I’ve read this book before (maybe twice before) but it had been so long that I felt it was due for a re-read and review. Obviously, I’m a fan. Connie Willis can be a bit verbose and repetitive here and there, but I eat it all up anyway. (I also love J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, T.H. White, and George R.R. Martin, so I can deal with a bit of verbosity and lengthy description). The story starts at Oxford University in the year 2054 in a […]
Capital Dames
This review is for the audiobook version of Civil War Dames. I enjoyed listening to this book, but I did have a hard time following the timeline. It was difficult to know when she was quoting the women and when she was summarizing. I also had a hard time keeping track of whose story she was telling. I understand the need to go back and forth between the women as time progressed, rather than telling each story fully and repeating the benchmark events, but […]
Treacly Secrets of the Been There, Done That Sisterhood
I received this book as a gift either the Christmas before last, or my last birthday, and decided it was time to check it off the old to do list. I have read other books by Rebecca Wells a while ago (8ish years?) and remember enjoying them. She is the author of “Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood” which is part of the “Ya Ya series” that made the rounds in popular culture and was turned into a feature film in the early 2000s. […]
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Feminists
Gloria Steinem’s first book in more than two decades is classified as a memoir, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Although this first chapter starts like a traditional autobiography, documenting her unconventional childhood as the daughter of a travelling antique salesman and a mentally ill mother, the rest of the book is about the people she’s met. Her book is about the mothers and stewardesses and cabdrivers she’s talked to, the colleges where she’s spoken and the other feminist workers she’s worked with. At 81, […]
“To Be a Godey’s Lady….”
In my continual search for quantitative research on Godey’s Lady’s Book, I came across “Mr. Godey’s Ladies: Being a Mosaic of Fashions and Fancies” by Robert Kunciov, which after the disappointment of the “Sarah Josepha Hale” book, I was leery. I was pleasantly surprised however, by the wonderful reproductions and a few color plates of the original etchings, as well as the author’s selections of excerpts from the original text. He begins with a chronology of the types of fashions, detailing the trends, colors, and […]
Everything History Should Not Be
I’m so angry that THIS was my half-cannon ball….. I’m working on researching “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for an annual historic fashion show I run, and there’s a striking lack of historical documentation about this famous magazine other than manually plowing through 60 years worth of the magazine itself, and frankly, I don’t have that kind of time. So I thought I would do a bit of digging about the founder and his editor, Sarah Hale, to shed some light on the gaping holes I have […]