Are you blue? Green? Yellow with a little orange? Sheila N. Glazov can tell you.

No, these colors have nothing to do with fashion, skin tone or bravery or the lack of it. Rather, Glazov is a specialist in the area of personality type and has written an intriguing new book that asks "What Color Is Your Brain? A Fun and Fascinating Approach to Understanding Yourself and Others" (Slack Incorporated). The colors she describes roughly translate into such characteristics as creativity, responsibility, organization, independence, self-esteem and more.

Glazov, an author (she previously wrote a children's book, "Princess Shayna's Invisible Visible Gift"), professional speaker, educator and consultant, first devised the "brain color" approach as an aid to the workshops she was facilitating.

"The program started out as a little tool, a way for people to understand each other's personalities while I was facilitating creative problem-solving sessions," she said in a recent phone conversation. During those sessions, "someone would come up with a great idea and others would look at them as if they were crazy. I wanted to develop a way for people to understand each other."

She came up with the idea of using colors to describe personality types because "we all respond to that stimulus. The colors worked really well. As soon as a person would discover that they were, say, a green brain they would go to the other people in their lives and try to figure out what they were."

One man told her, "I finally understand my wife, and I've been married for 30 years. She's blue and I'm green."

Soon clients were asking her for a longer brain-color program. Eventually she began doing more research and turned her findings into a book. "What Color Is Your Brain?" explains what the different colors mean, offers quizzes so readers can determine their own brain color, then discusses a host of issues, from interpersonal relationships to home decorating to romantic life, in terms of brain color. There is also a section on relationships with children, to whom the brain color approach applies as well, Glazov says.

She stresses that no one is all one color, that individuals can change their brain color and that there is no "right" or "wrong" brain color.

Readers who take the quiz in the book might find out "you have a high yellow but your orange is low; you realize it's easier for you to be organized and prepared than to be spontaneous and a risk-taker. And you don't want to ask a green person to give you an answer right away. They need to gather all the facts."

Glazov herself is "orange" in that she is an entrepreneur and likes to have fun but becomes "yellow"-highly organized and efficient-before she gives a workshop. "But I'm most comfortable with my blue brain, my creativity," she says. "Some people are not comfortable when they're 'blue.'"

Talking with others who have taken her workshops or read the book "is like a shorthand," she says. "At Thanksgiving, we had a family event for my husband's birthday and I had a lot of family here. I said to my family, you know how 'yellow' I get before these events. We all talk the colors, it makes it so easy and resolves the conflict."

In a work environment, she says, knowing what color employees' brains are "can help put together a really good team. Blue comes up with an idea, yellow comes up with a plan and orange implements it, for instance."

On the job as in life, "we need everybody," she says. "If we all had the same color brains it would be boring."

This time of year Glazov gives mini-workshops to help people cope with holiday hassles based on brain color, although, she says, "It's so different when you're Jewish. I polish my menorah and makes latkes for a family event. I don't have all the stress other people have. But I like doing the mini-workshops because it gives people some help in getting through this time."

Glazov donates 10 percent of her royalties from the book to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, an organization she has long supported. Her oldest son, Joshua, was diagnosed with the disease 23 years ago, when he was 15.

So what does each color mean and what color is your brain? You'll have to read the book to find out.

Ruth Shalett Littman's book "Finesilver's Gold" (Micah Publications, Inc.) is technically classified as historical fiction, but it's fiction that grows directly out of her family's history.

And an amazing history it is.

Shalett Littman's novel begins in 1894 when 19-year-old Jacob Finesilver, bent on escaping anti-Semitism and conscription into the czar's army, walks across the frozen Bering Sea from his shtetl in Ukraine to the Yukon, where he has heard there is a gold rush going on. He almost freezes to death and breaks his leg but is rescued by an Inuit Eskimo, who saves Jacob's life as well as his leg.

That's the beginning of a tale involving Jacob, the young bride he sends for from his shtetl, their Indian guide and other inhabitants of Dawson City, a gold rush town. It's a remarkable adventure but what's most remarkable about it is that it's true, and Jacob and his bride, Malka, were the author's grandparents. Much of the information for the book came from her grandmother's diaries, with Shalett Littman pursuing her own research to fill in the story.

"My grandmother and mother both kept diaries and I got a lot of the information from them," says Shalett Littman, who is not an author by profession but a singer. She sang with the New York City Opera Company, the Chicago Symphony and the Grant Park Opera and spent 17 years at Temple Jeremiah in Northfield as a cantorial soloist. She has co-authored (with Arlene Paskel) a mystery novel, "Deadly Prayer."

After hearing her grandmother's and mother's stories and reading the diaries, which she inherited from her grandmother in 1985, "I needed more colorful information," she says. So she spent a total of 12 years doing research, which included traveling to Canada, where she found the names of her grandparents in the records of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police.

Canada? Yes. "Nobody knows where the Klondike is. Nobody realizes that it wasn't Alaska. Everybody talks about the gold rush in Alaska but it wasn't in Alaska, it was in Canada," Shalett Littman says.

