Journey

Reduced to bare numbers, the story of Katie seems impossible. Age: 9 1/2 years. Height: 29 inches. Weight: Less than 11 pounds. Yet that is how she was, lying in a crib in a Bulgarian orphanage, when Susanna Musser showed up to become her mom. The little girl was alive, more or less. Her legs looked thin as broomsticks. Her skin was colorless, her brown eyes empty. She looked as if she might break. Thousands of miles away, physicians at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia reviewed her records and struggled to understand.

The thrilling adventure of OR-7 has captivated the West Coast and Northwest. It's a saga of courage and the enduring resilience of the wild. It's also a saga that will never happen in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. OR-7 is the gray wolf who left his pack in northwest Oregon and trekked more than 1,000 miles into Stanislaus County, Calif. The first gray wolf in the state since 1924, he has become so famous they had a contest to name him. The winning name, chosen by two separate kids: Journey.

Somber, serious and absolutely gorgeous (Iranian desert vistas, Balkan tundra, nomads on camelback on the far side of Turkey), The Journey to Kafiristan is a moody road movie about two women in search of themselves as the world gets ready for war. Inspired by the memoirs of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss socialite who ended up in a New York City mental ward, and her travels in 1939 with the amateur ethnologist Ella Maillart, the film is an...

Many years ago, in a time before chat rooms, malls and Mortal Kombat, boys and girls would get their parents, whom they called "Mom and Dad," to drive them to "the show" on Saturday afternoons. "The show" was held in something called a "movie theater," which was a little bit like a multiplex, except that it had only one screen, and actually served real melted butter on its popcorn, which was offered in modest portions and not the milk pails, mop buckets and garbage cans of today.

'What song is that, Dad?" I was sitting under a tent last week with family members after my son's high school graduation when he asked about the classic rock tune that was playing during his class video. I listened to the chugging intro and pegged the band as Journey but misidentified the title as "On and On. " After a few bars I corrected myself, "It's called 'Don't Stop Believin'. " So it was eerie when, two nights later, the same vintage power ballad provided the final notes for The Sopranos . Pretty cheesy choice for a series that always has been canny in its use of music.

The Daums are united by love and Orthodox Judaism, yet firmly asunder in faith in their fellow man. Sons Tzvi Dovid and Akiva, Torah scholars and residents of Israel, distrust non-Jews and deal with them infrequently. To them, a Christian isn't their fellow man. Their father, New Yorker Menachem Daum, who made Hiding and Seeking with filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, struggles with Orthodoxy's tendency to sever ties with the larger world, as well as with trust. "Better no religion than a religion that doesn't see godliness in every human being," Menachem says, quoting his late teacher, composer Shlomo Carlebach, whose music orchestrates this moving cinematic memoir.

Kevin Hunt and Jeff Williams want to become brothers. The men seem to have little in common. Hunt, 25, who is from Ireland, is a construction worker. Williams, 31, from Maryland, is a former Navy man. But what both men share is a desire to dedicate their lives to God and to work with profoundly handicapped people. Together, they are on the brink of committing themselves to a Catholic religious order that is pledged to serve the mentally handicapped, the elderly and the physically disabled and to restore to them a personal dignity.

Journey, the San Francisco rock band that came to the Spectrum last night, was one of the most popular rock acts of the late '70s and early '80s. Its hard-rock instrumentation, combined with the thin, piercingly emotional vocals of lead singer Steve Perry, brought the band enormous success. Journey is on tour for the first time in three years, promoting its new album Raised on Radio (Columbia), which has sold more than a million copies. At the Spectrum, the band - Perry, guitarist Neal Schon, keyboardist Jonathan Cain, bassist Randy Jackson and drummer Mike Baird - offered a wide- ranging selection of its successes, including "Any Way You Want It," "Don't Stop Believin' " and "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'," as well as a substantial number of songs from Raised on Radio, including the band's current hit single, "Girl Can't Help It. " What most distinguished this performance from previous Journey tours was its refreshing liveliness and good humor.

My new favorite rock band in the world, Journey, has just released an album titled Raised on Radio (Columbia). With one exception, the music on the album isn't really all that good - it's Journey's usual combination of bombastic overstatement and florid melodrama. The exception is pretty neat though: The lyrics for "Raised on Radio" consist entirely of lines from classic rock songs, from Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" to Shelley Fabares' "Johnny Angel," stitched together as verses to this clever tune.

