Sunday, May 19, 2024
Miss Morgan's Book Brigade by Janet Skeslien Charles - 2024 - 324 pages
Miss Morgan's Book Brigade by Janet Skeslien Charles - 2024 - 324 pages
Miss Morgan's Book Brigade is a wonderful book.
It has two interrelated settings, rural France and Paris during the German invasion in World War One and New York City in the 1980s.
1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. Founded by millionaire Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan. this group of international women help rebuild destroyed French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen—children’s libraries. Jessie Carson turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Miss Morgan appears to have a romantic relationship with another woman in the group, known as Doctor M. Most of the group participants come from affluent families that pay their expenses. Miss Carson gets a salary. At first social standing back in America is very important, but slowly bonds are formed. The women must learn to cope with the horrible devastation of the war. Some develop relationships with soldiers, knowing any day can bring their death.
1987 - : When NYPL librarian and aspiring writer Wendy Peterson stumbles across a passing reference to Jessie Carson in the archives, she becomes consumed with learning her fate. In her obsessive research, she discovers that she and the elusive librarian have more in common than their work at New York’s famed library, but she has no idea their paths will converge in surprising ways across time. Jessie deals with library policies, loves working with books and finds a boyfriend.
There are lots of delightful literary references. The descriptions of the impact of the war were very powerful. There are a number of letters which help carry the plot.
I found the ending emotionally satisfying
"Based on the extraordinary little-known history of the women who received the Croix de Guerre medal for courage under fire, Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, the power of literature, and ultimately the courage it takes to make a change." From the Publisher
"Janet Skeslien Charles is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Paris Library. Her work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. She has spent a decade researching Jessie Carson (Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade) at The Morgan Library, the NYPL, and archives across France. Her shorter work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Sydney Morning Herald, LitHub, and the anthology Montana Noir." From Simon and Schuster
"Invitations" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 4 pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004
This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.
Thursday, May 16, 2024
The Awakening of Miss Prim- A Novel by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera 2013 -272 Pages - translated from Spanish by Sonia Soto - 2014
The Awakening of Miss Prim- A Novel by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera 2023 -272 Pages - translated by Sonia Soto
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Alice Munro - July 10, 1931 to May 13, 2024
July 10, 1931
Nobel Prize 2013
May 13, 2024
"The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.
“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets" - from The New York Times
"Trying simultaneously to establish herself as a writer (she had her first story published in an undergraduate magazine in 1950 and sold a piece to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1951), she had no time for novel-writing. The short story it had to be.
Routinely likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, Munro was more radical than the comparison implies. AS Byatt, a longstanding admirer, described how reading Munro made her want to try short fiction herself. Munro stretched and challenged the genre. Not only does she consistently wrongfoot the reader, overturning our expectations of characters and their actions, but she melds several narrative strands together, bringing into one tale several plots." From The Guardian
Mel Ulm
Sunday, May 12, 2024
"Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - 14 Pages - Included in The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004
Friday, May 10, 2024
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo- forthcoming October 2024- 620 Pages
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo- forthcoming October 2024- 620 Pages is an extraordinarly valuable addition to the history of Trans-Atlantic Slavery.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
The Wide Wide Sea : Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides - 2024 - 411 Pages
The Wide Wide Sea : Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides - 2024 - 411 Pages -is a magnificent historical narrative.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling and superbly crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day."
“Hampton Sides, an acclaimed master of the nonfiction narrative, has taken on Cook’s story and retells it for the 21st century.”—Los Angeles Times
The Wide Wide Sea : Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides focuses on Cook’s last voyage. The purpose of the voyage, sponsored by King George the Third and championed by numerous other high ranking figures was to find the fabled North West Passage. The hope was this would cut a huge amount of time from a voyage across North America while greatly extending the scope of the British Empire.
"OJuly 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?
Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.
Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter." From penquin press - The Publisher
Here are a few things that particularly struck me. Cook and his medical staff some how kept his crew from getting scurvy. While his crew did have sex with Polynesian women Cook, which planted Gonorrhea on the islands,, a married Quaker, did not. He was not a rigid Christian ideologue, he did his best to understand the faiths and social structure of the societies he encountered. In Hawaii he was taken initially as a returning God by some. Sides vividly brings to life the extreme hardships and dangers of the voyage. Cook was very much cut off from news of England, he did not know of the outbreak of the American revolution. With 21st century sensibilities I was turned off by the wanton killing of so many animals. The final battle scenes on Hawaii were very exciting and to me more than a little disturbing.
HAMPTON SIDES is best-known for his gripping non-fiction adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of discovery and exploration. He is an acclaimed journalist and the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, On Desperate Ground and, most recently, The Wide Wide Sea. - from the author’s website
Friday, May 3, 2024
The House of Haunting Hill by Shirley Jackson- 1959 - 208 Pages
The House of Haunting Hill by Shirley Jackson- 1959 - 208
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
The Reading Life Review - April 2024 - Future Plans
April Nonfiction
1. Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle - 2009 - by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
2. Nazis, Islamists, and the making of the modern Middle East / Barry Rubin, Wolfgang G. Schwanitz. - no post
3. Stolen Words The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books by Mark Glickman - 2016 - 344 Pages
4. Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York by Tyler Anbinder- 2024 - 430 Pages
5. Some People Need Killing: a Memoir of Murder in My Country - by Patricia Evangelista.- 2023 - 429 Pages
6. Sacred trash : the lost and found world of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. 2011- no post
7. The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilence of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World by Dan Senor and Saul Singer- 2023 - 532 Pages
8. Time’s echo : the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the music of remembrance by Jeremy Eichler. 2023. - no post
April Novels
1. The Fraud by Zadie Smith
2. Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
3. Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Covenent of Water by Abraham Verghese
April Short Stories
I posted on four short stories by Carol Shields and four from Cork Stories
Blog Stats
Home Countries of April Authors
1. USA - 7
2. Ireland- 4
3. Canada 1
4. UK - 1
5. Columbia- 1
Origin Countries of Visitors
1. Hong Kong
2. USA
3. China
4. Philippines
5. India
6. France
7. UK
8. Germany
9. Singapore
10. Indonesia
Blog Views since inception
7,619,403
Blog Views in April
90,196
Of the top ten most viewed posts in April, 8 were on short stories, one
on a novel by Joseph Conrad aand one on a novel by Alice Hoffman
Future plans and Hopes
I am currently reading these works historical Nonfiction
1. The lost library: the legacy of Vilna’s Strashun library in the aftermath of the Holocaust by Dan Rabinowitz.
2. The wide wide sea : imperial ambition, first contact and the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides.
3. THE STORY OF THE JEWS. Copyright 2013 by Simon Schama.
4. Humans in Shackles An Atlantic History of Slavery Ana Lucia ArAujo review book from The University of Chicago
5, Chaim Weizmann A Biography by Jehuda Reinharz & Motti Golani - review book from Brandeis University Press on first president of Israel
Novels in process
1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
2. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
3. Palmares by Gayl Jones
May Short Story plans
I will continue reading stories by Carol Shields and works in the anthology Cork Stories