Combining juicy bits of Victorian history and custom with some delightfully scathing social commentary, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners, by  Therese Oneill, will delight and infuriate you. The author wishes to not-so-gently disabuse the reader of any romantic notions of a simpler and more gracious time by detailing the rigors of the […]

Having just finished You Will Not Have My Hate, by Antoine Leiris, I am shattered. His writing is beautiful; not just the words and the journey he creates with them, but the raw emotions of someone dealing with an unthinkable tragedy. The author was at home with his 17 month-old boy, Melvil, in November 2015 […]

If you’re already hooked on Ted Talks, you probably envy the abilities of TED talkers to engage, motivate, and win over an audience.  Who wouldn’t?  If you’re new to TED, the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design.  It started out as an annual convention built around people, businesses, and projects that operate at the convergence of […]

So much has been written about the Beach Boys during their extraordinary fifty-five year history, but Mike Love as the group’s front man and principal lyricist has the inside scoop on the history of the legendary American band with his new book Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. Their origins were middle class; […]

  There is a lot I could  say about Mischling, Affinity Konar’s new Holocaust novel; it’s heartbreaking and beautiful and horrific. Twelve-year-old twin sisters Stasha and Pearl are sent to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather, and come to the attention of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, who specialized in grotesque experiments on twins,  subjecting […]

In Charlie Quimby‘s follow-up to his debut novel Monument Road, he returns to his native western Colorado and the city of Grand Junction, a town built at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers. And it is at the river where Quimby’s story begins. The river banks, covered in the invasive tamarisk, have become […]

El Paso is Winston Groom’s first work of fiction in almost 20 year since Forrest Gump. It is a brawny, sprawling novel, part legend, part history, of outlaws, revolutionaries, railroad tycoons, kidnappings, and daring rescues. While Europe plunges into the Great War, the Mexican Revolution intrudes on the still wild American southwest. When railroad tycoon […]

Inspired by  a true historical episode, Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart, starts with an automobile crashing into a buggy carrying the Kopp sisters.  It’s 1914 in Paterson, New Jersey, and the villainous Henry Kaufman, drunken and erratic son of a rich factory owner, refuses to pay for the damages.  He and his thugs soon begin […]