More than four decades later, I can still picture the four of us journeying by car from our home in northern New Jersey to Florida to visit relatives near Miami. The shock of seeing the often hand-scrawled signs along U.S. 301 as we entered the South for the first time: "No coloreds" in front of $9-a-night motels; "coloreds" and "whites only" signs looming above drinking fountains at run-down gas stations; "whites only, please" signs in the windows of restaurants. For two weeks this summer, I went on another journey, this time by telephone and e-mail, not by automobile.

Transfer By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions. 119 pp. $16   Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the most spirited voices in American poetry. The author, editor, and translator of more than 30 volumes, she is best known for her poetry collections Fuel (1998) and You and Yours (2005), and her award-winning anthology of international poems for young people This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from 68 countries. In her affirming introduction for that book, she writes, "Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!

More than 30,000 runners, representing a range of ages and fitness levels, are expected to amass at Central High School on Sunday morning for the Broad Street Run. I was excited to be among those who registered before the popular 10-mile run reached capacity in an unprecedented five hours. My excitement, however, quickly gave way to anxiety. I am no elite athlete or seasoned runner; I am a suburban mother of four who started running less than a year ago. For reasons that defy conventional wisdom and my own conservative nature, I picked up running at the age of 42, with four small, needy children underfoot.

My husband was in the Peace Corps in India 45 years ago, but we were surprised when our second son announced he was applying. Spinal meningitis at 17 months had left our son severely hearing impaired. Despite his normal speech and college graduation, we privately wondered if he would be accepted and could successfully learn another language, as well as adapt to another culture. During our trip to visit Justin at his Peace Corps site in the Dominican Republic at Christmas 2011, we learned how wrong we were and gained a new appreciation of today's Peace Corps.

NEW YORK - Nearly every new work by Philadelphian Michael Hersch is like a journey to the center of the Earth, each achieved by a different route and in varying vehicles. Thursday at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, the composer's medium was string quartet, and the journey itself often left you in a figurative blindfold that's taken off momentarily to glimpse another previously unimaginable terrain. The title, Images From a Closed Ward, feels oddly contained for a 13-movement work that seems to have few harmonic restrictions, and is another of Hersch's suites of haikulike micro movements that teem with cumulative impact.

The thrilling adventure of OR-7 has captivated the West Coast and Northwest. It's a saga of courage and the enduring resilience of the wild. It's also a saga that will never happen in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. OR-7 is the gray wolf who left his pack in northwest Oregon and trekked more than 1,000 miles into Stanislaus County, Calif. The first gray wolf in the state since 1924, he has become so famous they had a contest to name him. The winning name, chosen by two separate kids: Journey.

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Still Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis By Lauren Winner HarperOne. 272 pp. $24 In the last 10 years, Lauren Winner has taken her growing readership on a twisty-turny journey: that of her own religious quest. Raised in Reform Judaism, she converted to Orthodox Judaism during her first year in college, and she converted again to Episcopalianism in grad school. She earned her master's in divinity in 2007 at the Duke University Divinity School, where she is now an assistant professor of Christian spirituality.

I am on a plane traveling to California for what I know will be the last time to see my father, who is succumbing to congestive heart failure. My wife in her wonderful way, knowing the pain this trip entails, slipped an Inquirer Travel article into my briefcase about a man who traveled with his father back to the small Italian village they were from. As I read it, memories of a similar pilgrimage came flooding back like rereading an old love letter. In my job, I have been fortunate to travel the world - mostly with people who were familiar with the regions and companies I was seeing.

The mountain road was under construction and we had been stopped for nearly 30 minutes. With the car in park and the emergency brake engaged, I got out and wandered with my camera. Cait and Richie followed. I snapped a few unexciting photos and looked around for those famous trees. "You have to see the trees," we had been told. "There's nothing in the world like them. " Until now we had seen only dogwoods and birches, all of which seemed pretty tame. A nearby ranger directed us back to the car, saying the line would start moving soon.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe in the old days cruising was string quartets in the Palm Court Lounge and nowadays it's more like amplifiers and strobe lights in the Upper Deck Disco. Maybe now it is more of a one-size-fits-all, something-for-everyone kind of deal. But underneath, and only slightly underneath, in fact sometimes so slightly underneath as to be hardly underneath at all, many things are just the same as they ever were. Everyone loved eating, drinking, dancing, romancing.