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... )

Choo Waihong’s The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains absolutely fascinated me, because it’s a sort of memoir/ethnography of the Mosuo people in Yunnan province, who are one of the last remaining matrilineal groups on Earth - and that matrilineal heritage is fast eroding as better roads, radios, and televisions bring ( Read more... )

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

I finished Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-Day nearly a year ago, and have been meaning to write a review of it ever since, although I have been scuppered by the fact that there are too many things I like about it. It’s a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl book, and it meanders a bit at the beginning - in fact for about the first third ( Read more... )

I have been struggling for the past few days to write a review of Sarah Arthur & Erin Wasinger’s The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us, because I really liked the book - enough that I am thinking of getting a paper copy, even though I’ve already got it on my Kindle from Netgalley - but I can’t seem to find the right approach to ( Read more... )

The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture is about the way that various pop culture phenomenon - sports, beauty standards, TV - have become vehicles for meaning and purpose in our lives as more traditional religious guidelines have waved in importance ( Read more... )

I enjoyed Pamela Paul's My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, but in a much more low-key way than I was expecting. It's a memoir about Paul's reading life, which is a genre that ought to be larger in my opinion, although future practitioners ought to take Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris as their guide rather than My Life with ( Read more... )

Patrick O'Malley's Getting Grief Right: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss is actually about the dangers of attempting to grieve "correctly," to fit grief into the one-size-fits-all template of the five stages of grief outlined by Kubler-Ross. O'Malley is a psychologist, and he gets a lot of clients who come in and tell him that since ( Read more... )

Doug Mack's The Not-Quite States of America has an excellent premise and a so-so execution. The book is an exploration of America's inhabited offshore territories - American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam - which are not states, not in any clear sense on the road to statehood, and not exactly subject to the US Constitution, ( 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... )