NEWSMAKERS

No stopping him: Journalist William Shirer’s 15 books include compelling works on Mahatma Gandhi’s India and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. After all that nobody would blame Shirer, 85, if he wanted to rest, but the author of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” says he wants to keep working. At his home in Lenox, Mass., Shirer said he is writing a book about why Leo Tolstoy walked out on his wife into the Moscow night at age 82 and never returned. It’s a question that has tantalized him for 20 years. “How could this happen to such a great man?” Shirer asked.

The Earth did not move: The diary of author Ernest Hemingway’s first love, the model for the heroine in his novel “A Farewell to Arms,” was opened to the public at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Agnes von Kurowsky’s notes reveal that despite Hemingway’s depiction of a flourishing love between them, their relationship was fleeting. Hemingway, 19, fell in love with nurse Von Kurowsky, 26, in a Milan hospital in 1918 after driving a Red Cross ambulance in World War I. She died in 1985.

No Halloween pranks: There’s no sales clerk or cash register at Harold Lineberger’s pumpkin stand 20 miles west of Charlotte, N.C. Only a wooden box. “Pumpkins $1, Honor System,” a sign says. Lineberger says 99% of his customers abide by the system. “Most are families buying them as a treat for the kids,” he said. “People just don’t steal with their families in the car.”

Don’t leaf me: Florists, nurseries and supermarkets in South Florida are selling the same leaves that folks up north are raking up and trying to get rid of. “It brings back that northern atmosphere,” said Pam Halliday, a manager at Frank’s Nursery in Tamarac, where a bag of six to eight leaves costs $3.99 to $4.99. “People come in bunches to buy them. We’re sold out.”