The Granddaughter is a pretty straightforward novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins. The time is contemporary Germany, and Berlin book store owner Kaspar comes home to find wife Birgit dead in the bathtub, apparently by drowning. They had met in the early 60’s, in a divided country. They had fallen in …
Tag: history
Boom and bust. Rinse and repeat?
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin is a spellbinding deep dive into the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties, the amassing of wealth and wild stock market speculations that eventually blew out the fortunes of Wall St. insiders as well as …
Courage in the face of fascism: the warnings of history
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück by Lynne Olsen is an extraordinary telling of a little-told Nazi horror story, barely hinted at by the subtitle, “How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler's All-Female Concentration Camp.” This goes beyond any book you’ve read or movie you have seen. The S.S.-run Ravensbruck hard labor camp …
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History that reads like a thriller
Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier by Maura Jane Farrelly is a perfect book for someone who revels in the process of researching a story, over and above being swept up in the story itself. It is set in the late 19th century, the closing …
A biography of politics, power and sex
Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance, is another display of the author’s mastery of biography. In this scrupulously researched and documented chronicle, her subject is Pamela Churchill Harriman, a too-often-dismissed woman of consequence. A woman of power and influence, she was, in the 20th century, an even more influential courtesan …
Memorial Day remembrances of fathers at war
The War Diaries of Simon Robert Gordon by Constance Gordon Kean is a daughter’s loving tribute to her father’s and mother’s 1940’s romance against the backdrop of a world war. Her father, a sergeant stationed for three years in the Middle East, kept a daily journal, sharing life behind the front lines supporting combat troops …
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Authoritarianism versus liberalism: a political memoir
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland through the perspective of her very complicated family. Her grandmother, Nini, who lives with them, …
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A message to Pete Hegseth about women in combat
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell is a wonderful biography about an extraordinary woman who played a key role in the defeat of the Nazis in the 1940’s, a woman of courage and powerful leadership skills, a woman of whom most people have never heard, a woman whose life should be instructive to …
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Historical fiction that expands our minds and feeds our senses
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud is a fictional drama based on the author’s own multi-generational family, covering seven decades of family history and moving from Salonica in Greece, to French (colonial) Algeria to France, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the United States. Each chapter is told from the perspective of another family member, …
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Jimmy Carter went out as he came in
It was a scorcher of a day in the summer of 1975, more than a year before the presidential election to determine whether Jerry Ford could withstand public contempt for his decision to pardon Richard Nixon and win a four-year term on his own. Foot traffic in Concord, New Hampshire was subdued under the blazing …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 