The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, by Anna Fifield. Hachette Book Group, 2019. The plump and oddly coiffed dictator Kim Jong Un seems to make the world laugh. This book will change the mind of anyone who reads it. Fifield, who was a correspondent in North Korea for over a decade, is uniquely placed ( Read more... )

Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend, by Roy Morris Jr. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019
I tend to be interested in biographies of artists and writers of the early parts of the last century, so even though I’ve never managed to read one of her poems I requested this book. I may now attempt to read The Autobiography of ( Read more... )

Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile, by Julia Fox. Ballantine Books, 2011
Juana of Castile and Katherine of Aragon were both daughters of the renowned monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the backers of Columbus and creators of a united Spain. Most people have heard of ( Read more... )

Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy, by Andrew Morton. Grand Central Publishing, 2018 In June of 1896, Bessie Wallis Warfield was born. In November of that same year, her tubercular father died. Her mother was two months pregnant when they married, which gave her a bad start in the social ( Read more... )

Dickens and Christmas, by Lucinda Hawksley. Pen and Sword History, 2017 Lucinda Hawksley is a direct descendant of Charles Dickens, so she is uniquely placed to write about his life. Her book relates an abbreviated biography of Dickens, with emphasis on how he himself celebrated Christmas, how England in general celebrated, and his works of fiction ( Read more... )

Marlene Dietrich: The Life, by Maria Riva. Pegasus Books, first published 1993; reprint 2017 This is an absorbing biography of Dietrich by her daughter, Maria Riva. We are given the star’s life in detail, from her birth until her death. Riva’s life was closely twined with her mother’s from the day she was born- her mother used her as constant ( Read more... )

Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, by Shrabani Basu. Vintage Books, 2010 By the time Queen Victoria started the last decade of her life, she had lost her beloved Prince Albert in 1861 and her Scottish personal servant, John Brown, in 1883- many people speculated that she and Brown were secretly married, they were so ( Read more... )

In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult, by Rebecca Stott. Spiegel & Grau, 2017Rebecca Stott was born into a cult. So was her father. He was a high ranking official in the church called the Exclusive Brethren. An End of Times cult, they felt they had to purify themselves so they would be bodily taken up when the Rapture occurred. The ( Read more... )

The Invention of Angela Carter, by Edmund Gordon. Chatto and Windus, 2016 Angela Carter is pretty high on my list of favorite authors, so I was delighted to see this book. Her stories refuse to fit neatly into any one genre; they have humor, magical realism, pure fantasy, literary fiction, grim fairy tales, and a lot more. She also wrote tons of ( Read more... )

Iris Grace: How Thula the Cat Saved a Little Girl and Her Family, by Arabella Carter-Johnson. Skyhorse Publishing, 2016
Despite the title, the book is really not about Thula the cat. She is in the book, of course, and is an incredible companion and support for Iris, but she occupies only a small part of the narrative. The book is about Iris Grace ( Read more... )