In winter, all the singing is in the tops of the trees.
- Mary Oliver
Here's what we discussed during a fine winter evening:
Jonathan Kellerman
The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben and Tim Flannery
Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees
Kindred - Octavia Butler
The Butchering Art - Lindsey Fitzharris
Voices from the Rust Belt - Anne Trubek
Anne Frank: The Biography - Melissa Muller
Libraries Discontinuing Book Fines
Something in the Water - Catherine Steadman
The Inflamed Mind - Edward Bullmore
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten - Robert Fulghum
The Temptation of Forgiveness - Donna Leon
Islands - Anne Rivers Siddons
White Oleander - Janet Fitch
About My Mother - Mike Rowe and Peggy Rowe
A Wedding in December - Anita Shrive
Calypso - David Sedaris
Pig Pen Sedaris
From our sister group in Oklahoma:
Lawton Any-Book Book Bunch
Thursday, February 15, 2019
Books
Clinton, Bill, and James Patterson. The President Is Missing.
Coben, Harlan. No Second Chance.
Dickson, H. Leighton. Dragon of Ash & Stars.
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; An Experience in India.
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.
Keller, Julia. Bitter River.
Keys, Jeff. Seventy-Five Homemade Salad Dressings.
McConnell, Caimh. A Man with One of Those Faces.
Obama, Michelle. Becoming.
Penny, Louise. The Nature of the Beast; Kingdom of the Blind.
Perry, Anne. A Breach of Promise.
Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner. Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds.
Springer, Nancy. The Case of the Left-Handed Lady: An Enola Holmes Mystery.
Turtledove, Harry. Ruled Brittania.
Films & TV
Heat and Dust; The Householder.(Ruth Prawer Jhabvala)
Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery. (Acorn TV; Amazon streaming)
From Mary Lou in Maryland:
Booknotes Laura February 2019
Karen White, The Beach Trees (2011). When Julie was 12, her younger sister disappeared and she has been searching for her ever since. Now her best friend Monica has died, naming her guardian of her 5-year-old son Beau and bequeathing her a portrait painted by Julie’s grandfather. Julie leaves her job at a Manhattan auction house and sets out with Beau and the painting for New Orleans. She wants to introduce Beau to his mother’s family and also if possible to find out why Monica broke all contact with them 5 years before. Julie also has inherited a half-interest in the Guidry family beach house on the Katrina-ravaged gulf coast in Biloxi. The narrative is divided between Julie and Beau’s grandmother Aimee Guidry. The atmosphere is sultry and mysterious. Together Julie, Aimee, and Monica’s brother Trey gradually uncover the passions and secrets of the past, including the reason Monica left and how the portrait fits into the puzzle.
Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987, 2008). This is a well researched and engrossing biography of America’s most maligned and misunderstood of First Ladies. It covers her entire life, beginning with her childhood as a daughter of one of the first families of Lexington, Kentucky, and ending with her widowhood. She had a life-long interest in politics, for which her stepmother denigrated her as unladylike and arranged for her to live with her older sister in Springfield, Illinois. When she was First Lady, members of her husband’s cabinet and the press criticized her for extravagance in dress and in refurbishment of the White House in wartime. Some critics spread rumors that she was a spy for the South, based on the fact that some of her relatives were aligned with that side of the conflict. After she was widowed and before she was allowed access to her husband’s meager estate, scandal erupted again when she attempted to sell her wardrobe. Some years later, she was notoriously committed to a private insane asylum, based on the testimony and maneuvering of her son Robert. Eventually she cleverly devised a way to find the assistance that secured her release. This biography follows all the events of her life, many of them tragic. It refutes many of the slanders and provides context and documentation for the actions that brought her notoriety. It examines the evidence regarding her medical problems and her likely over-medication for them. This is anything but a dry and dusty biography.
Jennifer Chiaverini, Fates and Traitors: A Novel of John Wilkes Booth and the Women who Loved Him (2016). We all are familiar with the appalling story of the end of the life of John Wilkes Booth. The stories of the women who loved him, presented here in fictional form, are much more sympathetic. The women are his mother Mary Ann Booth, his sister Asia Booth, New Hampshire Senator’s daughter Lucy Hale, and landlady Mary Surratt. Lengthy sections tell the stories of each of these women. The most interesting section is the first, focusing on May Ann and describing this famous family of Shakespearean actors, beginning with father Junius Booth and including John’s brother, the handsome and idolized Edwin Booth. It provides details of Mary Ann’s 1821 elopement with Junius from London to Baltimore, the founding of the family homestead north of the city, the birth and raising of their many children, and the challenges of maintaining a large household with erratic supported from a traveling actor. The novel provides detailed descriptions of the lives of women in Maryland in the mid-1800s.
