Like generations of little girls, Lauren Kessler fell in love with ballet the first time she saw “The Nutcracker”, and from that day, at age five, she dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But when she was twelve, her very famous ballet instructor crushed those dreams, along with her youthful self-assurance, and she stepped away from the barre. Fast forward four decades. Lauren - suddenly, powerfully, itchingly restless at midlife, embarks on a "Transcontinental...

Communists vilified her as a raging neurotic. Leftists dismissed her as a confused idealist. Her family pitied her as an exploited lover. Some said she was a traitor, a stooge, a mercenary and a grandstander. To others she was a true American heroine-fearless, principled, bold and resolute. Congressional committees loved her. The FBI hailed her as an avenging angel. The Catholics embraced her. But the fact is, more than half a century after she captured...

An acclaimed biographer, Lauren Kessler immerses herself in her work to construct compelling portraits of her subjects. In Dancing with Rose, she recounts her time at a West Coast Alzheimer's facility. Working as an unskilled resident assistant, Kessler learns important lessons about humanity while conducting interviews with patients in various stages of the disease.

One journalist's surprisingly hopeful in-the-trenches look at Alzheimer's, the disease that claimed her mother's life. Like many loved ones of Alzheimer's sufferers, Lauren Kessler was devastated by the disease that seemed to turn her mother into another person before claiming her life altogether. To deal with the pain of her loss, and to better understand the confounding aspects of living with this disease, Kessler enlisted as a caregiver at a facility...