Tag Archives: Reviews

A Year in Books/Day 216: Wild Irish Women

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  • Title: Wild Irish Women Extraordinary Lives from History
  • Author: Marian Broderick
  • Year Published: 2001/This Edition: 2002 (The O’Brien Press)
  • Year Purchased: September 2012
  • Source: My momma.
  • About: Besides hailing from the fair island of Ireland (or, in some cases, having Irish parentage), all of the women profiled in this book have one thing in common: they are all dead. Just my cup of tea! I love historical ladies, whatever their professional or social province or claim to immortality, however slight. The more eccentric, the better. The 75 women included in this volume, for good or ill, do our complicated place in history justice. The stories of their often oppressive lives are stimulating, maddening, thought-provoking, and inspiring. They were artists, writers, intellectuals, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, republicans, actresses, scientists, and activists. One thing they never were, was boring. Since my curiosity about the women who smoothed my path is unapologetically insatiable, I couldn’t flip the pages fast enough. It’s a wonderful tease into the fascinating subject of forgotten women. Distilling-or gutting-the essence of a life, human and flawed and fertile, into a few pages comprised of paper and ink could be, and often is, problematic. Lives aren’t edited, but history is; what is left out is as important as what remains. Take this book as a nice starting point, then go forth and learn more.
  • Motivation: My love of feisty, original, gutsy women is well-known. Naturally, this book reminded my mom of me.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 49: “However, there was something that lifted the spirits of Peig (Sayers) and the other islanders on the long, dark winter nights: storytelling. This important form of entertainment was part of the old Irish oral tradition. A dail, or assembly, would meet at night in a house, and a comedy, mystery or tragedy would slowly unfold. Peig, with her pure Irish and her beautiful embellishments and turns of phrase, was an acknowledged master of the art. She kept hundreds of stories in her phenomenal memory, and she was able to memorize a story that would take a week in the telling after hearing it just once.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9 1/2

A Year in Books/Day 215: Ariel Poems by Sylvia Plath

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English: Digital image of Sylvia Plath's signature

English: Digital image of Sylvia Plath’s signature (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • Title: Ariel Poems by Sylvia Plath
  • Author: Sylvia Plath
  • Year Published: 1965 (HarperPerennial)
  • Year Purchased: 1994
  • Source: A bookstore in Tennessee.
  • About: Sylvia was a born writer. She wrote like a lioness: fearless, protective, maternal, bold, ruthless, nurturing, unapologetic. Published a couple of years after her suicide, her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, changed the make-up of Ariel by switching out twelve poems for those of his choosing; it took 39 years for this to be righted. This is the altered edition. No matter, the poems are stunning. My favourites change with the seasons, my mood, my age. They are chameleons, different with each reading. They should, at that, be read aloud. Adding a voice tips the alchemical balance anew. If you haven’t read Plath’s poems in a while, try again. She isn’t just for moody teenage girls. I promise.
  • Motivation: I was young, very young. I bought this slim volume on a road trip to Tennessee. It was autumn, the leaves were falling. I wore a lot of plaid dresses and flat shoes, good for twirling around in the crisp mountain air. The season was a perfect accompaniment for her fierce lamentations and burning clarity, a like-minded companion for the turmoil of my heart.
  • Times Read: Multiple
  • Random Excerpt/Page 57: “I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me/With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury./I could not run without having to run forever./The white hive is snug as a virgin,/Selling off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

     

A Year in Books/Day 214: Me

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  • Title: Me Stories of My Life
  • Author: Katharine Hepburn
  • Year Published: 1991 (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: Summer of 2010
  • Source: My momma
  • About: Dear Kate: You were such an iconoclast. I know, I know; what an over-used word. I’m not proud of trotting out something so stale, especially in reference to
    English: Photograph of the actress Katharine H...

