Initially I found this book to be a bit preachy with its earnest messages, but I was won over by the author’s unique life and her willingness to face the great complexities of life that affect us all. And of course she could write about those complex issues with clarity. She was born in Korea and lived there her first five years. Her father, a multi-generational Tacoma-based Jewish man...
This is my third Mark Kurlansky book and I marvel at his enthusiasm for his subjects and for his love of factual information. And a firehose of information it was; this time he writes about “The Adventures of a Curious Man,” Bob Birdseye, the man associated with frozen food, for whom the Birds Eye brand of frozen vegetables is named. When I wrote about Kurlansky’s book Cod, I...
The subtitle of this non-fiction book is Ireland to India with a Bicycle and just reading it was exhausting. It’s hard to imagine someone could do this, but doing it in 1963 is truly amazing. I must resist the urge to recount all Dervla’s stories, but hope that a few of them will give the feel for how she coped with the challenges and what beauty and joy she found. To begin this epic...
There is now a genre “people writing about their connection to wild animals” and in my experience two stand out: H is for Hawk and Raising Hare. This one is remarkably insightful and like the other two, successfully interests us in the human involved and what the human thinks. Frieda Hughes is a poet and a painter and was living in the countryside in Wales during the time George was...
This is another short book, an essay, really, in the Australian series Writers on Writers that took me back to books I loved. While there’s much in it about Carey’s life and all his novels, the focus is on his book True History of the Kelly Gang, the fictional account of the 1870s outlaw who is a heroic figure in Australia. The oppression of the Irish, which the British carried with...
When I read that Helen Garner, one of my favorite writers, had written a book describing the season of Australian Rules Football for under 16s that her grandson was playing, I knew I had a treat in store. One day she saw her youngest grandson with a football and realized he was almost six feet tall. She asked Ambrose (called Amby) if she could come to his practices. She explained to Amby she had...
Another wonderful book by Russell Shorto. He describes himself as a writer of narrative history, making a living telling non-fiction stories about the past. About his book Descartes Bones, I wrote that I enjoyed the digressions and reflections as “we wended our way through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.” So yes, Shorto is a storyteller. And in this case, the subject is...
Two days last week were completely disrupted by the appearance of this book, written by my friend Jim Travisano. I just couldn’t stop reading. This is the tale of Jim’s bike trip across Europe in 1984 that he took with a cycling partner Nancy, a woman he met on a supported bike trip in New England. They had both experienced major changes in their lives and decided to undertake a trip...
What a remarkable bit of history this author has brought to life. I had never heard the story of Ellen and William Craft who escaped slavery in 1848, traveling from Macon, Georgia by public transport in disguise. Ellen was enslaved in the household of her half-sister. Her husband William was a skilled cabinet-maker who had been allowed to keep a bit of the money he earned. Their escape plan...
This is the second book by this author that I have found to be stimulating and exciting. The previous one, Descartes’ Bones, explored the intersection of faith and reason. This one describes the change in leadership of Manhattan in 1664 from Dutch to English, a change that resulted in a merger of aspects of two cultures that made New York City the richly diverse and financially successful...