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...
The subtitle changes the false impression the title gives: The Women Who Created a President makes clear this is not a salacious tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s love life. Instead, as the author puts it in the Preface, “Theodore Roosevelt was not the impossibly hardy, self-made man of myth and lore. Far from it. The most masculine president in the American memory was in fact the product of...
For me this was one of the most surprising books I’ve read in years. Let’s see if I can capture it or at least give a hint of its unique qualities. Though her career involves writing, this is the author’s first book. She had always been drawn to the city (London), “into the world of politics and foreign policy, working as a political adviser,” as she describes...
I heard about this book from Jennifer and found it to be a great listen. It recounts the experiences of women in the CIA and is subtitled, The Secret History of Women at the CIA. Jennifer mentioned it in connection with the women analysts who had been gathering data about Osama bin Laden for years before 9/11. It was a source of frustration that despite what they knew, the attack was not thwarted...