Over the Rainbow: Memoir of a Kansas Girl

"Life is all about the journey," Mary Erlanger believes, and in this book she-born into the Greatest Generation in Manhattan, Kansas, and drawn, seemingly inevitably, to Manhattan, New York City-narrates stories and offers insights about her long and eventful life. A WAVE officer in World War II, a television-and-radio-network copywriter, a human-rights-and-services advocate in Connecticut, Mary became-in late life-a counselor/psychotherapist specializing in working with older adults and families and teaching others. With aging, she believes, comes "the need to connect the parts of yourself"; finding these connections then "turns into the desire to make some kind of record." With this book, she has put that record together for her beloved family-children, grandchildren, and great-grandchild-and friends. The book serves, too, as a reflection of an extraordinary, nearly century-long period of history, seen through the eyes of an adventurous girl who embraced it.