Karen Stabiner

The world needs another sports book like it needs another Super Bowl. One quick browse through a bookstore will quickly show that just about everyone who has ever scored a touchdown, made a basket or hit a home run has later been inclined to write about it. The approach is almost always self-serving. Also dull. Now, along comes Karen Stabiner, a Santa Monica-based writer, who has, in her new book "Courting Fame," taken a novel approach to the writing of a sports book.

MY oldest child will graduate from high school in a few weeks, and before I know it he'll be packing his bags and heading off to college, scarcely pausing to turn around and wave to those he's leaving behind. Conventional wisdom holds that it's easier to leave than to be left, and no matter how hard I look for comfort in "The Empty Nest," an anthology of writers who've gone through the same experience, I know it's going to be a rocky autumn.

Pity poor Dick Sittig, an ad man from Chiat/Day, the hyper-hip Venice-based agency that produced some of the most memorable advertising of the 1980s. He has created a new commercial for Nissan in which an upwardly-mobile Everyman dreams of owning his own car company so he can design his ideal car (which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Nissan Sentra).

Re "Madonna's choice," Current, Oct. 22 I have to respond to Karen Stabiner's cruel attack on Madonna for adopting David Banda. At 72 years, the mother of five and the grandmother of 10, I am not in the cohort of Madonna's fans. Yet I protest the meanness of the essay. No matter how a child comes into a family, the child brings joy but also sleepless nights that do not end when infancy passes. It will be Madonna who lies awake at night when David Banda is 18, wondering if he wrecked the car, if he dropped out of school without telling her and a jillion other mother nightmares!

I happily digested "Tastemaker for the Masses" (Feb. 11), a restaurant article that could have flopped like a flat pancake but instead rose with the magnificence of an erupting shrimp from the confines of a Stacey James' imagination and most cleverly and wittily described by author Karen Stabiner, certainly one of your more creative and visually descriptive contributing writers. ANN DASHE San Diego

I was personally involved in the field of adoption for years. "The Baby Brokers," by Karen Stabiner (Aug. 14), is the first article I have seen by a lay person that correctly expresses the procedures and eliminates a great deal of the mystery surrounding the process of independent adoption. JAMES F. MILLER Pasadena

For a book about Beulah Louise Overell, who was tried with her fiance for the 1947 murder of her parents, I would appreciate hearing from anyone who recalls the trial, or knew Beulah Louise, her parents Walter and Beulah, her fiance George (Bud) Rector Gollum, or the men she later married, Robert Cannon and Joseph Peter Kooyman. KAREN STABINER 1341 Ocean Ave. 286 Santa Monica

Regarding "Dressing Well Is the Best Revenge," by Karen Stabiner (Dec. 11): For the past 45 years I have lived and worked in Beverly Hills. My friends are people dedicated to various charitable, cultural and political causes. We have tried to teach our children sensitivity for others in an attempt to counter the "hedonist" image we have as a community. Your vacuous piece on Wanda McDaniel and Armani was an embarrassment to us as a community. BOBBI ELLIOTT Beverly Hills

Thank you for the kind article "Best Sellers," by Karen Stabiner (May 29). We hope we can live up to the sentiments expressed. We would, however, like to set aside any misconceptions that might have been conveyed regarding the Brentwood Book Shop. When we purchased it from Lou Virgiel in 1984, it was in no sense a failing business. In fact, we were very lucky to have inherited a loyal, literate clientele. DAVIS DUTTON DOUGLAS DUTTON DUTTON'S BRENTWOOD BOOKSTORE Los Angeles

I was delighted and disappointed by Karen Stabiner's article, "Me and Dr. Midlife" (Sept. 8). I attended a seminar at the Hudson Institute over a year ago, at age 47, and I planned the next phase of my life with renewed clarity and enthusiasm. True, life changes may not happen in six weeks, but I've spoken to several others who attended with me and they've moved from a "stuck" place to a life that works for them. That is exactly what the seminar claims it can do for participants.

