Part memoir, part travelogue, The Enjoy Agenda takes readers from Rick Bailey's one-stoplight town in Michigan farm country to Stratford, England, to the French Concession in Shanghai, the Adriatic coast of Italy, and to a small village in the Republic of San Marino. With his self-deprecating style, Bailey recalls the traumas of picture day in elementary school and lugging a guitar to the Cotswalds and back. He reflects on food safety in China, relives a dental emergency in Venice, and embarks on a quest for il formaggio del perdono (the cheese of forgiveness) in the hills above the Adriatic. Bailey, whose voice is a combination of Dave Barry and Rick Steves with just a soupçon of Montaigne, writes with humor and wit about how these experiences reflect the issues and conflicts of contemporary American life: environmental change, life in digital times, and the vicissitudes of arriving at ripe old age. Throughout The Enjoy Agenda Bailey asks,...

American English, Italian Chocolate is a memoir in essays beginning in the American Midwest and ending in north central Italy. In sharply rendered vignettes, Rick Bailey reflects on donuts and ducks, horses and car crashes, outhouses and EKGs. He travels all night from Michigan to New Jersey to attend the funeral of a college friend. After a vertiginous climb, he staggers in clogs across the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In a trattoria in the hills above the Adriatic, he ruminates on the history and glories of beans, from Pythagoras to Thoreau, from the Saginaw valley to the Province of Urbino.  Bailey is a bumbling extra in a college production of Richard III. He is a college professor losing touch with a female student whose life is threatened by her husband. He is a father tasting samples of his daughter's wedding cake. He is a son witnessing his aging parents' decline. He is the husband of an Italian immigrant who takes him places he never imagined visiting, let alone...