The dozen stories in this book are very intense, beautifully told stories that are as unsparing as you can imagine. A small dose of this view of humanity is the right size dose. Some stories are set in London, others in an Ireland that seems long past. There's the story of the twosome, matched by a dating agency, meeting in a theatre bar (brilliant idea, when everyone...
This is a wonderfully funny pop-history book. Sarah Vowell travels to every conceivable location with any connection to the three presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. And along with the appealing travelogue, you get some history. The odd fact is a specialty for her — for example, did you know that Robert Todd Lincoln, Lincoln’s son, was present (or in the...
Audiobook. The story of a year in a village visited by the plague in the 17th century doesn't sound like a pleasant one. When the pastor talks the village into shutting itself off from the rest of the world to keep from spreading the death, you know it will not be fun. (There actually was a village in Derbyshire where villagers did not flee, but shut themselves in.) The earthy...
I thought sure I'd enjoy another Penelope Lively book, but this one didn't do much for me. I loved Moon Tiger and City of the Mind, but not this one. The characters have some appeal — Howard Beamish is a paleontologist who studies fossils of life that didn't make the cut of evolution. The story of Lucy Faulkner is that at nine years old she was the sensible...
Kindlebook. Jennifer recommended this book about a neurobiologist who had a hemorrhage in her left brain. She knew what was happening to her and the story of the stroke itself and her 8 year struggle to recover is wrenching and enlightening. As the damage of the stroke spread on the morning it occurred, she worked to get help for herself, but had trouble summoning the telephone number of her...
The narrator tells his story to an apparent stranger he meets in a market in Lahore over a cup of tea, then a long dinner. His tone is very proper, dispassionate and distant as he tells the details of his great success as a student at Princeton, then as an employee in the top levels of the world of finance and the end of this world for him and his return home to Lahore. He is...
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. 2006. Reviewed in New Yorker.
Audiobook. The subtitle gives you a good idea about this book: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. It is the true story of a talented musician struck down with schizophrenia when he was a young man at Julliard in the early 70s. When the author, a columnist for the L.A. Times, encounters him, he had been living on the very mean streets for 30 years. Over...
Audiobook. I listened to an abridged version of the book, read by the author. He does have an amazing and unique background — the Kansas grandparents made their way to Hawaii after World War II, his mother married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian, his father was persistent enough to find a college in the US that would not charge him tuition. Quite a story. In Dreams from My Father Obama...
The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick about the WWII era Vermeer forger. Reviewed in the Post July 08.