New Life for "On the Town."

British religious scholar Karen Armstrong. Her new book, a bestseller in England, is "A History of God" (Knopf). "All religions have been designed to help us touch the God in each other" Armstrong says of her research, which traces 4000 years of Monotheism in the form of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The author, a Catholic nun for seven years in the 1960's, left the order to take a degree at Oxford, and now teaches at the Leo Baeck College for the study of Judaism.

How did a second tier New York department store called Bloomingdale's --where the city's domestic help bought their uniforms in 1950-- evolve into "the most celebrated store in the world": the pinnacle of designer fashion and self promotion? The answer can be found in Marvin Traub, the former chairman of Bloomingdale's for forty years. His new memoir is called "Like No Other Store..." (Times Books).