Contributors
SirReadaLot has about six to twelve active anonymous reviewers at
any one time. Working with either our review editor or associate
editor, we encourage local members of the reading public to apply for
book review opportunities.
Want to write reviews for SRL?
We will provide you with a stylesheet that will give you an idea
of what we're looking for in a review and we will provide you with
complimentary copies of books on topics that you have a particular
interest in or knowledge about. Email:
sjones(at)SirReadaLot.org
Executive Team
Anna Washington is our managing editor. Anna’s background is in
education, teaching, training, and instructional design. Anna says
she particularly likes being privy to the “current intellectual buzz
swirling around in the hot air just slightly above eye level.”
See biography below. E-mail:
awashington(at)SirReadaLot.org or
washin2432(at)aol.com.
Savannah Jones is our Review Editor. She has worked in marketing for
nearly twenty years. Savvy has a general appetite for all things in
print and is a constant reader. She loves a good mystery and enjoys
the continuous whirl of literary discovery this job entails.
E-mail:
sjones(at)SirReadaLot.org or
sjones(at)aol.com .
Janet Lentz is our Administrator. She attempts
to keep the front office going and the books straight. E-mail:
jlentz(at)SirReadaLot.org
Paul Nagy is our emeritus editor. He brings over twenty-five years
of experience as a book reviewer and executive editor. Paul has an
M. Div. degree, and a spiritual friendship practice that kindles a
keen interest in religious studies and philosophy. E-mail:
pnagy(at)SirReadaLot.org
or
pnagy(at)mindspring.com.
Biographies
Bonnie Foster, R.N., Nursing, Psychology, Gerontology
Studies.
Foster, after receiving her undergraduate degree in
Psychology at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
(UNC-CH) in the ‘90s, worked for three years in a nursing home.
Enjoying working with the elderly, she subsequently went back to
school to get her Nursing degree, specializing in Gerontology. She
is now working in the nursing psychology field in the
Annapolis
area, having recently taken some time off to have a fourth child.
She and her husband, a copyright lawyer, somehow manage to
home-school their four sons by working alternating shifts. In her
spare time she devours arts and crafts books.
Mary Louise Hester, M.S., Education.
Hester earned a master’s degree in the communications
department at San Francisco State
University in the 1980s.
She has worked as a publicist and also taught new media in several
community colleges in California. Hester tends toward freelance
writing about pedagogy and educational theory. Hester loves romantic
novels, as she says, the sappier the better.
Savannah
(Savvy) Jones, M.Ed., Review Editor, Home & Garden.
Savannah Jones grew up in a small town in
North Carolina. Her mother was a
high-school, home-economics teacher and a cook in the old South
style, pork as a seasoning, fresh corn, butterbeans, snaps,
tomatoes, okra and salsify. Her father was an office manager and
frustrated farmer, gardener, boat builder and fisherman who was also
an outdoor chef specializing in chicken barbecue and Brunswick stew.
She and her sister spent one summer writing down the recipes of
their mother (and Daddy, too) and then experimenting to figure out –
what is 'a pinch and a handful,' anyway? Her favorite cookbook
(which her mother gave her for a wedding present) remains
The New Joy of Cooking.
She also was drawn to art – drawing and painting – as a
child and young adult, with a great interest in attention to fine
detail, probably due to myopia. Jones went to
Europe upon graduation (in Art History), and then came
back to get a Masters degree in education at UNC-CH.
Shortly after this time, Jones got into the
back-to-the-land movement and gardening herself. She graduated from
Southern cooking through her interest in different cultures and
tastes and traveling abroad. She has lived in Germany in
several different decades, as well as Italy, Greece, and Mexico. And
she’s traveled in
Spain,
France
and Yugoslavia.
In 2002 Jones spent three weeks in Bel Horizonte, Brazil, attending
a Feijoada party (beans with pork, greens, sort of like a midwinter
barbecue – you had to be there) and drinking Caipirinha (sort of
like a Margarita) laced with Cachaşa (the local hooch).
Now she’s interested in healthful and flavorful cooking and
the application of the new diet guidelines and fads – the
Mediterranean diet, the Asian diet, Volumetrics, as well as food as
art. And of course, all us Boomers are now into exercise, too – it
used to be low-impact aerobics, but the new concept is
'strengthening the core.' Let’s gaze at our navels and live forever!
Research Question: Jones wants to know: if you knew you
were going to be stranded on a desert island and could have with you
only three foods, what would they be? Her current choices are corn,
tomatoes and fish (actually beef, but we’re trying to be realistic
and healthy here).
