As someone whose ranching family lived through the Dust Bowl and its series of droughts to the point of nearly losing land that had been in the family since the 1870s, I found Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s fascinating. Author Worster does a bang-up job...
I am not usually one for humorous books, but Tartufo caught my eye, largely because it is set in Italy where I lived for a number of years. The village of Lazzarini Boscarino is dying. Young folks have all left, heading to Milan or other big cities. The old mayor died...
Through sheer serendipity, All That She Carried is the third book in a row I’ve read about the place of objects in our lives and memories. The first two were fiction: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson and The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk. All That...
The Museum of Innocence is a lovely novel by Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk. Set in 1970s Istanbul, post Ataturk and during several coups, it captures the sense of a country tied to the past while striving for but not quite reaching the future. Pamuk’s...
I must confess I purchased Behind the Scenes at the Museum thinking it was in one of my favorite genre: museum and art-related. However, it was not that at all, but I loved it, nonetheless. The narrator, Ruby Lennox, starts her life at the moment of her conception in...
I chose to read White Mulberry because the author told her grandmother’s story, as I did in one of my own novels, and I wanted to know how she treated her family history. Miyoung, a poor Korean country girl living during the Japanese occupation of Korea just prior to...
Tooth and Claw is the twenty-fifth volume in the Sheriff Walter Longmire series—and like the Hillermans' Leaphorn/Chee novels, I've read and enjoyed every volume. Tooth and Claw doesn’t disappoint. Though it is quite short at 208 pages, it packs a whallop of non-stop...
A Thousand Times Before is a sapphic love and marriage between two women, Ayukta and her wife Nadya. They are pulled apart by one issue: Nadya wants a child, but Ayukta doesn’t. Aykuta has a secret she doesn’t tell her wife until she is about to lose her over the...
The Bastard Brigade is nonfiction that reads like a thriller. It is the gripping story of the development of nuclear bombs during the 1930s and 1940s and the scientists and spies who are determined to keep the Third Reich from developing the bomb. In scope it is...
As the child of an intolerant oil field worker, I grew up all across the western United States. Little did I know that when I read Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West I would recounter many of the places I’d lived. Bandit...
Zeke and Ned is a western in which Larry McMurtry works his magic, as he did in his magnificent, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Lonesome Dove series, in capturing the essence of life during America's more rustic years. In this case, he and his co-author fictionalize true...
Demon Copperhead, the protagonist of this eponymously titled novel, is born in trailer house in Lee County in the southern mountains of Appalachia to a teenaged mother with substance abuse issues. To tone down her labor pains, she overdoses as her son comes into the...
Stolen Lives is the second in Joyce Yarrow’s Zahara series. In the first, Zahara and the Lost Books of Light, Seattle-based journalist Alienor Crespo decides to document her journey to recover her Sephardic family’s past when Spain offers citizenship to those...
In Zahara and the Lost Books of Light, the first of two books in Joyce Yarrow's Zahara series, when Spain offers citizenship to descendants of the Jewish community who were expelled in the past, young Seattle-based journalist Alienor Crespo decides to document her...
Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari is a dual time-line story, one set in the 1950s and the other in 1995; both concern Yemeni Jews who have immigrated to Israel and Israeli politics during each timeframe. The novel begins in a wretched, over-crowded...
Ahmet Atlan is a Turkish author/journalist born into a family of authors. Like his father and brother, he was jailed unjustly after writing an article dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide. After a failed July 2016 coup d'état in 2016 against President...
With a teenager in the house again after many years, I’ve been reading some Young Adult books to encourage their reading and discuss with them. I have always enjoyed Rick Riordan’s books, both his adult Tres Navarre mystery series and his many YA series. In the Magnus...
The Summer Before deals with child sexual abuse in an unusual and somewhat oblique way. The story focuses on the family, specially the daughter, of the perpetrator of the abuse and the rippling effects of that abuse. Madeline Plympton and Summer Starr are BFFs and...
John Henry (Doc) Holiday and his cousin, Mattie, are childhood lovers held apart by religion (her family is Catholic while his is Presbyterian) and consanguinity (they are first cousins). Doc moves West in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis but continues a long-term...
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession is a fascinating psychological profile of Stéphane Breitwieser and his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, as they weave their way across Europe stealing art and artifacts from museums, averaging...
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