She did research in other areas as well. "I had to find out how to pan for gold and what to do after you found the gold, where you looked for it," she says. "There was something called the benchland. They called them benches up above the spots where they thought the gold was, and they had to get permission to dig into the benches. When people found gold they were lighting cigars with five-dollar bills."

Many people did makes fortunes, she says, but "my grandparents never found a lot of gold, just enough to keep them going until they bought a general store. They gave up on gold mining because it was too hard." The novel follows this development as well as the young couple's struggle to maintain their Judaism and keep their marriage together when merely surviving was difficult enough. "Finesilver's Gold" is not only an adventure story but a love story, its author says.

Shalett Littman, meanwhile, spent time in Dawson City, the gold rush town where her grandparents lived, and compared the information in her grandmother's diary with historical records there. Retracing her ancestors' travels, she says, "was fun-traveling on funny roads, meeting nice Indians along the way. I loved that part. I wish I could have met Red Sky," the Indian guide who accompanied her grandmother (and the wedding gown she had sewed for herself back in the shtetl) across the treacherous Chilkoot Pass.

Her grandmother, who later lived in Seattle, where Shalett Littman would visit her, "was the most adored person in the family," she says. "Everyone loved her and I really wanted to memorialize her in some way. This seemed to be a good way."

"Tuesdays with Morrie" has nothing on "Chicago Afternoons with Leon" (AuthorHouse), author Kenan Heise's lively account of his recent adventures in the company of almost-centenarian and former alderman Leon Despres (the book's subtitle is "99 1/2 years old and looking forward," referring to Despres).

The slim volume has a very particular genesis, according to Heise, a former staff writer and reporter for the Chicago Tribune for 34 years. When Despres' wife, Marian, died in January after 75 years of marriage, Heise found his old friend "kind of down, not really looking forward to the future very much without Marian around."

Despres, of course, is the progressive, Jewish former 5th Ward alderman who was often called "the conscience of the City Council" and whose clashes with Mayor Richard J. Daley were legendary.

When Heise, a longtime friend of Despres, found him depressed, "I said, let's do something about it," he relates. "We decided to go out every week on Wednesday and get involved in the city, do the kinds of things Marian spurred him on to do. We went out and had adventures and experiences but in a meaningful way."

Heise says that one of his longtime connections to Despres is the fact that the two "have some common heroes," especially Dr. Emil Hirsch, the dynamic, nationally known rabbi of Sinai Congregation from 1880 until his death in 1923. Hirsch served as a surrogate father to Despres after his own father died when he was young, Heise says.

"I'm not Jewish, but my heart is there," he says. "I had read a lot about Emil Hirsch, and here's a man who was actually taken under Emil Hirsch's wing when his father died. I always respected what Emil Hirsch did in taking his religious background, history and heritage and using it to contribute to the community. I felt Emil Hirsch had made a real breakthrough in Chicago history, and here's his surrogate son." The knowledge strengthened his connection to Despres, he says.

The book documents Despres' re-engagement with the city he loves as he and Heise tackle issues relating to lakefront improvements, neighborhood parks, the Chicago Public Library, environmental issues, the city's art, architectural landmarks, schools, labor unions, segregation and plans for the 2016 Olympics.

One chapter covers the longtime friendship and admiration between Despres and another beloved Chicago nonagenarian, Studs Terkel (now 95). Touchingly, Terkel calls Despres "My North Star."

"This is a love story of Len (as Despres' friends call him) toward Marian," Heise says. "It's continuing what they did, a path they went down, a shared mission, continuing it even though she died."

Among the spots the two men visited were Glessner House, a historic South Side mansion that Marian Despres, an architectural preservationist, was instrumental in rescuing, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, where they discovered many connections to noted Chicago architect Alfred S. Altschuler, Despres' father-in-law. They also visited the Art Institute of Chicago and viewed a painting Despres' mother-in-law had donated in 1946.

Not all of their adventures were exercises in nostalgia. But by the end of the book, Despres has become fully reengaged with the city and its people and politics.

"He is very analytic about the city, a real activist and wants to make things better in the city. It was a very thrilling thing to me to be involved with him about that," Heise says.

"You always think, when the person you're married to dies, you are going to have sad memories. It's over," he says. "But there's another way to do it. This started that way, and the more it went along the more true it was."

When Jacob (later Jack) Stillerman was born just before midnight on July 4, 1915, "Dr. Greenberg showed me to Ma, her first American born baby, a boy. She called me 'Jacob, my Yankee Doodle Boychik,'" the author writes 92 years later.

That nickname became the title of two volumes of Stillerman's memoirs, "Yankee Doodle Boychik" and now, just published, "Yankee Doodle Boychik Grows Up," subtitled "A Chicago Memoir-Depression to 1933 World's Fair" (AuthorHouse).

