Odyssey

The Jewish Americans Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America By Beth S. Wenger Doubleday / 388 pages / $40 The product of a working-class family from the Bronx, Bess Myerson declined to change to a less Jewish-sounding name for the Miss America contest of 1945. "Now, Besseleh," her father repeated, "don't forget who you are out there." When she became the first Jew to wear the crown, Myerson gazed at the crowd at the Warner Theater "and saw all the Jewish people hugging each other, congratulating each other, as though they had won."

BARDERA, Somalia -- They walk in out of the desert from places not even on the map. They stagger through the sandy gullies where water once splashed, pushing themselves on with sticks, clawing with their skeletal hands, stumbling over the debris of rock and brittle dry brush.They have heard there is food in Bardera, and there is. But it is not enough. Down here in this universe of red earth and perpetual dust, the story is the same as everywhere else in Somalia. There is not nearly enough food.

Maryland Million Day celebrates the state's thoroughbred industry. From the grooms at the barns to the horse owners in their boxes, everyone involved holds their heads a little higher because of the role they play in one of the state's most important industries.But five years ago, as the revelry of the day approached a crescendo, the celebration died.The ever-popular Root Boy, running near the lead in the Maryland Million Classic, broke down. He lay in the dirt on the Laurel Park backstretch, his right front ankle shattered, his life imperiled.

Bruce and Isobel Cleland have a small, black and white photograph of their third child that can still move them to tears. In it, Georgia, almost 3, is looking down, cuddling her baby blanket. She is nearly bald from the chemotherapy and radiation that ravaged her body but saved her life. "That's my favorite picture," Isobel says. Bruce Cleland keeps the 1986 photo with other keepsakes from that time. In some ways, it seems like another life -- before the Clelands moved to Baltimore, before they knew Georgia would go into remission and survive, before they could fathom any good arising from their family tragedy.

GREEN SPRING VALLEY - Pupils from the Odyssey School in Baltimore, which educates those with the reading disability known as dyslexia, held a parade and groundbreaking ceremony May 25 to mark the start of construction of a school off Greenspring Avenue in Baltimore County, set to open its doors in fall 2002. The $8 million project, on a site adjacent to the campus of St. Timothy's School, will replace Odyssey's school in Baltimore's Roland Park neighborhood. Officials say the school, which was founded in 1994 and has nearly 80 pupils and 30 teachers, has outgrown its current location and needs room for expansion.

Dexter Manley's autobiography is an exercise in abuse.Mr. Manley is abusing drugs, women and his responsibilities as a parent. His brother and sister are abusing drugs. His mother is abusing alcohol. The football system is abusing him by putting him through high school and college without teaching him to read. The Washington Redskins are abusing him by ignoring a failed drug test to keep him in uniform for a Super Bowl."Educating Dexter," written with the help of former Washington Post sportswriter Tom Friend, is about as close as a sober soul can get to going through the 30-day program at Hazelden.

Ignorance, by Milan Kundera. HarperCollins. 208 pages. $23.95 Discovered by American readers in the 1980s, the celebrated Czech writer Milan Kundera has remained one of the most widely read European writers here. His towering reputation as a postmodern philosopher-novelist rests most heavily on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in English in 1984. Kundera often writes about the peculiar historical circumstances in Eastern Europe in the last several decades, and his novels have a strong existentialist bent.

"Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences," by Richard Pryor with Todd Gold. 257 pages. New York: Pantheon Books. $23Richard Pryor looks out from the cover of this sad, honest autobiography with a distant, pained stare, eyes just this side of tears. His expression says: I have seen and done things you wouldn't believe, and a lot of it hurt.He's made the de rigueur trip to the Betty Ford Clinic. Had multiple nervous breakdowns, a quadruple bypass, six wives. Shot his Mercedes and set himself on fire.

I LEAN BACK in my chair. I talk to my computer. It types what I say. And. I. Do. Not. Have. To. Talk. Like. This.Computer dictation software has typically used a limited vocabulary or required you to train yourself to use "discrete" speech, pausing unnaturally after every word, or both.Recognizing large-vocabulary continuous speech, the way we normally talk, has long seemed a goal unreachable until some Jetsonian future. Until now.Dragon Naturallyspeaking, from Dragon Systems Inc., is the first program I have seen that really does let you dictate to a personal computer in an unforced way. It is far from perfect, but it is nonetheless the first speech recognition system I would seriously consider using in my work.

There were inscriptions written above the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi, and the two most famous ones were cautionary words of wisdom: "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much." Those bits of ancient advice are worth considering as two Hollywood studios hope to launch film franchises that use Greek mythology as the unlikely premise for popcorn entertainment. "These are the stories that began storytelling in many ways," director Louis Leterrier said a few months ago on the London set of his "Clash of the Titans," the Warner Bros.