From My Button Box: Collected Essays in a Pandemic Time

FROM MY BUTTON BOX
COLLECTED ESSAYS IN A PANDEMIC TIME

by Judith Bruder
Body, Mind and Spirit
Biography and Autobiography
Self-Help/ Motivational & Inspirational
5.5 x 8.5, Paperback, 270 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9905651-9-2
$21.95 (plus tax + shipping)

Remember the joy of being held on Grandmother’s lap and listening to a story? Or being at home sick from school and getting to play with the buttons in her button box?

Here are 50 “buttons” for you — thoughts, ideas, memories, musings — a harvest of 89 years of stories and conversations. Originally recorded as podcasts during the pandemic, these essays are as colorful and varied as buttons in a button box, reflecting our tumultuous times while looking forward to a brighter future.

A special feature of From My Button Box is that individual QR codes are included with each essay so you can listen to the original podcasts.

JUDITH BRUDER, like so many women, has lived a variety of lives, often to her own astonishment. On college campuses she is a writer, a lecturer, and a scholar; a graduate of Wellesley College who has been a campus minister at Fordham University in Manhattan. At home she is a wife, mother, grandmother, an unwilling widow, and most recently, a great-grandmother. Judith is the author of two previous books, Going to Jerusalem (Simon & Schuster) and Convergence (Doubleday), about which Book-of-the-Month Club wrote: “Moving, funny, and poignant…an autobiography of rare candor and depth.” She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Judith Bruder

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PRESS & REVIEWS

“There’s a gracious tenacity to these essays, an elegant insistence that meaning can be found amid loss, whether of a dear husband of fifty-eight years, or of sustaining companionship during a pandemic, or of a seemingly endless future in an octogenarian’s life. We need only explore the rich landscape of remembrance, unearthing the joyful epiphanies that have enriched our lives with each passing year. Judith Bruder has given distinctive voice to this landscape, as resonant as the Brooklyn of her youth, honest and courageous, hopeful and inspiring, eloquent and wise. — Robert Braile, a former book critic for The Boston Globe

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“There’s always a future, no matter how old you are. It’s assumed that old people don’t have anything to say anymore and have nothing to look forward to. I stand here as proof that’s simply not true.” Bruder said “Everybody has a button box of their own. Not necessarily a literal one, but a button box of their own thoughts and memories and dreams. The older you are, the more buttons you have in your button box.”

from “Northampton author publishes third book at age of 89,” by Miasha Lee, The Reminder, November 20, 2023. (Read Full Article)

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