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Wendy Wasserstein is best known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, but she has also spent 10 years penning brisk, mostly comic, often touching essays for magazines. Here they are, niftily collected in Shiksa Goddess; or, How I Spent My Forties. Though there's much to be said for her brisk interview with Bette Midler, written in the form of a comic play (if we're to believe Wasserstein, the two of them rowed around Manhattan harmonizing on "Shine On Harvest Moon") and some of the other occasional essays, the heart of the book is her portraiture of her family. She immortalizes her mother, Lola Wasserstein, in a few deft sketches. "Always look nice when you throw out the garbage," Lola warns. "You never know who you might meet." When it comes to cards, "Lola encourages sending 'the very, very best,' a homemade greeting card. A personal citation like 'I love you, Gramma' or 'Mother, I promise next year to be married with three musically inclined children, a co-op, and a degree in dentistry' is worth a thousand words." The darkest, deepest notes are sounded in her essay on the cancer battle of her late sister, Sandra, the model for the character Sara in Wasserstein's dazzling play The Sisters Rosensweig. The book concludes with a rather heroic account of her pregnancy at age 48, which lives up to its title: "Days of Awe: The Birth of Lucy Jane." At her best, Wasserstein is an essayist of emotional delicacy, intellectual rigor, and an unconquerable funny bone. --Tim Appelo
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