Oh, dear, the plight of women throughout history has been really dreadful. The Case of Madeleine Smith is a graphic novel (graphic history, I guess) about real-life Victorian lady Madeleine Smith, who may or may not have murdered her lover Emile L’Anglier (though she probably did murder him, the book strongly implies). It’s a straightforward, fairly impersonal depiction of the story – could just as well be the Classic Comics version! The book deliberately (I assume) sets the reader at one remove from the players in the story, so it’s more of a history than a story. I would have…
2 CommentsTag: nonfiction
(Finally getting around to reading some of the books I got at the book fair in early March. Stupid library, distracting me.) Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of nine – at one point she reads about it and discovers it has a 5% survival rate. After ages and ages having this sorted out, she is left with part of her jaw missing. Later on she receives numerous grafts to sort this out, and these work for a while and then keep getting reabsorbed. (I believe that’s how it worked – I’m fuzzy on medical…
Leave a CommentI picked this up at the library a little while ago, and realized when I got it home that I had read about it here before checking it out and completely forgotten. Weird. You wouldn’t think I’d be able to manage being uninterested in a memoir about someone whose father was a faith healer. But I just never got interested in this. For someone with such a colorful life, this guy has written a book that was surprisingly bland (yeah, I mixed that metaphor. Got a problem?). Even before I began to suspect that Mr. Smith genuinely believes in his…
Leave a CommentAccidentally on Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made, is a memoir about Mary Pols getting pregnant completely accidentally at the age of 39, from what was meant to be a one-night stand. I got it off the library display case for New Nonfiction yesterday, and read it that evening. Because I like memoirs. Well, I like memoirs but. I like memoirs, but books like this bring up all my serious, grave concerns about memoirs. On the one hand, I want them to be honest – I feel so let down when…
Leave a CommentThis is the hugest book ever. I have been reading it and reading it. It’s about Edward Murrow as you might have imagined, and I will just tell you now that Edward Murrow was quite a person. He wasn’t always perfect (of course), but I admire him tremendously. Everyone I know is now tired of hearing Edward R. Murrow stories. Like the one about when he went to Buchenwald with the troops, and people there – people who were in Buchenwald – recognized him and asked if he remembered them. And the one about how someone asked his four-year-old son…
2 CommentsI put a hold on this book in November, after reading about it here, and I almost canceled it the day before it actually came in, because I thought surely the book was lost and would never be returned, and I was just out of luck as far as reading this book went. Which I thought was too bad because it sounded interesting, and I was curious to know what I missed out on when I dropped out of the library science master’s program. This book is amusing and entertaining, which is what it’s intended to be. The stories he…
Leave a CommentMeh. I saw this mentioned on Amazon when I was hunting for something else, so I got it out of the library and read it last night. I wish I had read my book about Edward Murrow instead when I was falling asleep. It wasn’t bad at all, I just never connected with it. There’s nine high school students talking about their backgrounds, and then each of them interviewed someone from a different background about 9/11. I wasn’t as much in the mood for it as I thought I would be, although it did remind me that I want to…
Leave a CommentI’ve been meaning to read this book for ten thousand years. I saw it at Bongs & Noodles once, when I had a bunch of B&N gift card credit, and thought seriously about getting it, before ultimately deciding on something totally different. And then I got it out of the library before Christmas last year. I love the library. I don’t know how anyone functions without the lovely library. This book is just what you might imagine, a history of virginity, or really, cultural attitudes towards virginity. It is completely fascinating. Really. I’ve been staying up late the past two…
3 CommentsSexual ethics are fascinating, aren’t they? But I got tired of this book anyway. It was all disorganized. I was pleased to learn about Sylvester Graham, a completely joyless fellow who advocated bland food, invented the graham cracker, and said that if someone didn’t do something to stop little boys from masturbating, they would grow up and become “a living volcano of unclean propensities and passions”. I swear. Those were his words. I suspect they are burned into my brain forever. But as for the rest, Ms. Horowitz kept teasing me with the promise of a good story, and then…
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