Painted Windows

Childhood recalled in a sequence of short pieces — night, solitude, friendship, fame, remorse, a first journey — each one a pane in the window of memory, looked at again from the far side of middle age. Peattie became a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the 1880s, when women were not, and ran its literary page for a decade; this small book is the quietest and most personal thing she wrote. Sixty paintings by John Constable and Albert Bierstadt, among others, picture churches, cathedrals and quiet waterways, matching the book's own habit of looking at the past through a frame.