Janet K. Lentz, Administrator.
Janet Lentz is the Office Administrator at SirReadaLot.org.
With a degree in Business Administration from
Western
Carolina
University, she is an organizational
mastermind, as she attempts to keep the front office going and the
books straight. FrontPage, PowerPoint, Quicken and Excel are among
her trademark areas of expertise. On a cold winter evening, she
enjoys a good mystery-romance.
Ruth Toby Singer (née Kleinbaum), M.P.P., Policy Studies,
Parenting, and Families.
Singer
received her undergraduate degree in Anthropology from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991. She also
studied German and completed her junior year abroad in Tübingen.
After spending a year traveling and working in various
public service jobs around the country, Singer went to graduate
school and received her Master’s degree in Public Policy at the
University of Chicago in 1994. She stayed in Chicago, working for
the National Opinion Research Center and later the Research Triangle
Institute (at its Chicago office), where she directed social science
research studies and developed an expertise in survey design.
Singer is currently a stay-at-home mother with two young
daughters. As a Board Member of the Edgebrook School Foundation and
Edgebrook Park Advisory Council, she is actively involved in her
local school and community. Her husband is a project manager
for the City of Chicago. Singer enjoys reading memoirs, other types
of non-fiction, and children’s books.
Henry S. Mitchell, Sociology, Computers and the Internet,
Self-Help.
Mitchell got his degree in Social Work in 1983 at the University of Chicago.
He came to North Carolina
in the ‘90s following his wife, from whom he was divorced, to be
near his daughter. In the ‘80s, when computers were taking over the
work world, Mitchell changed his focus from social work to web
development and started training for his career shift and
freelancing. He now runs his own business working as a website
designer and computer troubleshooter.
Mitchell also enjoys coaching recreation league sports and
follows sports, ALL sports.
William D. Monday, M. S., Health and Fitness,
Entrepreneurship.
With a master’s degree in Recreational Sports from East Carolina
University, Monday has an
abiding interest in all things athletic. A physical fitness
teacher and trainer, Monday likes to keep abreast of sports medicine
and psychology. Monday lives in
Cary, North Carolina and runs his own business.
Paul Nagy, M. Div., Founding and Emeritus Editor,
Philosophy and Religion.
Nagy is managing editor of Wordtrade.com, an Internet
newsletter that reviews new books and has a specialty focus in
religious studies and philosophy as well as being the founder of
SirReadaLot.org. He is also the webmaster and research
assistant for a Washington, DC-based think tank, and also maintains
an active ministry in spiritual direction.
Nagy received his M. Div. from the Pacific School of
Religion, an interdenominational seminary, a member of the Graduate
Theological Union, Berkeley,
California. Nagy worked as an anthropologist
studying new religions in and around the San Francisco Bay Area from
1968-1984. His approach was participant observation with open-ended,
in-depth life history interviews. Nagy has a background with
Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim groups. He also is conversant with New
Though traditions, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Subud, Beshara
Foundation, Free Thought movements, the general history of
religions, American church formation and alternative neopagan
groups.
Nagy was an associate editor of the Journal for
Contemporary Studies in the 1980s and a freelance contributor and
book reviewer for several metaphysical periodicals such as Gnosis,
Quest, and Pagan New Times.
Nagy has also been active in the hospice movement, suicide
prevention, drug information services, childcare advocacy, the
Theosophical Society, and the Unitarian Universalist Association,
the American Ethical Union and is currently encouraging various
contemplative practices, especially Trika and centering prayer. He
reads tarot cards and contributes to the development of New Age
tarot lore. And he can’t seem to get enough of esoteric religious
studies.
Recently Paul has a weekly radio talk show,
Touchstones: Religious
Experience, Tuesdays 11 AM-12 NOON on WCOM, 103.5 FM
that features the variety of religious and spiritual choices
available in the
Chapel Hill area. Paul often offers capsule reviews of notable books
in religious studies and does call-in author interviews.
J. Martin Otterham, Ph.D., History and Culture Studies.
Otterham developed his love of history as a child when he
became a stamp collector.
He received his doctorate from the
University
of Surrey,
Roehampton in the 1970s. Thereafter he was a lecturer in
contemporary history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Currently he resides in the Southeastern U.S.
where he does freelance journalism for several British periodicals
on contemporary American culture. Something of a polymath when it
comes to cultural topics, Otterham enjoys reading topical history
works as well as academic historical monographs.
Whit Price, M.S.L.S., Information Science, Reference and
Music.
After growing up in a small town in
North Carolina, Price received his
undergraduate degree in Political Science and History at UNC-CH.
