The following three books could easily fly under your radar UNLESS you pay close attention to this post! Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, by Maud Newton How many of you have sent your DNA to ancestry.com? For those of us who are very curious and do not have a genealogist in the family, we may have done so. I know that I did.
Some of you may ask, “Who is Frank Bruni”? Frank Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times. He is also known for his best selling book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. This book was written for high school students and their parents in an attempt to deconstruct the college admissions process. It’s too bad some well-known celebrities didn’t
The person in the above picture is Reginald Dwayne Betts, and he is sitting in the National Building Museum in front of one of the specially designed book shelves he created through his Freedom Reads organization. Bookshelves like the one in the photo have been installed in two prisons, one in Massachusetts and one in Louisiana. By the end of 2023, Betts hopes to have
This year’s PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion is Oprah Winfrey. Board Vice President Mary Haft speaks of Winfrey in glowing words: “Oprah Winfrey is a literary force field. She has been like a lighthouse standing sentry and shining a beacon of light onto literature and into the lives of writers and readers.” The PEN/Faulkner Foundation is an independent non-profit arts organization dedicated to promoting writing. It supports
This post is a tribute to Thornton Wilder. April 17 was his birthday. He would have been 125 years old. Wilder was the only person to win a Pulitzer Prize for both literature and drama. He recieved the Pulitzer for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and the plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Do you remember
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: THE REPORTERS WHO TOOK ON A WORLD AT WAR by Deborah Cohen Cohen give readers an inside glimpse of the oft-times reckless reporters who covered the brewing crisis in Europe prior to and during WWII. Before we had 24/7 TV coverage, these American reporters were the sole source of news from the front. The Wall Street Journal says “(Ms.
This time of year, many book clubs decide which books they are going to read for the coming year. This is true if the club uses a ‘school’ calendar with the year ending with May and begining with September. Usually, when someone suggests a book for the entire club, that person has read the book herself. Sometimes that is even a requirement. There are, however,
Most of you are members of a book club; and you notice at the end of many books, the editor will include discussion questions for the book clubs. Frankly, I’ve never been impressed with most of the questions because they don’t seem to provoke critical thinking. Nevertheless, these questions often serve as a starting point that can lead to other questions. I happened upon an
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
