It's working again!!(hooray!!) turns out I wasn't doing a hard restart by waiting until the screen went gray. This time I held the button while I counted to 30 seconds. This time, it took awhile to restart and gave me the Amazon Kindle screen with a progress bar. Now it's back up and I can see everything and read my books again - including the one that I had the problem with.
I think I confused the thing... [read 2 pages - wait, I wanted that Anne McAffrey book - go to Amazon store, buy book, assign to collection, and back into the Elizabeth Moon book. Read 4 pages - oops, I only bought the first in the trilogy - go back to Amazon store, buy next two books, assign to collection, and back into the Elizabeth Moon book. Read 6 pages - ok, very distracted now, etc....] Guess it serves me right for giving into my bad impulses and spending too much money on eBooks when I have the hard copies 4 feet behind me on my bookshelf.
The trials of a bibliophile...
Thanks again - you've really been wonderful in helping me out here! Next up, updating the author and author sort fields so that I can finally sort by author...