Copy Desk

Anthony F. Barbieri, who joined The Sun 32 years ago as a copy boy and rose to oversee a staff of more than 100 metropolitan reporters and editors, was promoted yesterday to managing editor, the second-highest position in the newsroom. Barbieri, 52, replaces William K. Marimow, who was named editor of The Sun last month."His experience both as an editor and a reporter really covers the gamut of what the Baltimore Sun stands for," Marimow said of Barbieri. "He has really served with distinction."

"Here's the deal," he said to the waiter. "I want a mushroom burger with Cheddar cheese instead of Swiss. No, forget it. Let's do the old English burger with lettuce, tomato and onion, which I see there."See, Dexter Manley was reading the menu. Dexter, who graduated from high school and stayed eligible to play four years at Oklahoma State when he couldn't read, then starred with the Washington Redskins, could handle Houlihans' menu. He made more sense than the waiter, actually."I can read my own book," said Dexter, and proceeded to open it to a random passage and read it. It tells how he got the courage to go to the Lab School in Washington for help learning to read because it was too painful not to.The book is "Educating Dexter," which is the sequel to the locker-room whispers of "Dexter can't read."

Mary J. Corey, whose personal warmth was matched by a drive that led her to become the first woman in The Baltimore Sun's 176-year history to head its newsroom, died Tuesday of breast cancer . The Sun's senior vice president and director of content, who was 49, essentially grew up at her hometown paper, joining it as a college intern and rising through its reporting and editing ranks. She led The Sun to regional Newspaper of the Year honors during the past two years and spearheaded new print and digital sections while building on its tradition of investigative journalism.

The Sleeper, by Christopher Dickey. Simon and Schuster. 273 pages. $24. It was inevitable that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would produce, for better or worse, a literature, and equally inevitable that one of the genres would be the thriller. Fortunately for readers, Christopher Dickey has produced in The Sleeper one that is both sophisticated and compelling. The towers of the World Trade Center are coming down as the novel opens. Kurt Kurtovic, an American of Balkan descent living peaceably in Kansas with his wife and small daughter, is compelled to action.

After a long time of reading mainly history and biography (and murder mysteries - always a guilty pleasure creeping in), it has been refreshing to honor National Poetry Month by reading some recent releases. Poetry inspires the most personal and idiosyncratic reactions of all the literary forms, so I have without apology chosen three favorites. Eternal Enemies By Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh Farrar, Straus and Giroux / 116 pages / $24 The weight of history lies heavily on Poland, and for contemporary Polish poets the shadow of the great Czeslaw Milosz must cast its own weight.

Anita Mauk Lees, a longtime psychologist and special education administrator for Baltimore City schools, died of lung cancer Saturday at Gilchrest Center for Hospice Care. She was 76. Born in Aliquippa, Pa., she attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1946 and a master's degree the next year. Mrs. Lees later completed coursework for a doctorate in psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mrs. Lees moved to Baltimore in 1953 and joined the city school system as a psychologist in 1960.

Helen B. Jones Sun staff member Helen B. Jones wrote the cover story for this issue of UniSun - profiles of four fashionable area residents. Although she prefers road running to clothes shopping, Jones said she thoroughly enjoyed talking to her subjects about their favorite stores, best bargains, style tips and more. "Thanks to them, I now know that I should never leave home without my lipstick, and that I really can wear a hat," she says. Jones, a native Baltimorean, is a graduate of Western High School and Towson University.

Stuart McIver Sr., a newspaper reporter whose assignments included early Baltimore Colts coverage, died Thursday of complications from surgery at North Broward Medical Center in Pompano Beach, Fla. He was 86 and lived in Lighthouse Point, Fla. Born in Sanford, N.C., he earned a journalism degree at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and worked on Greensboro and Charlotte newspapers before moving to Baltimore and joining the The Sun's staff...

"Balls," by Nanci Kincaid. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 396 pages. $21.95. In the South, football ranks just behind evangelical Christianity as the region's dominant form of religion.Or maybe I've got that backward. On autumn afternoons on big state university campuses, football is the South's religion (although evangelical Christianity still plays a big supporting role). All this makes for serious business or a big human comedy (or maybe both), depending on how you view things."Balls" is at once a lonely but acutely perceptive story of a football coach's wife and a hilarious send-up on college football in the South.

MARYLAND IS America in miniature, and, it follows, the governor's mansion is Maryland in miniature, or should be.So, Hilda Mae Snoops, the official state hostess, wants to put painted screens on one of the mansion's doors. She unveiled them at a meeting of the Governor's Mansion Trust last week.Her plan to grace the mansion with this example of East Baltimore folk art quickly drews scoffs from some. "I'm a tremendous fan of the folk-genre of painted screens and they are a marvelous art form for Baltimore but they couldn't be more incorrect for a Georgian revival mansion," said Stiles T. Colwill, a former curator with the Maryland Historical Society, who suggested Ms. Snoops should "go back to Eastern Avenue."