Before reading Cop Town (2014), I was unfamiliar with Karin Slaughter and not looking to read any bestselling thrillers. But then I happened to see the author on television, talking about her latest book. Slaughter mentioned that she set Cop Town in Atlanta, Georgia in 1974 because she was interested in the restrictions and challenges facing women in that period. She talked about women not being able to find housing or even get a credit card without their husband’s approval. A restrictive society, indeed, and […]
A powerful indictment of the colonization of aboriginal Australia
An excellent novel about the seizure of aboriginal lands by pardoned convicts from the British penal colony in New South Wales in the early 1800s, The Secret River could just as easily be the story of the extermination of Native Americans in early 19th century United States, or of the Spanish conquests in South America, or of the European colonization of India and Africa. Grenville is an Australian, but her story is a universal one. She begins with a truly Dickensian tale of Londoner William Thornhill, […]
“Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.”
This is exactly the kind of book that appeals to my historian self. Yes, I’d love to read 300 pages about how the various technologies we use in cooking have changed over the course of recorded history. It’s also a boon to me when these types of books qualify as research for work and I am able to spend a couple days reading happily at work. I have done just that and with 10 pages of typed notes I have lots to work with as […]
Little Known Story of Italian-Jewish Resistance in WWII
This amazing novel tells the story of ordinary men and women—farmers, soldiers, priests and nuns, housewives, doctors, stonemasons—who took a stance against the Nazi juggernaut in Italy and waged a near hopeless war of resistance not only in defense of their homeland but in defense of Jews from throughout Europe who had fled across the Alps into an Italy which had broken with Germany, thinking to find a refuge from the genocide, only to discover that the Germans were occupying Italy and prepared to escalate […]
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
I saw The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on a hundred best-of lists when it first came out, and after I finally got around to reading it, I was pleased that it lived up to the hype. It’s really a great story. In 1946, author Juliet Ashton is surrounded by the damage of the war in London, and is looking for inspiration for a new book. She stumbles across a group of friends in Guernsey (an island in the English Channel), that formed a […]
That Time Lady Macbeth Went Hunting
Serena is described on the cover as a “retelling of Macbeth in Appalachia” and that is the most accurate five-word description that can be given to this book, except in this version, Lady Macbeth quickly outdistances her husband. George Pemberton is the owner of a timber business in 1929, and he and his new wife Serena seek to dominate and to expand this business by any means, often ruthless, necessary. When Serena discovers she cannot bear children, she turns this same ruthlessness towards Pemberton’s illegitimate […]
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