The inspiration for this fictional book is a woman named Margaret Fishback, who was the highest-paid female advertising copywriter during the 1930s based on her work for R.H. Macy’s. She was a published poet and a feminist. The author learned of her from Angela McClendon Ossar, her high school friend who became the archivist for Fishback’s papers when they were donated to the...
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...
I have rarely read a book written in the second person, especially when most of the time the “you” referred to is the unnamed narrator. This seemingly awkward approach was surprisingly effective. Somehow it resulted in an intensely personal storytelling device. The narrator is a Black man living in London whose family is from Ghana. He is a photographer, or at least is agreeable to...
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 fun book this was. I enjoyed every minute that I listened to it. It is a fictional story of a gathering of actual women crime writers who work together to solve a murder. The story is told by Dorothy Sayers who along with Agatha Christie, gather the women together. The others are Ngaio Marsh, Marjorie Allingham, and Emma Orczy. I was a big fan of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey series...
I have now finished a book that will be on my “favorites for the year” list and to my surprise it is a book of short stories. I will begin with a quote from Kim’s Reading Matters that convinced me to read it. I found what she said to be exactly what I loved about it: It’s a deliciously entertaining book and reading one or two 10-page stories in bed every night proved a...
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...
I read this book by a beloved Irish author sometime before I began this blog so that means sometime before 2006. I had remembered only that it focused on a woman who was a composer and that I loved it. Now that I have read it again, I still love the book and it is bristling with post-it notes. The passages I marked are largely in two categories: one is the effort by a wonderful writer to...