I read another Christmas present yesterday, this one from my friend Fernando. The book is Leon’s Story by Leon Walter Tillage, as told to and illustrated by artist Susan L. Roth. Leon was born in 1936 into a sharecropper family, descendants of slaves and still subject to a no-win existence of working hard with not [...]
Continue Reading →Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway, by Celia Blue Johnson is explained by its subtitle: “Stories of Inspiration Behind Great Works of Literature”. Blue Johnson takes us into the years, weeks, or moments before a great writer put pen to paper and explains how characters, plots, and backgrounds come from personal experiences — everything from being in [...]
Continue Reading →A Book of Secrets by Michael Holyrod tells the true stories of women of means but not of certain parentage, power, or steady money; in varying degrees of success, these women forged lives and loves, and wrote tons of letters (luckily for all of us). Holyrod turns those lives, loves, and letters into a delightful [...]
Continue Reading →The subtitle of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is A New Zealand Story. I would have amended that to A New Zealand Love Story. Christina Thompson travels to New Zealand as a post-grad scholar/adventurer, and finds unparalleled beauty, stark reality, and a Maori man. Level-headed and practical (she is [...]
Continue Reading →Given the title of this review, you might think Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard (translated by David McLintock) is a depressing read. But despite the tortured nature of the individual souls of the two friends, one friend being Paul Wittgenstein (nephew of the great philosopher) and the other being a thinly-disguised version of author Bernhard, [...]
Continue Reading →The Hare with Amber Eyes is the Ephrussi family history, told through the words of artist and heir Edmund de Waal. That he is an artist is important to understanding the nature of the book: the writing is not so much a narrative as a visual, tactile, and atmospheric rendering of a time long in [...]
Continue Reading →What really struck me when reading Jennifer Armstrong’s thoroughly delightful Why? Because We Still Like You: An Oral History of the Mickey Mouse Club is just how hard it was to be a Mousketeer. Armstrong interviewed past cast members, everyone from Cubby O’Brien to Sharon Baird to Karen Pendleton (Annette Funicello can no longer give [...]
Continue Reading →Kirkus Reviews has named Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, to its list of recommended summer reading for women. What’s on your list this summer? I have been getting in shape for my summer reading and I’m ready to leap in! For months, people around me have been gearing up for [...]
Continue Reading →Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is out! So far, the reactions have been wonderful. Thank you to all the readers who have been so welcoming and kind! I am making new friends, reconnecting with old friends, and I am continuously awed by the support of my stalwart Westport companions in reading. Together, old friends and [...]
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