individual readers send in a recommendation
Grandparents are certainly important family members. No scientific study is needed to verify that fact. When your grandparents are the President and the First Lady, however, it’s worth writing about. Agreed? That is exactly what Jenna Bush Hager has done with her new book Everything Beautiful in Its Time. The book is a collection of journal entries Hager began writing in 2018 when her grandmother
Do you remember when Linda Malcolm reviewed a book entitled The Windsor Knot? Linda enjoyed the light and clever mystery about Queen Elizabeth solving crimes while carrying out her officail duties. Intriguing, isn’t it? Now the book is out in paperback, for those of you who still read actual books, AND the author SJ Bennett has a sequel entitled All the Queen’s Men. There are
Today at the Sandcastle Book Club meeting, Martha Zink led the discussion of The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn. The novel was based on real women who worked as code-breakers at Betchley Park during and after World War II. Martha printed photos of the ‘real’ people who were featured in the book. Several club members shared their experiences touring Bletchley Park. Quinn has a new
While we are watching the Ukranian people fight Russian soldiers and dodge Russian missles, a few of us may be confused about the country itself. World leaders have bantered around different narratives about the nation for the past decade. To get a broader scope on the current conflict and to understand the roots of the issue, one needs to go back in history to a
During the 2021 Charleston Literary Festival, Kameelah Martin, Dean of the Graduate School at College of Charleston, interviewed Tiya Miles, whose book All That She Carried : The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2021. Yes, this book is non-fiction! Miles is a Professor of History at Harvard University, and she researched her own family
My Saint Simons friend Becky, who publishes an Instagram Blog entitled beckyonbooks, has a few new recommendations. The following are three books and her comments on why she liked them: The Maid, by Nita Prose A maid in a hotel discovers a body in a room she goes in to clean Becky says: There is an interesting cast of character and suspects; the writing is
The Paris Bookseller, Kerri Maher Historical fiction at its most authentic!! The Paris Bookseller is about real-life American Sylvia Beach, who opened a bookstore in Paris in 1919. The name of the bookstore was Shakespeare and Company, and it soon became a mecca for expatriate writers from America. (Readers will remember The Paris Wife, a story about Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley, who
If you read a lot in bed, either print material or on a tablet, you may have touble with your neck. I do because the book isn’t lined up with your eyes at the right angle so you tend to strain your neck. One of the many newsletters I receive had a link to an Interesting advertisement. Take a look at a few of the
For a long while now, I have stopped trying to defend the South: the place of my birth, the place my ancesters settled shortly after the United States became a country and the place I have lived my entire life. Of course I knew that the South committed treason by seceding from the nation. I realized there was no legitimate ‘lost cause.’ I was not
From Madeleine Kaye– Frances: Your post inspired me to search reviews of “The Sentence”, and both the NY Times and the Washington Post gave it such raves that I’m suggesting it for our local book club. It also reminded me of one of the most intriguing “pandemic” books I’ve read in years: “The Dog Stars” by Peter Heller. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune gives this description: In
