supply of a highly addictive painkiller that has led to numerous overdose deaths," said Police Commissioner William J. Bratton. "Thanks to the efforts of the investigators involved in this case and our law enforcement partners, this organization will no longer distribute these pills into our communities."
Doctor Lucas was indicted for conspiracy in the 4th degree, and 37 counts of Criminal Sale of a Prescription for a Controlled Substance for allegedly selling prescriptions for oxycodone, a powerful opioid painkiller in exchange for cash over the course of six and a half years. His wife Lydia Lucas is change with a count of Conspiracy in the 4th degree and 37 counts of Criminal Sale of a Prescription for a Controlled Substance.
The Lucases were arraigned in Manhattan Supreme Court before Justice Bonnie G. Wittner on Tuesday afternoon June 6th.The judge set bail at $1 million dollars and ordered the couple to turn in their passports.
The arrests are the result of a long-term investigation by the Special Narcotics Prosecutor's Prescription Drug Investigation Unit, the DEA New York Division's Tactical Diversion Squad (Group TDS-NY), the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and HRA. Assisting in the investigation were the New York State Health Department's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement (BNE), the Nassau County Police Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Group TDS-NY is comprised of agents and officers from the DEA, the NYPD, the Town of Orangetown Police Department and the Westchester County Police Department.
Though no pictures of the suspects were released, Erin Mulvey from the Drug Enforcement Agency forwarded the picture above of the cash seized from the Lucas home at 15 Black Birch Lane in Scarsdale.
