Before I listened to this book I knew there were different views of it. KevinfromCanada found it sentimental and like sponge cake compared to his preferred fruitcake. Tony's Book World deems it a classic and compares it to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Harold, recently retired from his job at the brewery to a life that revolves around mowing the lawn and...
Mamah Borthwick Cheney left her husband and two children for Frank Lloyd Wright who had designed their house in Oak Park. They were together from 1907 until 1914 when she and her two children (and four other men) were murdered by a crazed man who worked for them. This fictionalized account of their time together is based on much documentation including newspaper accounts and letters...
I listened to this Man Booker Prize winning 550 pager published in 1990 that was recommended to me by Sue. And loved it. A.S. Byatt creates the world of two Victorian poets, their friends and loved ones, their poetry, and the dramatic story of their connection. The secrets of their romance were uncovered for us by a disparate group of scholars with competing interests who each have...
Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing is a thoroughly entertaining book with important insights about connections between human and other animals' health. The authors, a cardiologist from the UCLA Medical Center and a health writer have described many conditions that we thought of as human illness that are shared with other species. Though the...
A book based on some 800 letters written in Japanese over a 40-year period by a British army officer to a woman he loved would be a rare find. In this case the authors have come upon a real treasure, as the life of the letter-writer, Arthur Hart-Synnot, is as dramatic as any Australian writer could summon up. SPOILER ALERT: I am just going to spill the beans about this book because knowing in...
Beautiful Ruins is beautiful and smart in a way that made me think of Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility (my take on it here) in that it is well-plotted and the characters are appealing. The time and setting range from World War II in Italy to 1962 on Italy’s Cinque Terre coast and Rome to the present day in Hollywood, Seattle, and northern Idaho. Oh yes, and there’s a brief time...
It was quite moving to hear this admirable woman reading the book she wrote about her family and the events which occurred around the time of her birth. Her parents were from Czechoslovakia and her father was a diplomat when the Sudeten Germans became allied with Hitler. You may remember the most remarkable part of this story, that it was only when she became well-known in this...
This book of 35 stories by an Israeli writer brings to mind Kafka, in that you must be prepared for the main character to turn into a cockroach. The tone and underlying message are generally much lighter than Kafka’s and in some cases the stories are sweet and straight forward. Some of my favorites, though, are those in the absurdist vein. One, called Unzipping, starts this way: “It...
I began this book knowing little about Cleopatra — I didn't even see the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton extravaganza — so I had lots to learn. Stacy Schiff's book tells what little is reliably known about her, while evaluating some of the less likely stories about her. It's good to remember that the history of a woman who was a lover of Julius Caesar and...
Eric Weiner, a former NPR reporter, writes about his "Flirtations with the Divine," as his subtitle has it. I heard him speak at the Charlottesville Festival of the Book and thought, rightly as it turns out, he would make a great reader of his book, given his experience as a reporter. And he was funny as well as instructive. He undertakes to "find his god" and...