The author's name will be familiar to generations of Chicagoans: Stillerman is a dentist who practiced in the Loop and Skokie for 50 years. He retired in 1987 and left Chicago for Los Angeles, where he now lives.

"I thought I'd come out to California after I retired and donate dental services for charity, but I couldn't do it because I didn't have the insurance," Stillerman said recently in a phone conversation. So, since he is the former editor of a national dental magazine and his wife Marci, an English major at the University of Chicago, is a writer, he decided to pen his memoirs.

Originally, he says, "it was designed to show what life was like in contrast to the way it is now, especially when the grandkids would hear about how horses and wagons were your mode of transportation. I've been blessed with a wonderful memory and I retain all these memories from way back."

The first volume of "Yankee Doodle Boychik" covers the years from Stillerman's birth in 1915 to his bar mitzvah; the new book, 1928 to 1933. It ends with "Lady Godiva" opening the 1933 World's Fair. Between its covers Stillerman paints a vivid picture of growing to manhood on Chicago's South Side, playing in an amateur jazz band during the Jazz Age, feeling the first stirrings of his sexuality, struggling to find the $15 needed to register for college and living through the stock market crash and the Great Depression.

"I was there at the World's Fair when Lady Godiva opened it," Stillerman recalls. I was at the opening of many of the important structures in Chicago and also during the sad things."

Later, Stillerman served in World War II and was in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Those memories are for a later volume, which the 92-year-old author will work on when he finishes his current project, a compilation of stories about Yankel, a junkman who lived in Englewood, and his horse.

As for "Yankee Doodle Boychik Grows Up," it is, more than anything, a portrait of Stillerman's quintessential Jewish mother, with her quaint expressions, fierce pride in her family and determination to see her son become, as she put it, "ah doctor ah dentist" despite his early, and secret, ambition to be an architect. (Ma won; what did you expect?)

Stillerman sets the tone early when he describes his grade school graduation, when he notices his mother sitting in the audience sobbing: "It embarrassed and troubled me to see her bawling when everyone around her was smiling. The graduation ceremony finished, I went to Ma and handed her the ribbon-tied diploma.

"'Why are you crying?' I embraced her. 'You're supposed to be happy.'

"She kissed the diploma and in her immigrant English answered, 'I'll give ah tell. Cuz, mine Yankee Doodle Boychik vill be first in the familia to go four years to high school.'

"Now I understood. They were tears of happiness. She was thinking of her dream. I, her pride and joy, born here in Chicago on the Fourth of July in 1915, was going to go to high school and college, and be called 'ah dentist ah doctor.'"

Robert A. Packer has become a one-man cottage industry for history and information on bygone Chicago synagogues and other buildings of Jewish interest.

The Chicago man, a private building inspector by profession, first became interested in the subject more than four years ago while working on a family history project. He then discovered nearly 500 synagogues and Jewish communal buildings in the Chicago area that were still standing but functioning as churches, condo buildings or office structures. He began photographing them and searching for information on their history.

A story on the project published in Chicago Jewish News generated so much interest from the public-including many non-Jews-that last year Packer published a book on the subject, "Doors of Redemption: The Forgotten Synagogues of Chicago and Other Communal Buildings."

Now Arcadia Publishing, a respected publisher of books on regional history, has picked up on Packer's work and a new book, "Chicago's Forgotten Synagogues," has just come out in Arcadia's "Images of America" series. It contains hundreds of photos of old synagogues and other Jewish communal buildings along with pictures of rabbis, confirmation classes, religious school students, newsletters, posters and placards and other historically significant material.

The first book "was a warm and fuzzy kind of book," Packer said recently. "But people were always asking me about facts. After I got together with Arcadia I took that subject to a different level to allow for more historical factual treatment."

With the aid of Chicago Jewish historians Irving Cutler and Norman Schwartz and others, "I found more historical data-newsletters, archival material, photos of people, that help to bring alive a lot of the photos" of synagogues and other buildings, he says. In addition, as he searched through this archival material he found more pictures that had not been published before.

Among the varied historical treasures are a photo of the original marble memorial donation tablets of the Northwest Home for the Aged, now a condo building; a High Holy Day ticket from Temple Ezra for services held at Dr. Preston Bradley's Peoples Church in Uptown; a photo of the 1952 graduating class of the Hebrew Parochial School of the Jewish Peoples Institute; a 1923 confirmation class photo from Temple Beth El; a 1910 image of the children's band of the Chicago Home for Jewish Orphans; and more.

The new book "has brought out a completely different audience, a more cosmopolitan one," Packer says. "With the first one I was talking to mostly senior groups about their lives, their parents' lives. Now I go to library programs throughout the area and speak to a more varied crowd of people, with anywhere from a third to a half of the groups non-Jewish." At a recent interview on a Polish radio station based in Cicero, "I got a great response to the book and the program, which really surprised me," Packer says.

"The interest is going way beyond the original demographic," he says. "Now it's a Chicago story, not just a Jewish story, and people seem very excited about this particular book."