Autumn Laing tells her story over the course the last year of her life; she has become a crotchety old woman, having been a self-destructive teenager and later a volatile woman. After twelve years in a peaceful marriage, living on a farm where she and her husband preside over a group of artistic friends, her husband brings home the artist Pat Donlon. Their lives are never the same;...
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...
Tony's review of Never Any End to Paris drew me to this book, along with the fact that Paris is much on my mind these days (more about that later). You can't resist a writer who begins his memoir/fiction by telling about being disqualified from a Hemingway look-alike contest in Key West because he does not look at all like Hemingway. I don't know how many years I spent...
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 took longer to get things moving in Hilary Mantel's second book in a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, but ultimately, the book was quite satisfying. The first was Wolf Hall, you can see my take on it here. She tells us about the low-born Thomas and his band of young men who try to impose order on Henry VIII's world; no small matter, given Henry's problem creating...
What an odd mix of farce and academic exposition about Bruegel is this book. How he conceived of a book with both a car chase and a consideration of the iconography and, get this, iconology, of Bruegel is a mystery to me. A philosopher on sabbatical, his art historian wife, and new baby go out to the countryside outside London where Martin gets a look at a painting in his...
I became interested in Roger Williams when I read Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates (reviewed here). She described Williams as a troublesome teenager to the Puritans, a very religious man devoted to conscience as he defined it. Now that I have read this book, I have come to think of him as a brilliant and original thinker. In England he was an assistant to the great...
Prairie Fever by Peter Pagnamento. Toffs try Kansas and Iowa in the late 19th century. Reviewed by NYT. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. Review in NYT makes it sound excellent. Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the next 1,500 years by Philip Jenkins. Fifth Century happenings. Saw a...
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...
Because the skies were cloudy here in Virginia at the time of the recent transit of Venus, I decided to read the book instead. I had admired The Great Fire very much, but that did not prepare me for the tour de force that is this book. It ranges far and wide in geography and time and uses language that is breathtaking and demands (and deserves) much re-reading. We meet Caroline and Grace Bell...