I love history because people have already done most things that you can imagine. This book looks at pivotal events in Spain in 1492 including the rise of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and their attempt to consolidate power, and their use of the Inquisition and the persecution of Jews by the Roman Catholic Church …
Continue reading “Dighton Spooner, Associate Director, Career Planning”
I find myself drawn to examinations of the outer limits of consumer practices: trafficking in kidneys and other organs, adoption agencies that work as sales agents, mail order marriages. This chilling novel tells of one such “arrangement,” that of Ralph Truitt and his mail-order bride, Catherine Land. Truitt is, on the surface, a staid, turn-of-the-century …
Over the winter break, on a road trip that took me and my wife from the southern tip of Florida to Chicago, I read Saul Bellow’s recently published letters. They were perfect for digesting in bite-sizes on planes, in hotel lobbies, at highway rest stops, and even at breakfast when there were (rare) lulls in …
Athol Fugard’s ‘Master Harold’… and the Boys offers a glimpse into some of the fraught but affectionate relationships that occurred between older, black South Africans and young white South Africans during Apartheid. Set in a tearoom in Port Elizabeth, the play has only three characters: Sam (a black waiter in his mid-forties), Willie (also a …
Christos Tsiolkas’ novel, The Slap, begins with a multigenerational, multicultural collection of friends and relatives enjoying a summer barbeque in suburban Australia. During the gathering, a misbehaving child is slapped by an adult who is not his parent. The book’s subsequent chapters reveal the perspective of eight different people who were witnesses – perspectives that …
Continue reading “Cindy Bessmer, Manager of Human Resources”
Robin McKinley (’75, H ‘86) is a Bowdoin alum and Newberry Award winner. I discovered McKinley’s writing when at the college bookstore to buy, for my father’s birthday, Billy Watson’s Croker Sack by Franklin Burroughs (an eloquent exploration of the tensions between human connections to nature, human relationships with creatures and human nature as hunters). …
In Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa gives his readers access to former President Manuel A. Odria’s dictatorship in Peru in the early 1950s. The two main characters share memories about their past through a conversation happening in a cathedral. In this conversation we get a glimpse of what the society in Lima was …
I love electronic readers, and pleased that Hawthorne-Longfellow Library has loaded Kindles and Sony EReaders with a variety of books. I also love short stories, and use my iPhone to download audio versions of them through our OverDrive Download Library. This collection, edited by Ben Marcus and released in 2004, includes stories from Wells Tower, …
In Bel Canto , Ann Patchett explores how people of different nationalities, ages and interests interact when isolated from the outside world. The book begins when, through a series of unlikely events, the head of a successful electronics company, an accomplished opera singer and numerous government officials of a Latin American country all become hostages …
Wallace Stegner’s novels portray the lives and passions of early settlers of the American West. They paint a vivid and eloquent picture of the hardships, frustrations but rewards these hardy people encountered. Stegner manages to capture the beauty and power of the landscape, and weaves this in with human stories that have relevance to all …