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of the March 12th "Insight" public radio show.

Host, Jeffrey Callison talks to TV actress and author Dinah Lenney who has written a memoir about her father’s highly publicized murder, and the impact it had on her family.

FROM — The Books You Must Read: Picks for 2007
The Gist: Some of our favorite authors recommend their picks for 2007

Samantha Dunn: I'm going to give a plug to two fine memoirs. In these there is no abuse, drug use, crazy parents or even a hot Italian lover, just beautiful sentences, deep emotions and intellectual stimulation: One is Dinah Lenney's Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir. The other is Practicing, by Glenn Kurtz, about his lifelong pursuit to perfect his playing of the classical guitar.
— Samantha Dunn, author of three books, including, most recently, Faith in Carlos Gomez

“This affecting memoir ends on a note of grace as Lenney acknowledges her hard-won peace with her father’s memory and his murder. . . . Such transcendent realizations elevate Bigger Than Life . . . beyond an account of the bombastic life and brutal death of Nelson Gross to speak of life and healing found in the midst of tragedy.”
— Paula L. Woods, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The subject matter is grim but the writing is anything but, as Lenney, with an artful layering of details and remembered conversations, brings her complex, confounding father back to literary life.”
— Los Angeles Magazine

“Before his murder, Dinah Lenney’s father was Bigger than Life but looms larger in death.”
— Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

“In one sense, [Lenney’s] book can be seen as therapy, a way of purging a decade’s worth of inner turmoil. But the story also explores a broader issue, the way the death of one man can affect the lives of many people. . . . Not a typical ‘survivor's autobiography,’ but a deeply affecting one.”
— Booklist

"Vivid, revealing, and meditative. . . . The narrator is poignantly self-aware, brutally honest. . . . This is a book well worth reading, not only for some dazzling chapters and evocative details about the American justice system, but also for the contribution it makes to the body of American literature about fathers."
—Fourth Genre

From Writers on Writing Blogspot - Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Dinah Lenney and Michael Quadland

Marrie Stone interviews Dinah Lenney, author of Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir and Michael Quadland, author of That Was Then.
Listen to audio... (Broadcast audio: Nov 14, 2007)

BIGGER THAN LIFE iS #10 ON THE LA TIMES BESTSELLERS LIST
LA TIMES BESTSELLERS — Week of March 25th 2007

Actor-writer pens memoir of life marred by murder
By Robert David Jaffee, Contributing Writer — 2007-10-19

Review from Betterbaking.com Book Shelf

Books take a candid look at dads
Actors Dinah Lenney and Kirk Douglas take on the pain of parent-child relationships

By Valerie Kuklenski Los Angeles Daily News (Jun 16, 2007)

Interview with Dinah Lenney

Unlimited Thinking
Listen to the Interview with Dinah Lenney on Karma Air — from March 25th, 2007
Sean and Amy interview actress Dinah Lenney from NBC's critically acclaimed ER . Now in the middle of her 13th season as Nurse Shirley.

FROM BOOKLIST
Nelson Gross, a New Jersey businessman and politician, lived his life with abundant enthusiasm. When he was murdered in 1997, in a holdup that went horribly wrong, his death punched a hole in the lives of his family, including his daughter, Dinah. In one sense, her book can be seen as therapy, a way of purging a decade’s worth of inner turmoil. But the story also explores a broader issue, the way the death of one man can affect the lives of many people. The narrative uses Gross’ death as a fulcrum, seesawing back and forth from the years before the murder, when the author was trying to come to terms with her parents’ divorce, to the years after the murder, as Lenney tried to restore her life to normality and find a way to explain to her young children what happened to their grandfather and why. It’s an unusual structure, perhaps not as accessible as a more traditional linear one, but it captures effectively the jumbled nature of the author’s life before and after her father’s murder. Not a typical "survivor’s autobiography," but a deeply affecting one.

— David Pitt

FRESH EYES NOW (READ THE BLOG)
(excerpt) ... Of all the people in all the world, it was Dinah's father who was murdered in 1997 by three young men whose greed turned homicidal. Somehow, Dinah Lenney tells that story with all the complexity, the messiness, the surprisingly wry humor, and even the joy of a life lived that such a story deserves.

A father.

A daughter.

To see the world in a grain of rice, you have to look. And you have to read books like this one. Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2007

— Robert Gray

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE, SHELF LIFE [VIEW THE REVIEW]
On September 17, 1997, Nelson Gross, a one-time Senate hopeful, was kidnapped by three teenage boys and brutally murdered; with the money they stole from him, they purchased jewelry, clothes, and hubcaps. BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nebraska, 227 pages, $25) is an account of the murder, written by Gross's daughter, Dinah Lenney, an actor who lives in Echo Park. Although the abduction made national news, the book is less about the tragedy than about what such events do to the survivors. The subject matter is grim but the writing is anything but, as Lenney, with an artful layering of details and remembered conversations, brings her complex, confounding father back to literary life.

— Robert Ito

From Writers on Writing Blogspot - Tuesday, December 04, 2007 Dinah Lenney and Michael Quadland Marrie Stone interviews Dinah Lenney, author of Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir and Michael Quadland, author of That Was Then. Listen to audio... (Broadcast audio: Nov 14, 2007)

BIGGER THAN LIFE iS #10 ON THE LA TIMES BESTSELLERS LIST LA TIMES BESTSELLERS — Week of March 25th 2007

Actor-writer pens memoir of life marred by murder By Robert David Jaffee, Contributing Writer — 2007-10-19