Marmee & Louisa, The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother In Marmee & Louisa, LaPlante has given us a rich but compact description of many elements of 19th century America: family life and relations, the abolitionist movement, the surge for women’s rights, religious and Utopian movements, and the attempts at educational and […]
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Simple Dreams, A Musical Memoir If you’re looking for a kiss and tell, gossipy read, this is not it. Instead, Linda Ronstadt’s beautifully written story is about growing up in the hot desert of Tucson, Arizona, spending an idyllic childhood on horseback, singing songs around campfires with her family and her Mexican adopted family members
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Beverly Jones Jewelry Designs Wow inspiring design, meticulous craftsmanship, and great attention to detail seamlessly team up with comfortable wearability in a democratic environment where a precious gem might share space with a found object or a natural oddity. Example – silver pendant with a meteorite, a ruby and a piece of petrified armadillo hide.
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Moby Dick “Call me Ishmael.” It may be the most quoted opening line in fiction, deployed by literary dilettantes to impress their friends. But how many have actually read the book? It took me forty years of procrastination to get around to it. Ishmael turns out to be a very leisurely narrator. His story moves
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The Silent Wife The Silent Wife kept me turning pages all night. But this thriller is a cut above the usual escapist fiction. Not only are the characters people I could actually identify with, but the plot develops from their own flawed actions, rather than improbable situations they somehow find themselves drawn into. Jodi is
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Crazy for the Storm This hair raising, yet inspiring memoir, chronicles a tragic accident after Norman Ollestad’s chartered airplane slams into the San Gabriel Mountains which leaves Norman Jr., age 11, to face certain death, scaling down a vertical icy mountain, surviving against the odds. Norman’s detailed account of the crash and the emotional toll
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Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook The publication of Kitchen Confidential in 2000 propelled Anthony Bourdain to global stardom as an author and TV personality. Medium Raw, published ten years later, is a sequel. In his passionate and highly opinionated style, Bourdain holds forth on the
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power Like some latter-day Edward Gibbon chronicling not the Roman Empire but the life of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has devoted decades of his life to his multi-volume biography. This is book four of the series. Caro takes us behind the scenes to witness Johnson’s failure
A Thousand Acres Here is a book which I bought from the Friends’ Best Used Book Sale. Knowing nothing about it, I simply trusted the gold Winner of the Pulitzer Prize label on the cover and enjoyed every word. This is good literature folks, not ‘brain candy,’ and reminds me a little of the style
Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 This engaging book is only a partial biography of the tragic poet, and you don’t have to be a Plath fan to enjoy it. In talking about Plath’s one month in New York as a guest editor at Mademoiselle Magazine, along with 19 other college
Summer 2013 Review Read More »
