3 families in the early 1900’s cross paths. They differ in temper and ideals and life circumstances and thus the book becomes a study in difference in class in the English society, the social and economical differences from the lower to the upper middle class. The Schlegels are cultural and live their lives based on lofty ideals. The Wilcoxes are practical and rich and the Basts are in denial of their poverty and what it will take to get them out of it. I love […]
An Interesting Family Archive from an Interesting Time
I was granted an ARC of this book via NetGalley in return for a fair and honest review. This book’s expected publication date is June 29, 2014. There are lots of books out there about Nazi Germany and World War II. Literally thousands and thousands. But there are few that bring the realities of day to day life which Germans were experiencing to light for the modern reader. By choosing to share the cache of letters she found in her family home, Hedda Kalshoven brings […]
So Much to Recommend It, But It Didn’t Live Up: Guests on Earth
Lee Smith’s Guests on Earth had so much to recommend it. I love books about my home state, North Carolina; it promised Zelda Fitzgerald as a main character, and was centered at the Highland Hospital, a mental institution which burned to the ground in 1948, claiming the lives of nine women; one of them the world-famous Zelda herself. That sounded interesting to me, so I dove in with high hopes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as great as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t as awful as it could […]
Serena by Ron Rash
“Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better” It’s been a week since I finished Serena, and I’m still not sure how to talk about it. The basics: it’s set in the 192os; Serena and George Pemberton, recently wed, have moved to a logging camp in North Carolina to make their fortune. Right from the start, the Pembertons encounter trouble when a woman named Rachel and her father confront George at the train station: George got Rachel pregnant the last […]
Not What I Was Looking For
I work in public health emergency preparedness, so this book about the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic has been on my to-read list for a while. People rave about it; even though it’s about 450 pages of small print, I was ready to dive into it because I already have an interest in this sort of thing, I have some background in working on preparing for a pandemic, and I’ve found that histories of diseases and other medical issues (“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Ghost […]
On Slavery and Body-Snatching
Nemo Johnston is an intelligent black man with a strong instinct for survival. He is also a slave in antebellum South Carolina, and is purchased by Dr. Frederick Johnston and his colleagues of the South Carolina Medical College in 1857 to serve as a janitor, a butler and, most importantly, as a body-snatcher (or “resurrectionist”) for the school’s desperate anatomy department. Nemo undertakes the job with the understanding that it is primarily black bodies he will be unearthing for the dissections, but any sense of […]
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