    English: Photograph of the actress Katharine Hepburn in the 1932 play The Warrior’s Husband. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    someone as amazing as you were. Really, though, what choice do I have? What else is there? Rebel, nonpareil, maverick? Nonconformist, idol, icon? Legend, paragon, nonesuch? They’re all too pale, weak, humourless. You were too kick-ass to be so neatly boxed-in, anyway. Now let’s get to business. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 213: Drinking with George

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  • Title: Drinking with George A Barstool Professional’s Guide to Beer
  • Author: George Wendt with Jonathan Grotenstein
  • Year Published: 2009 (Simon Spotlight Entertainment)
  • Year Purchased: September, 2011 (at Oktoberfest Zinzinnati)
  • Source: George Wendt
  • About: George Wendt’s love affair with beer is a thing of epic beauty. Drinking with George is part personal biography and part encyclopedia of beer. It’s a strange combination that pairs as wonderfully as barley and hops. You could really say that he poured his heart and soul into this project. Tee-hee. It’s incredibly funny, informative, and can be read in the time it takes the average person to drink a couple pints of Guinness. It even comes with a bit of real, human romance: his love for his wife Bernadette Birkett (who voiced Vera Peterson on Cheers) is sweet and moving, if nearly as hilarious as his beer-induced exploits.
  • Motivation: The author hawked his book at last year’s Oktoberfest Zinzinnati. Only a humourless, beer-hating twit could resist buying a copy from the man himself.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 35: “Looking to lighten my load, I packed a leather travel bag I’d overpaid for in Marrakesh with my untouched and completely unnecessary suit and dress shoes. I sent them back to the States via tramp steamer, addressing the bag to my friend Joe Farmar so as not to offend my dad. A few months later, I would try to recover the clothes, only to discover that Joe had torn the suit, the shoes, and even the bag itself to shreds. This was entirely my fault: I hadn’t bothered to include a note, which confused Joe until he put “bag” together with “Marrakesh” and decided that I’d hidden hashish somewhere inside.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

    George Wendt , with yours truly cropped out.

    George Wendt , with yours truly cropped out.

A Year in Books/Day 212: The White Blackbird

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  • Title: The White Blackbird A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
  • Author: Honor Moore
  • Year Published: 1996 (Penguin Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2004/2005
  • Source: A bookstore in Buffalo, New York
  • About: I love stumbling across books about people whose names and faces don’t register. It is fair to say that I am obsessed with the obscure and the odd and the oddly obscure, especially when the subjects in question are creative and rebellious women. Anyone determined to live a life of artistry has to break some barriers. Deterrents come in many forms, but we all have expectations that we must push past in order to have the freedom to create. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 211: Leading Ladies

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  • Title: Leading Ladies
  • Author: Don Macpherson
  • Year Published: 1986/This edition: 1989 (Conran Octopus Limited/Crescent Books)
  • Year Purchased: 1990s
  • Source: It was a Christmas gift from my Aunt Lauree.
  • About: This is a coffee table book, not a scholarly work. The text is nice, but not genre-shattering; it’s the standard drill for this kind of product. The images are from The Kobal Collection, so the writing stands no chance of taking first place, anyway. The whole gang is here, from Theda Bara to Doris Day, Jean Harlow to Jean Seberg, Anna Magnani to Debra Winger, represented by an array of unusually stunning photographs. Since that is the dominant reason for buying a book like this, you’ll walk away happy.
  • Motivation: I’ve been fond of old movies since I was a child.
  • Times Read: Multiple
  • Random Excerpt/Page 22: “By the time she was twenty-five, Colleen Moore was earning a weekly salary of $12,500, a reflection of her value to a studio for whom she was a highly profitable jazz baby. With her bobbed hair, cheeky face and alert eyes, she resembles to modern eyes an uncanny combination of the better remembered Clara Bow and Louise Brooks. But in the 1920s, it was Moore who was the incarnation of the twenties flapper girl.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10++
    Publicity photo of Colleen Moore for Argentine...

    Publicity photo of Colleen Moore for Argentinean Magazine. (Printed in USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia). Here, in her post-Flapper days.

     

A Year in Books/Day 210: Great Lives Great Deeds

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  • Title: Reader’s Digest Great Lives Great Deeds
  • Author: Various
  • Year Published: 1964 (The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: 1966, by my Grandma
  • Source: Reader’s Digest
  • About: When my mom was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, a normal American family with kids owned a car, a television, a full set of encyclopedias, and at least a few Reader’s Digest books. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 209: Lives of the Poets