Like so many of his generation, he took up guitar as an
undergraduate in the ‘70s. He received his master’s degree in
Library Science in 1981 and worked for the U.S. E.P.A. as a
reference librarian before starting his own business in document
delivery.
Price has also continued his avocation in music, writing
songs and playing acoustic guitar and mandolin and making frequent
trips to Nashville.
Price is also obsessed with the environment, both in terms
of spending time in nature and concerns about global warming. He
enjoys travel and especially likes books about the desert.
His daughter is a classical archeologist currently digging
a hole in Crete.
Anna Peed Washington, M.A.T., Managing Editor, Teaching
and Learning.
Washington
felt a calling in the 50s growing up in
Oxford,
NC to do something about racism,
rebelling against the disparity between people thinking of
themselves as fair-minded and yet treating a whole segment of the
human family unfairly. That insight has broadened to the mission:
‘bring people together.’
With an undergraduate degree in Philosophy,
Washington
went back to school to become an instructional designer and taught
in Carnage Junior High and Ligon Senior High during the second year
of integration in Raleigh, NC,
the year that both Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
were murdered.
For most of
Washington’s professional career, she has
worked as an instructional designer, creating courses and teaching
materials, managing projects and working as a team with
subject-matter experts, educators/trainers and production experts.
She worked in both business and higher education, at Nortel
Networks, Research and Evaluation Associates, the Instrument Society
of America, the Centers for Disease Control, and the UNC-CH in
Nursing, Public Health, Medicine, Pharmacology, Education, and
Computer Science. She created courses, self-study workbooks,
job-aids, videotapes, internet-based courses, etc. for group home
houseparents, unemployment insurance claims adjudicators, health
care providers, etc., on such topics as listening skills, telephone
interviewing, hotline counseling, Hepatitis B, working with the AIDS
patient, virtual reality research, principles of grounding,
reproductive epidemiology, allergen skin testing, etc. Having
managed large-scale projects and coordinated outreach programs, she
also put on train-the-trainer workshops and evaluated faculty and
instructors’ teaching skills.
Washington
has had a parallel volunteer career. First as a student at UNC-CH
she marched the streets for the integration of
Chapel Hill in the 60s and was active on the committee
for the United Nations in the campus YMCA. Then she served on the
board of a parents’ cooperative preschool. She managed and
coordinated the first Soup Kitchen in Chapel
Hill
for the Interfaith Council for Social Service and served on that
board for three years. Over a period of 16 years,
Washington’s grounding in working with
groups developed through coordinating weekly ‘Search for God’ study
group meetings using the Edgar Cayce ‘Guidelines to Small Group
Work.’ She organized and facilitated a leadership-training program
to create a bureau of public speakers. She served three terms on her
church board and was active on the Tapestry Committee, helping lead
several community gatherings, consciousness-raising sessions using
the Color of Fear film, and weekend-long, community building
trainings. Washington organizes activities to bring
people together: murder mystery dinner parties, volleyball, bridge,
hiking, bocce and most recently, Salon discussion groups and women’s
groups.
Washington
has lived in Chapel Hill for 40 years and in the same big old house,
located behind UNC-CH, for 26 years, where she and her husband are
active in the Westside Neighborhood Association and have a bocce
court in the backyard. Her daughter and son-in-law have two
daughters and live in Chicago.
She dearly enjoys the character development in a good
murder mystery series – Nero Wolf, Easy Rawlins, Rumpole of the
Bailey and the like – as well as books on graphic and visual design.
Norman Wellheim, Ph.D., Philosophy & the Social Sciences.
Wellheim studied philosophy and social policy formation at
the New School
for Social Research in New
York City. He also holds advanced degrees
from the University of New Hampshire
and has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill,
Rowan
University, and East
Carolina
University. He is
currently pursuing his own interests as an independent scholar and
writer.
Richard T. Zieger, Home Improvement.
Growing up in the 30s in
New Jersey, Zieger is a member of the
Greatest Generation. After service in the U.S. Navy, he worked as a
clerk in a hardware store, a machinist in a machine shop, and the
caretaker of an estate. He is qualified as a plumber and an
electrician as well as a machinist. Since his retirement he has
logged many hours as a volunteer at the UNC Hospitals and done the
plumbing and wiring on 160 Habitat for Humanity houses.
Zieger is a voracious reader, having moved to
Chapel Hill
because he could live near a university and attend classes. He has
three daughters and two granddaughters. He loves comedy series, P.
G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves being the prime example.
Zieger, something of a loveable curmudgeon, notes that
nobody seems to know how to do anything any more.
