The sporty young fellow on the cover of Omaha Blues—bedecked in saddle shoes, bowtie, sport coat, and a nervous smile—would later turn out to be the executive editor of the New York Times. But that was far in the future, after a difficult childhood. This book results from the retired Lelyveld’s unexpected passion to investigate some key elements in his family’s history—and only secondarily to figure out his “sometimes puzzling self.”

Omaha Blues takes its title from a central event in Lelyveld’s life, when he and his family lived in Omaha, where his father was the rabbi at Temple Israel. The family was in trouble. Lelyveld’s mother, a woman interested in a theatrical career, had become disenchanted with her status as a rabbi’s wife; his father was avidly intent on his rabbinical duties and his role as an organizer for Zionism. Clearly, something had to give. And so there resulted an incongruous situation in which the six-year old Lelyveld was shipped off for the summer to a farm near Tekamah run by a Seventh Day Adventist family. He quite rightly felt abandoned, sent into exile.

Lelyveld spends only enough time on that summer to suggest its impact (but also to question if he had indeed been as unhappy as he remembered). The rest of the book explores his parents’ lives—his mother’s bouts with depression and several suicide attempts; his father’s personal convictions (leading him in the Freedom Summer of 1964 to demonstrate in Mississippi, where he was severely beaten by local racists); his parents’ eventual, though long delayed, divorce; and their separate deaths.

Lelyveld also devotes two long chapters to the “one adult in my life who seemed consistently and reliably available,” Ben Goldstein. Ben befriended the boy and took him frequently to baseball games—apparently telling him little of his past, of his connections to Communist politics, and of his brief career as a rabbi in Montgomery, where he had given himself and his congregation much trouble by speaking out in defense of the Scottsboro boys (nine black teenagers who in 1931 had been falsely accused of raping two white women).

This is a powerful book, recording a search for intimate truths, and written without rancor. Lelyveld sets out to explore the past, and incidentally the formation of his own character, and he accomplishes his goals with understanding and compassion.

Although it has been more than sixty-eight years since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, interest in knowing what happened to the internationally-beloved pilot has not waned. This book by a native Nebraskan now living in Wyoming, helps whet the appetite of Earhart’s fans through an exploration of Amelia’s private life and accomplishments leading up to the untimely death of “Lady Lindy.”

The loss of Earhart’s plane in the Pacific sparked an unprecedented search for the woman whose heroic exploits endeared her to people throughout the world. More than a quarter of a million square miles of the Pacific were investigated at a cost of more than four million dollars after Amelia’s disappearance. One of the highlights of Van Pelt’s book is the discussion of the theories that have been suggested as explanations for what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, in the final stages of her around-the-world flight.

The publication of this excellent book coincides with the most recent attempts to locate Amelia’s missing plane in the Pacific. Web site addresses for the updates are given in the sources section at the end of the book. As a librarian, I would highly recommend this book for high school students looking for a book about Amelia’s life.