Bookworm Musings

Lost and Wanted, by Nell Freudenberger This book knocked my socks off. I read Freudenberger's first book, a collection of short stories when it first came out. While I'm sure portions of her book reflect actual people she knows or situations that she's been in, she...

The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer. This tome reminded me a bit of Gone with the Wind: a love story set with the backdrop of a war, in this case WWII.  A good pat of schmaltz.  Most of the main characters make it through the war although statistically (according to...

The Club, by Takis Würger. This is a quick story about a poor orphaned German young man with an aunt in Cambridge. She uses him to infiltrate a secret Cambridge club to seek revenge against the Patriarchy, the upper crust, the Old Boys Club. Not the best book of 2019,...

Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, David E McCraw While still in the preface, I was so upset by McCraw’s questions about the fate of the US, I almost put the book down. I’m glad I persevered because the New York...

Madame Foucade’s Secret War, by Lynne Olson I picked this book up after reading the New York Times’ review of it, which used words like “fast-paced” and “gripping” as well as “impressively researched.” I wasn’t so gripped (more later), but definitely intrigued enough...

All I can say is TMI on Steve Jobs.  Yes, he's an interesting character...but I didn't realize that he'd appear on every other page of this memoir.  Next time, a book more about actual small fry or French fries or who Lisa Brennan Jobs is without her dad.

Admittedly, I’m late to the party.  If anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, in Spencerport, NY during the 1970s, he or she wasn’t assigned it in my English classes. In February 2019, I got the opportunity to see the Aaron Sorkin remake of the play, To...

I think I've now read the last of Erik Larson's books written to date.  I'd put off The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America for quite a while because I'm not so big into gore & I knew this was a tale of a serial...

Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss. On Maureen Corrigan’s review, I began Ghost Wall, a story of a teenager and her family joining an academic “experimental archeology” field course in the North of England. Wikipedia describes Experimental Archeology as “a field of study which...

Blood, Water, Paint, by Joy Mccullough.  I picked up this book because it was about Artemesia Gentileschi & I thought I’d be re-reading a book that I read a decade ago about her.  No, that book,The Passion of Artemesia, by Susan Vreeland, had a different span and...

Amos Oz’s memoir starts in pre-independence Jerusalem and ebbs and flows back to Oz’s parents birth countries in Eastern Europe and Russia.  Nu, what? Is is Oz’s grandfather’s standard greeting. He’s deeply skeptical of the socialist bent of Zionist, as he worries...

Frederick Douglass, by David Blight.  Reading this book, I was reminded of the fact that biographies are not my cup of tea. Not really all that interested in anecdote after anecdote from boyhood. And Douglass' childhood was brutal.  He was born a slave on the Eastern...