Review of “Kaaterskill Falls” by Allegra Goodman

Kaaterskill Falls is a slice of life: a look at a tight-knit Jewish Orthodox community in the 1970’s that winters in New York’s Washington Heights and summers in a bungalow colony in Kaaterskill Falls. This group calls itself the Kirshners, after the rabbi they follow, Rav Elijah Kirshner, who escaped from Germany in the 1930’s [...]

Review of “Bee Season” by Myla Goldberg

This dysfunctional family is looking for love in all the wrong places. As the story begins, we think this is just a “normal” dysfunctional family, but as the book progresses, we feel the horror of watching helplessly as the problems of the parents affect the children, who start out shy but hopeful, and with a [...]

Review of “The Age of the Unthinkable” by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Who, you may ask, is Joshua Cooper Ramo? The World Economic Forum in 2005 called him “one of China’s leading foreign-born scholars.” Ramo speaks Mandarin Chinese and works as a managing director and partner at the Beijing office of Kissinger Associates. He advises some of the largest corporations in the world and governments at the [...]

Judge Not Lest You Judge Not

Those of you who read this blog know that I loved the book Star Gazing by Linda Gillard. On September 16, The Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) announced that Star Gazing won the Woman’s Weekly poll for the “Best Love Story of the Last Fifty Years.” Congratulations to Linda! But that’s only the beginning of the [...]

Review of “The Stand” by Stephen King (born on this day, September 21, in 1947)

SMACKDOWN! The Passage vs. The Stand Three of us, having completed The Passage by Justin Cronin (784 pages), decided to engage in a “smack down” between it and The Stand by Stephen King (1153 pages). There are two reasons for this bizarre behavior on our parts. One is that The Passage seemed to us to [...]

Winsome Media Tour Review of “Hiroshima in the Morning” by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped a 9,700-pound uranium bomb over the city of Hiroshima. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 15 kilotons (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT). Within minutes 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less [...]

Review of “Julie of the Wolves” by Jean Craighead George

This is a great “issues” book for middle graders published in 1972 about a 13-year-old Eskimo girl who must learn to adjust to a reality increasingly tangled up between the old world of traditions and the new world of the gussaks, or white-faced. In Part I of this short book, Miyax (called Julie in English), [...]

Review of “One Day” by David Nicholls

I’m always so happy when I read a book I enjoy. I had just finished re-reading Hunger Games and Catching Fire in anticipation of the arrival of Mockingjay, and they were even better and more emotionally draining than I remembered. So I knew I needed to read something very good as a follow-up. Since Sandy, [...]

Book Blogger Appreciation Week – September 13 – 17, 2010

It is now the week set aside once a year to appreciate bloggers, and although I am not actively participating this year, I wanted at least to acknowledge other bloggers and tell you how much I have come to love and depend on them. In the past couple of years, my reading horizon has expanded [...]

September 12, 1825 – Birthday of Ainsworth Spofford, or: How To Get A Lot of Free Books

Ainsworth Spofford was the Librarian of Congress who came up with the idea to “transfer the entire copyright business to the Library of Congress.” The House and Senate agreed, and in 1870 President Grant signed the Copyright Law of 1870, making the Library of Congress the first central agency for the registration and custody of [...]