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Irene Biggs
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
This non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America from its inception. This deeply researched text is supported by personal anecdotes by Martin Luther King, baseball’s Satchel Paige, and Wilkerson herself along with many others. Wilkerson looks beyond race and class as she addresses how our caste system influences our lives, our behavior, and our nation’s fate.
In this time of heightened awareness of racism, the reader is informed and fortified as the book examines ways America can move past human divisions and toward the hope of common humanity.
Bruce Burk
A Month in the Country
by J. L. Carr
This slim, poignant novel is set in the 1920’s, in Oxgodby, a small Yorkshire town. The story is narrated by Tom, an artist charged with the task of uncovering and restoring a medieval wall painting in the local church. Over his month’s stay in this quiet village, Tom befriends Moon, an excavator employed to recover a lost grave in the churchyard. Both men, seeking a sense of normalcy, bond through past and present experiences.
Through the lens of daily village life and budding relationships, the story captures a sense of nostalgia and tranquility, with an acceptance of one’s life: its possibilities, disappointments, and its reality.
Roberta Yarker-Smith
The Last Train to London
by Meg Waite Clayton
This is one of the best historical novels I have read in some time. It is well-researched and certainly illustrates the concept that “one person of integrity can make a difference.” (Quote by Elie Wiesel, from his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.)
The seventh of M. W. Clayton’s novels, this book is concerned with the Dutch woman, who organized the Kindertransport from Vienna (1938-1940). Geertruida Meijer (1896-1978) was known as “Tante Truus” to the children she rescued. She and her husband, who supported her work unreservedly, had no children of their own, but managed, with others, to enable some ten thousand children, mainly, but not exclusively Jewish, to escape Nazi occupation.
Clayton weaves her novel around real people, including Adolf Eichmann, and fictional characters, primarily Stephan Neuman, a young playwright and Zofie-Helene Perger, a mathematical prodigy, who eventually studies at Oxford, and their extended families. The construction of the novel is excellent with short chapters and excerpts from newspapers and reports of the time as well as material from survivor interviews.
It is a compelling and inspiring tale.
Roberta Yarker Smith
The Daughters of Yalta
by Catherine Grace Katz
The is a non-fiction work and an astonishing debut by its young author. It concerns the three women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta conference in 1945: Kathleen Harriman (28), Sarah Churchill (30) and Anna Roosevelt (38). Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana was only 19 at the time and did not attend.
It is well-written and meticulously researched using private and government archives, documentary collections and the diaries, journals, letters and conversations of these woman. It gives a fascinating insight into the decaying palace hosting the conference and the various ways, both official and unofficial meetings were arranged and developed.
As one reviewer has written, “The Daughters of Yalta” is as “informative as it is intriguing.”
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
This non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America from its inception. This deeply researched text is supported by personal anecdotes by Martin Luther King, baseball’s Satchel Paige, and Wilkerson herself along with many others. Wilkerson looks beyond race and class as she addresses how our caste system influences our lives, our behavior, and our nation’s fate.
In this time of heightened awareness of racism, the reader is informed and fortified as the book examines ways America can move past human divisions and toward the hope of common humanity.
Bruce Burk
A Month in the Country
by J. L. Carr
This slim, poignant novel is set in the 1920’s, in Oxgodby, a small Yorkshire town. The story is narrated by Tom, an artist charged with the task of uncovering and restoring a medieval wall painting in the local church. Over his month’s stay in this quiet village, Tom befriends Moon, an excavator employed to recover a lost grave in the churchyard. Both men, seeking a sense of normalcy, bond through past and present experiences.
Through the lens of daily village life and budding relationships, the story captures a sense of nostalgia and tranquility, with an acceptance of one’s life: its possibilities, disappointments, and its reality.
Roberta Yarker-Smith
The Last Train to London
by Meg Waite Clayton
This is one of the best historical novels I have read in some time. It is well-researched and certainly illustrates the concept that “one person of integrity can make a difference.” (Quote by Elie Wiesel, from his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.)
The seventh of M. W. Clayton’s novels, this book is concerned with the Dutch woman, who organized the Kindertransport from Vienna (1938-1940). Geertruida Meijer (1896-1978) was known as “Tante Truus” to the children she rescued. She and her husband, who supported her work unreservedly, had no children of their own, but managed, with others, to enable some ten thousand children, mainly, but not exclusively Jewish, to escape Nazi occupation.
Clayton weaves her novel around real people, including Adolf Eichmann, and fictional characters, primarily Stephan Neuman, a young playwright and Zofie-Helene Perger, a mathematical prodigy, who eventually studies at Oxford, and their extended families. The construction of the novel is excellent with short chapters and excerpts from newspapers and reports of the time as well as material from survivor interviews.
It is a compelling and inspiring tale.
Roberta Yarker Smith
The Daughters of Yalta
by Catherine Grace Katz
The is a non-fiction work and an astonishing debut by its young author. It concerns the three women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta conference in 1945: Kathleen Harriman (28), Sarah Churchill (30) and Anna Roosevelt (38). Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana was only 19 at the time and did not attend.
It is well-written and meticulously researched using private and government archives, documentary collections and the diaries, journals, letters and conversations of these woman. It gives a fascinating insight into the decaying palace hosting the conference and the various ways, both official and unofficial meetings were arranged and developed.
As one reviewer has written, “The Daughters of Yalta” is as “informative as it is intriguing.”
