If, like me, you read the title Touring America by Automobile in the 1920s and all but swoon with joy - and swoon again when you realize that this is a primary source, a diary that a woman named Hepzy Moore Cook write during two early American road trips with her husband (one to Yellowstone and the other through the South) - then this is the book ( Read more... )

I found Nora Murphy’s White Birch, Red Hawthorn irritating for three main reasons ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Two books from the Unread Book Club! I read Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils, which is an account of the Civil War from the point of view of a southern Illinois farm boy on the home front, which I thought was very well done although also possibly one of those children’s books that is going to appeal more to adults ( Read more... )

I loved Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - A World on the Edge, which retells the story of Russia’s two 1917 revolutions (the first overthrowing the tsar in the spring; the second establishing the Bolsheviks in the fall) through the reports of on-scene Western observers. It’s told in strictly chronological order, ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished ReadingThe second Ivy + Bean book, which I think will be my last Ivy + Bean book, because it’s not much better than the first. In this book, Bean cuts her sister Nancy’s hair as she sleeps, and honestly I just feel so sorry for Nancy and I know the books are never going to let her get her own back ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The first Ivy + Bean book, which I did not find nearly as enchanting as I hoped. Ivy and Bean are just such - twerps, I think is the only word for it; the crowning moment of the book is when they throw worms in Bean’s sister’s face, and you know, I have an older sibling, and he could be very frustrating when I was ( Read more... )

I need to be pickier in the books I get from Netgalley; I've hit a whole string of duds in a row. The latest one is Debra A. Shattuck's Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers, which is both boring and unconvincing. How do you write a boring book about early women baseball players ( Read more... )

My roommate and I went to the Artcraft Theatre yesterday to see The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which is a movie I don't think I would have been very fond of if I'd watched it on my own; but watching it in a theater, with everyone else to laugh with, was a lot of fun ( Read more... )

Krystyna Mihulka’s Krysia: A Polish Girl’s Stolen Childhood During World War II is a memoir about her years in Siberia after the Soviets deported her family from Poland. It’s meant to be a memoir for children, and I suspect that morbidly inclined children will love it. I probably would have eaten it up when I was ten ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mike Rendell’s In Bed with the Georgians: Sex, Scandal, and Satire in the 18th Century is an odd book. Some of the chapters are basically just annotated lists: here are all the most famous courtesans of the Georgian period, or all the most infamous rakes. There was one guy whose nickname was the "Rapemaster in Chief ( Read more... )