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...
The enthusiasm of KevinfromCanada and Reading Matters led me to The Light of Amsterdam. The three stories we hear are about individuals from Belfast who independently go to Amsterdam for a weekend and intersect very little. Karen is a single mother in her early 40s whose defining moment was her abandonment when she was pregnant by her boyfriend. She devoted her life to filling her...
This appears to be a very thorough look at the topic of British aristocrats' interest in and experience of the American West during the period. Views of the West, and especially of Native Americans, were popularized by the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Charles Murray, and George Caitlin. Their rhapsodic descriptions of the landscape and the intriguing lives of the...
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...
The account of Robyn Davidson's travel from Alice Springs across the desert to the sea in 1977 by camel is the story of a woman discovering her strength, a tale of camels, a paean to the desert, and an appreciation of Aboriginal culture. The trip was six months long and she traveled 1700 miles. Davidson, who was born in 1950, grew up in Queensland and was a member of the Push in Sydney...
Richard Flanagan has been on my radar screen for ages, but for one reason or another, I just hadn’t read any of his books. I chose this one for convenience — it was available at the public library and a good size to travel with — so I don’t know how it ranks among his other books. It has left me wanting to read others. It is unusual in its approach of telling two barely...
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...
In this memoir of his time under threat of the Ayatollah Khomeini's sentence of death against him beginning in 1989, Salmon Rushdie details the events of his life, lets us see how his books come to life, and ruminates on religion. He was surprised by the fatwa, thinking that The Satanic Verses was a less political book than others he had written, and of course had no idea of the...
Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. Reading Matters. Book available in November, kindle version available now. The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally. Reading Matters. Not listed in Amazon yet. Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek. His other two books were wonderful, especially An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves...
Stephen Newman grew up in Los Angeles, son of a Polish immigrant father and Cuban immigrant mother. His father worked in a fur storage operation and an important moment in Stephen's life is his father's whack, administered as Stephen was dancing around in Marilyn Monroe's mink stole, a story referred to more than once by the adult Stephen. We hear nothing of his college years...