She also describes the day, when she was 4, that her mother showed her how to write the alphabet and she sat, copying the letters, at her mother's feet as her mother read: "Nothing broke the pleasure of our solitude.
"Do good deeds that for them are gardens in which rivers flow," a turbaned imam chanted as Abbas and his father sat following copies of the Koran in their laps.
In one of the bedrooms sat a copy of "Brothers Emanuel," the new memoir by Ezekiel J. Emanuel about his brothers, Ari and Rahm.
His dining room was filled with books; on a side table sat a copy of "Description of Egypt," Napoleon's attempt to catalogue Egypt's archeological history.
At the last student government meeting of the school year, Mr. Tisa and his cabinet members gathered in their usual conference room, decorated with a basketball net, ratty couch and long wood table on which sat a copy of "The Politics of the Presidency".
To the right of the audience was another tableau: an upright piano on whose keyboard sat a copy of "Mythology for Dummies," a bugle, and a sign that said "THE GRACES THREE" (three large dolls lay on top of the piano).
On the dining table sat dog-eared copies of Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom" and Derrida's "Specters of Marx," grist for his senior thesis.
Others let low-scoring children sit near and copy from higher-scoring ones.
One possible exception: on a lower shelf sits a copy of a memo, written in 1953 by a recently hired General Motors engineer.
On his desk sits a copy of the 1991 book on Schistosoma biology by former Stanford Professor Paul F. Basch, whose early death deprived the field of one of its leaders.
