Clare Wald is a South African writer. She lives alone, with Marie, her ‘woman of business.’ Sam Leroux, an academic from an American university, has come to South Africa for a series of interviews with her, as he is Clare’s cautious choice as her authorized biographer. Clare is divorced; her son, Mark, is a lawyer… FULL STORY
Archive | Books RSS feed for this section
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer” by Susan Gubar
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. Indiana University English professor Susan Gubar did not quote Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge Without… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Troubles” by J.G. Farrell
“Troubles” is JG Farrell’s long exploration, from the point of view of an English visitor, of Ireland in the years 1918-1921, immediately after the First World War and, perhaps more relevantly, shortly after the Easter Rising of 1916. “Troubles” won the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970, and is the first published of J.G. Farrell’s… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club, “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance” by Thomas McNamee
Craig Claiborne, who was born in 1920, took until he was nearly 40 to find himself. Born in Mississippi, he came of age just as the US was entering World War II, and served in the Navy in North Africa, Sicily, and the Pacific. After the war Claiborne moved first to Chicago, to work in… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Sacre Bleu” by Christopher Moore
In Paris, in the second half of the 19th century, the painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, the art dealer Theo van Gogh, and assorted others, among them the fictional baker and painter Lucien Lessard, try to track down someone they call the Colorman, who they fear… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Next to Love” by Ellen Feldman
The title of Ellen Feldman’s novel is ascribed to Eric Partridge, the British lexicographer, who, as a young recruit, wrote of “war, which, next to love, has most captured the world’s imagination.” In the novel, Babe Huggins works for Western Union, snipping lines of telegram tape as they chug from the receiver, then gluing them… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” by Deborah Moggach
Until I came across a copy in the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, I had no idea that “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” now a Major Motion Picture starring a slew of great British actors, started life as a book. But indeed it did, in 2004, and the book has just been reissued… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh
‘Sea of Poppies’ is the first book in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ibis Trilogy.’ In this historical novel, set in 1838, Ghosh tells the intertwined story of Indians, Europeans, and Americans, all affected by the opium trade. First, there’s Deeti, who manages to farm a few acres, mostly dedicated to opium poppies, while her husband, an addict,… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Alice in Bed” by Cathleen Schine
“Alice in Bed” is one of Cathleen Schine’s early novels, having been published originally in 1983, and reissued in 2012 after the success of Schine’s 2010 novel “The Three Weissmans of Westport.” “Alice in Bed” tells the story of Alice, a college student who is, for some reason, unable to move her legs without pain,… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Conundrum” by Jan Morris
A few weeks ago I reviewed Jan Morris’s novel “Hav.” Reading that book and her book about Sydney, Australia, made me more curious about Morris, one of the earliest and best-known personalities to undergo gender reassignment surgery. So I read her book “Conundrum,” published in 1974 (and reissued in 2002). “Conundrum” begins with a vignette… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “How It All Began” by Penelope Lively
A mugger pushes 70-something Charlotte, who teaches English to immigrants, over on the sidewalk, breaking her hip and setting off a chain of consequences in lives that should be unrelated. Charlotte’s married daughter, Rose, is unable to accompany her elderly employer, retired academic Lord Henry Peters, to a speech out of town, so his niece… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past” by Martin Davidson
Many of the books about the Holocaust that have recently found their way to this household have described what happened to particular families after 1939 (“After Long Silence” by Helen Fremont), or about searches made long after the war to discover what happened to one’s family (“The Lost” by Daniel Mendelsohn, “Walking Since Daybreak” by… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Girl Reading” by Katie Ward
We forget, often, that artifacts survive us, but survive they do, and that is one of the points that Katie Ward makes in her fascinating new novel, “Girl Reading.” Each chapter is about a work of art, usually but not always a painting, always involving a woman and a book. Who are the women in… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson
From about 1915 through about 1970 more than six million former slaves and descendants of slaves left the Jim Crow south and moved to cities in the north. As Isabel Wilkerson describes this important internal migration, “it was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Cat’s Table” by Michael Ondaatje
For much of the 20th century, long sea voyages were the only way to travel from one continent to another, and thousands of people made long trips. Four or six week long voyages were not uncommon (it took nearly a week to cross the Atlantic in the 1960s) and shipboard romances became the stuff of… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach
Despite what I must admit is a rather dim memory of the New Yorker review suggesting that “The Art of Fielding” is not really a book about baseball, I have to say that it is not about baseball in the same way that “Moby-Dick” is not really a book about whaling. That is to say,… FULL STORY
Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Hav” by Jan Morris
The noted travel writer Jan Morris has published very few novels, but I found one of them at the Brooklyn Book Fair, published, perhaps not surprisingly, by NYR Books, a source of many of my favorite books. “Hav” is a novel as travelogue, allowing Ms. Morris to indulge what must have been sorely tempting during… FULL STORY
Creativity has spilled forth from the classrooms of P.S. 8 and found its way onto the walls of the Urban Folk Art Gallery, thanks to the “How’s the Weather?” exhibition that features dozens of landscape paintings and drawings by first-grade students from the Brooklyn Heights elementary school. The group show marks the end of a… FULL STORY
Recent Comments