A missing person alert for an adult can be filed over the phone. It cannot be removed over the phone. It is sufficient, however, for the police officer to show up at the apartment of the person who placed the alert and be told face-to-face "Yes, the person's found; sorry for the inconvenience." At no point during this did the missing person and the police ever come into contact with each other, by phone or otherwise. (A reliable and anonymous source carried a cell phone turned off and missed an ex's series of increasingly alarmed calls, triggering this series of events; no, I was not party to any of it.)

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow was billed to me as a book worth reading just because it is so very Chicago (it is the tale of Alan Bloom, the Closing of the American Mind, and dying). Indeed it is.

The book is also, in some fun way, the antimatter cousin of Umberto Eco's Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Both are about old men reminiscing over lost friends as they face questions of death and memory of their own, but where Eco's Yambo is a rake, Bellow's Chick is only straining to become one. ("You need to F---ing assert yourself," Ravelstein (Bloom) tells him as he tries on a gorgeous green Fedora at a Parisian haberdasher). Eco wrote what he called the fictional biography of a generation. Ravelstein is just the fictional biography of a man who may have shaped one.

[50 Books]