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  • Title: Lives of the Poets
  • Author: Michael Schmidt
  • Year Published: 1998 (A Phoenix Paperback)
  • Year Purchased: 2004/2005
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: Michael Schmidt takes approximately 1000 pages to cover more than 250 poets, briskly but rigorously dissecting their lives, influences, historical circumstances, and professional interconnections. Mapping out seven centuries of poetic genealogy is a gargantuan task, but Lives of the Poets is a surprisingly quick read, and as riveting as most of its subjects’ creations.
  • Motivation: The title + poets + biographies=bliss. Surprised?
  • Times Read: Cover-to-cover-1/Excerpts-Multiple
  • Random Excerpt/Page 11: “Poems swim free of their age, but it’s hard to think of a single poem that swims entirely free of its medium, not just language but language used in the particular ways that are poetry. Even the most pathenogenetic-seeming poem has a pedigree. The poet may not know precisely a line’s or a stanza’s parents; indeed, may not be interested in finding out. Yet as readers of poetry we can come to know more about a poem than the poet does and know it more fully.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 208: Forgotten Films to Remember

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  • Title: Forgotten Films to Remember
  • Author: John Springer
  • Year Published: 1980 (The Citadel Press)
  • Year Purchased: 1990s
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: Some of the best classic movies aren’t, well, classic. At least not in the sense of having wide, lasting cultural impact. Maybe they were box office winners in their day, quiet sleepers or cheapie programmers, critically acclaimed or unappreciated gems; most have been long forgotten by the masses, embraced and beloved by fanatics alone. Hollywood studios churned out hundreds of films a year, so it is no wonder that, of those hardy survivors, few are truly iconic. If you want to learn more but are too cowed to wade through the classic film jungle alone and bewildered, Forgotten Films to Remember makes it easy. Covering the years 1928-1959 (with a quick overview of the 1960s and 1970s), John Springer devotes a paragraph each to dozens of remarkable movies that you really need to watch. In the process, a clear, workmanlike but interesting narrative of studio-era Hollywood emerges. The accompanying photographs are mostly from the author’s archive.
  • Motivation: I love old movies, especially obscure ones.
  • Times Read: 4 or 5
  • Random Excerpt/Page 18: “Howard Hawks made a strong movie out of Martin Flavin’s play, The Criminal Code, aided impressively by the performance of Walter Huston. He played a district attorney who becomes the warden of a prison, populated by men he has sent up. Constance Cummings and Phillips Holmes had the love interest such as it was and Boris Karloff skulked about as a squealer.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 207: Romancing the Ordinary

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  • Title: Romancing the Ordinary A Year of Simple Splendor
  • Author: Sarah Ban Breathnach
  • Year Published: 2002 (The Simple Abundance Press/Scribner)
  • Year Purchased: 2002
  • Source: It was a Christmas gift from my mom.
  • About: There is something a bit stale about most inspirational books that are directed at women, or maybe I don’t have the proper constitution for that type of thing. Either way, I was surprised to discover that Romancing the Ordinary, although a trifle flowery in spots, is actually inspiring. I know, I know. Hear me out. These are the reasons I love this book: 1) It’s easy to use. Twelve months=a dozen chapters. In other words, I can take an entire month to read a chapter. It’s such a slight commitment that it does not take serious time away from my other reading. 2) It’s guilt-free. Romancing the Ordinary isn’t a self-help program, but a reminder to slow down for three seconds and attend to your own needs. It’s a how-to guide in relaxation, if you will. 3) It doesn’t try to make you a better person. If it did, I would have pitched it years ago. 4) It is full of quotes, and we all know I love quotes. 5) Most of the books quoted from are fabulous. Anything that turns me on to books I’ve never read, especially intriguing ones, is a winner. 6) It has recipes. The Rice Pudding is delectable. 7) Even though I haven’t tried 85% of her ideas, I don’t feel inadequate. Who needs that from a book, anyway? I take what I want, dismiss the rest, and go on my merry way. 8) The underlying message. Perhaps it is an elaborate way of saying something very basic-“Hey there! Always remember that alone time is great. Don’t let yourself get lost in the demands of the every day.”-but it is a reminder we all need on occasion.
  • Motivation: My mom bought a copy for someone else. After they raved about it, she decided that I would find it enjoyable, too.
  • Times Read: 3 or 4
  • Random Excerpt/Page 208: “I am now an orderly woman. By this I mean, I am a woman who reveres order. But I am not the neatest person. I have always been a messy girl, and not so long ago, in an effort to embrace my imperfection, I came to the awareness that I will probably always be a messy girl.” (Ed. note: Ahem. My husband would say that this reminds him, quite powerfully, of me.)
  • Happiness Scale: 8 1/2