NY: Viking, 2005.
Lurie is a first-rate storyteller, and has been for fifty years now, though her oeuvre isn’t huge. You take a stroll with her around a college campus in upstate New York, and she tells you things about the academics she knows, and their families, and before you know it, you’re caught up in their lives and relationships.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Back in the 1950s, a series of useful volumes began to appear under the uniform series title “Everyday Life in [name your period or culture]” which were designed for high school readers, though they were popular with anyone wanting a quick, accessible introduction to a given slice of social history.
NY: St. Martin, 1977.
This is the third novel in the immensely popular series featuring DCI Morse — I almost said “featuring John Thaw,” so heavily is the character identified with that actor’s portrayal of him — and it nicely maintains the pace of the first two.
NY: Random House, 1984.
Prof. Vinnie Miner, a specialist in children’s literature and folk culture at what passes for Cornell, is small in stature and plain of face, now in her fifties and well practiced at living by (and for) herself. She’s selfish, in a constructive sort of way, but the fact that she was raised to be a lady generally wins out. (Though her neighbors had better keep an eye on their roses.)
NY: Farrar, Straus, 2005.
I was one of those bright, autodidactic kids whose idea of a great way to pass a rainy afternoon was to curl up with a volume of the encyclopedia, or with a large dictionary, and just browse. I delighted in learning new stuff, and of a very miscellaneous nature. (I was no doubt born to become a reference librarian.) I learned about the history of dictionaries in library school, but Hitchings (whose first book this is, and who did his PhD thesis on Johnson) goes into far greater depth and does it in a highly entertaining way.
NY: Little Brown, 2008.
Gladwell is a master of the revelatory essay filled with “Aha!” moments. I’ve been reading his stuff for years in New Yorker, and when he began doing book-length explorations of the things in our world that need explaining, I followed right along. This one, on what “success” actually means and how people actually attain it, may be his best yet.
NY: Putnam, 1973.
It’s difficult to write a review of a book like this. There’s so much the author has to say that ought to be noted, and there’s so much I need to say about my reactions to it. Very briefly, it’s 1955 and Henrietta Snow — known to everyone as “Snowy” — is fifteen and a sophomore at a small-town New Hampshire high school. Almost everyone she knows is blue-collar, but she and a small number of her friends are determined to go to college.
NY: Harper, 1979.
Leffland is a highly regarded novelist of slender output — five novels in thirty years, and nothing at all in more than a decade. This one, her third, has recently been republished (and marketed as a “classic”), but I came across it when it first appeared and I remember enjoying it very much, so when I came across a mention of the book in another review, I decided it was time for a re-read.
NY: Knopf, 2008.
This is the second book about the four Penderwick sisters of Cameron, Massachusetts — Rosalind, Skye, Jane, ages twelve, eleven, and ten, and little Batty (short for Elizabeth), age four. It’s only a month since their return from their summer holiday, the story of which was told in the first book, and school is now upon them.
London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
In the mid-1960s, young Cartwright, a native of Johannesburg, arrived at Oxford to pursue an M.A. The place took hold of him almost instantly and lodged itself deep in his personality and psyche, as happens to a great many of those privileged to study there.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
