I'm finishing up my thesis (Jewish identity in 1930s Germany) right now, and there's a story in one of the memoirs I'm using that I keep going back to... seriously, it breaks my heart every time I read it. A little background: Gad Beck, the man who wrote this memoir, was a gay Jew from Berlin, born in 1923. In 1942, his boyfriend (ish) and his ( Read more... )

My main book these days is John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is basically about this guy who goes to Savannah, GA, and meets a bunch of people and it eventually becomes a true crime novel but I'm not quite there yet.  It's pretty good.

One of the people he meets Emma Kelly, a woman known as "The Lady of Six Thousand Songs ( Read more... )