My Girl Adventures With a Teen in Training Karen Stabiner Little, Brown: 270 pp., $23.95 * Must raising an adolescent girl necessarily be heartbreaking? This question is at the center of "My Girl," a stirring narrative by journalist Karen Stabiner focusing on her experiences as her daughter Sarah moved into early adolescence.

To the editor: While I appreciate the attention given to my book, "All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters" (Book Review, Sept. 8), I would like to correct an error that led the reviewer to suggest a conflict of interest on my part. She writes that at "the end of that year" of research I "had enrolled [my] own daughter at Marlborough." In fact, we did not even apply to Marlborough until two years later, for entrance into the class that began three years after I undertook my research.

In the 1990s, a slew of new studies showed that adolescent girls were in crisis. Something strange happened to girls when they reached their teens. They went from having confidence and good grades to becoming silent, self-doubting, subpar students. One of the popular theories at the time was that teachers inadvertently favored boys in the classroom. Some parents responded by sending their daughters to all-girls' schools.

Breast cancer is the devil's toy. It is capricious, ruthless and as of this writing, still out of control. I know this first hand. Nearly five years ago on a perfect June morning, I sat across from a kindly doctor who started lobbing unmentionable words to me. "Tumor." "Chemotherapy." "Mastectomy." "Reconstruction." In seconds, my sunny world went dark and ugly. My husband, whose kindness and quick wit help keep my world bright, slumped in his chair, his jaw slack. There were no words.

What a blessing for Karen Stabiner that she can approach dining out as "an adventure" ("Whining and Dining," Oct. 30), that she can trust the chef to make her taste buds happy and not leave her with an after-meal hangover. For many business travelers like myself, eating out is anything but an adventure. Finally, after years of bloating, belching and indigestion from overindulging in fine eating establishments, I have learned to eat to nourish my body and not abuse it. I was beginning to think that restaurateurs had awakened to the fact that many life-threatening diseases result from overindulging our bodies.

My generation, raised on the same pernicious fairy tales writer Karen Stabiner ("A Suitable Mom," March 6) criticizes, has, tragically, internalized their messages, which demonize mothers and laud dragon-slaying princes. We've stayed away from active motherhood in droves and gone out, instead, to slay our own dragons. Thus, with a work-oriented mindset, Stabiner chronicles her stint as a stay-at-home mom by listing accomplishments. This is like evaluating a poem by counting words.

Starting this week, "Nonfiction in Brief" and "Fiction in Brief," the features previously seen in this space, are replaced by a recurring cycle of four features: on the first Sunday of the month, "The Practical Mind"--advice, how-to and self-help--by Karen Stabiner; on the second Sunday, "Fiction in Brief"--a holdover from the old rotation--by Michael Harris; on the third, "Other Lives"--biographies, autobiographies and memoirs--by Chris Goodrich; and...

Re "Madonna's choice," Current, Oct. 22 I have to respond to Karen Stabiner's cruel attack on Madonna for adopting David Banda. At 72 years, the mother of five and the grandmother of 10, I am not in the cohort of Madonna's fans. Yet I protest the meanness of the essay. No matter how a child comes into a family, the child brings joy but also sleepless nights that do not end when infancy passes. It will be Madonna who lies awake at night when David Banda is 18, wondering if he wrecked the car, if he dropped out of school without telling her and a jillion other mother nightmares!

An advertising executive who says it's OK to "go after" children once they've reached a certain age is in the same category as any predator ("Billion Dollar Babies," by Karen Stabiner, Aug 15). When the public trust is betrayed by companies in search of profits at whatever cost, well, let the buyer beware. But when it involves children, these people should understand that there is no forgiveness on our part, that we hold grudges forever. After Beechnut was fined in 1987 for selling sugar water as apple juice, I never again bought another Beechnut product.

Pity poor Dick Sittig, an ad man from Chiat/Day, the hyper-hip Venice-based agency that produced some of the most memorable advertising of the 1980s. He has created a new commercial for Nissan in which an upwardly-mobile Everyman dreams of owning his own car company so he can design his ideal car (which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Nissan Sentra).