I went to the Charlottesville Festival of the Book and heard about these books that just sound wonderful: At a session called Women in Transition these authors talked about and read from their novels: Reunion by Therese Fowler; the protagonist is a successful talk show host who gave up a baby as a teenager to avoid her mother's limited life as a single parent. The Safety of Deeper Water by...
The subtitle explains: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. The book begins with an image I have recounted several times now: in 1746 a French abbot named Jean-Antoine Nollet convinced 200 monks to stand in a line, stretching over a mile, each holding a 25-foot length of iron wire connected to his neighbors’ wires. Nollet had a crude...
Audiobook. This appealing story tells of the recovery from the events of World War II (the great fire) of several characters. The appealing main character, Aldred Leith, is in Japan and China to write a book in 1947. The head of the base where Leith stays in Japan is evil, matched in evilness only by his wife. Their son is dying and his 17 year old sister is his close...
Eucalyptus turns up as a favorite on many Australian book lists. It is a fairy tale of a story about a man who is able to buy a huge farm in western New South Wales because his insurance policy betting that his wife would have twins paid off. She and the boy baby died shortly thereafter, leaving Holland with a pile of money and a daughter Ellen. Holland bought a large farm...
Audiobook. Another inspiring book by Greg Mortenson about his work to build schools, especially for girls, in Pakistan; this one focuses on his work in Afghanistan. (See my entry about Three Cups of Tea.) He was sought out by an unlikely delegation, a group of Kyrgyz nomadic herders from the 100 mile long Wakhan Corridor, the very narrow panhandle of Afghanistan, who have been largely ignored...
Highly recommended by Mary Susan and I concur. There's just nothing like a wonderfully complex story in the hands of a great storyteller. I love it when you are not in a hurry to learn the end, but read happily all along the way. The narrator is Marlowe, a psychiatrist whose newest patient won't speak after having tried to attack a painting in the National Gallery of Art...
This is a warm and loving account of a year in the life of a village in Ireland set at a time I can't clearly identify, probably the 1960s. The central characters are a couple who moved to the country years before, leaving their successful careers in London behind. They are sensible and reasonable, the most conventional of the zany characters we meet. There's Jamesie...
Audiobook. A funny book about an aging male academic set in an Ivy with complications of race issues thrown in is hard to imagine. But it manages to be funny and is willing to make just about all of its characters look ridiculous. Howard is the most foolish and out of control; he's a white British Rembrandt scholar who would like to denounce Rembrandt in print if he could...
This is the story of two amazing characters. Archie was an Astor, heir to his part of a huge fortune who was orphaned at an early age. He, along with most other men in her orbit, fell in love with a novelist from an aristocratic cash poor family from Virginia who found his money very appealing and agreed to marry him. They were married for a few years of high drama; Archie experienced great...
Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist; he looks at our economic (and other) choices the way a psychologist would. He has devised countless experiments that demonstrate the choices we make are not rational. For example, a group of 100 students is given the following three choices for subscriptions to the Economist: an online only subscription for $59, a print-only subscription for $125 or a...