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I’m not a fan of horror, but I’m a huge fan of Douglas Preston. He recently served a term as president of the Author’s Guild where he fought against the A.I. machines stealing our work. But his talents lie in his writing abilities: journalism, nonfiction, and fiction. His article on the Amanda Knox case is…
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How can one not be tempted to read a Booker Prize-winning book that comes in at just over 200 pages and has cover blurbs like “Ravishingly beautiful” and “Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage…and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye.” I was ravished! Seriously, this a eye-opening book. On the surface, it covers a…
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Seldom does a book come along that both infuriates and leaves one gaping in awe. This work is subtitled, “Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the challenge to Victorian medicine that changed women’s lives forever.” That’s a tall order, and Reeder does not disappoint, though “forever” may be a stretch. This is not precisely a biography…
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This 2023 book is by the same authors as “The Personal Librarian”: Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. The story is a fictionalized look at the close friendship and activism of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, two women from entirely different places and backgrounds. Bethune, an educated Black woman, has learned to work the…
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This classic, banned book was a book club read for me in 2024. Told in epistolary style, the main character, Celie, first writes to God and later to her sister, Nettie. The books themes on racism, incest, lesbianism and domestic violence in the American South, all contribute to the controversy surrounding Walker’s prize-winning novel. Celie…
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Many pundits have likened our present American society to that of the Gilded Age, making The Cold Millions a relevant historical novel for our times. Set in Spokane, Washington, in 1909, it focuses on the labor struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the face of a corrupt justice system, bought outright…
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Today’s review is a two-fer: “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, and “The Soul of an Octopus” by Sy Montgomery. I’ve had the latter book on my TBR shelf for several years, but it wasn’t until I read Van Pelt’s novel that I pulled it down. Van Pelt clearly drew much inspiration from Montgomery’s…
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This novel is “based on the true story of a sometime hero” named Samuel Solonsch, a British-German Jew. Solonsch also used an alias, John Douglas, and was an ancestor of the author’s husband. The story begins in a POW hospital camp in Batavia during World War II, narrated by a Dutch prisoner who befriends the…
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“In some quarters nowadays it is fashionable to dismiss the balance of nature as a state of affairs that prevailed in an earlier, simpler world—a state that has now been so thoroughly upset that we might as well forget it….The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a…
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This work of historical fiction is based on the real life of Belle Marion Greener, a Black American woman who passed for white as Belle de Costa Green. An educated intellectual, she turned her back on her heritage (pressed by her mother) in order to achieve professional success. Due to her experience as a campus…
Eilene Lyon 