The Book of Knowledge and Wonder is a memoir about claiming a legacy of wonder from knowledge of a devastating event.  In some ways it has the feel of a detective story in which Steven Harvey pieces together the life of his mother, Roberta Reinhardt Harvey, who committed suicide when he was eleven, out of the 406 letters she left behind.  Before he read the letters his mother had become little more than her death to him, but while writing her story he discovered a woman who, despite her vulnerability to depression, had a large capacity for wonder and a love of familiar things, legacies that she passed on to him.  The book tackles subjects of recent fascination in American culture:  corporate life and sexism in the fifties, mental illness and its influence on families, and art and learning as a consolation for life’s woes, but in the end it is the perennial theme of abiding love despite the odds that fuels the tale.

The Book of Knowledege and Wonder is part of the Judith Kitchen Select Series at Ovenbird books. 

from the "Introduction" by Judith Kitchen: "Watch the writer of nonfiction as he illuminates his craft,  By asking himself the original 'wonder questions' of his childhood, Harvey ignites a curiosity that takes him back into memory—but also allows him room for inference and imagination... Stepping in and out of reminiscence and retrospection, Harvey begins to know his mother as an individual. In the end, he emerges with a kind of knowledge, to which he adds the well-earned word 'wonder.'”

 Available now at bookstores

as well as Amazon and other on-line sites.