I’m just finishing Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. For years now I‘ve been aware that I missed reading this book in it’s feminist heyday and so finally came to it as a way of revisiting a period I lived through as a student some fifty years ago; it does feel like a historical …
I have been reading Life, the autobiography of Keith Richards, the leader of the Rolling Stones. On the cover Keith says: “This is the life. Believe it or not I haven’t forgotten any of it.” I have enjoyed this book for two reasons. On the one hand, it speaks to me very personally: Keith and …
I’m reading book 19 of a series of 24 . The book title is Wisconsin!. It is the Wagon’s West Series by Dana Fuller Ross from 1987. It is fiction. The book is about how people struggled leaving the east and going by wagon train to the west and setting up there to start new …
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life by Anne Lamott is a wonderful book that enveloped me quickly in Lamott’s comforting, yet realistic, advice, and sharp, unassuming tone. As the title suggests, Lamott shares a lot of shrewd opinions about the writing process and both heart-wrenching and humorous experiences she’s had as a …
The Monster of Florence: A True Story by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi has to be one of the most riveting books I have ever read. Douglas Preston is a successful crime novel writer, but this book is a very real account of Preston’s first hand experiences while researching a string of unsolved murder stretching …
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”