It’s official: there’s no way I can limit myself to just one great book per month so from now on it will be BookS of the month. For June, I recommend
The Housekeeper and the Professor, a delightful, kind story of the love between a professor who’s losing his mind and his hoursekpeer (and her son)
Not [...]
Home Safe is the story of a sixty-year old writer who loses her husband and her writing inspiration and focuses instead on making her daughter’s life miserable. She starts with innocuous annoyances, like buying her clothes she can’t wear, but graduates to prying into her boyfriends and her life, all under the cover of being [...]
Doghead is the story of a Norwegian-Danish boy with a wacky family that includes an alcoholic father, a grandfather with an uncertain past, and several young men who took to the seas since they definitely did not fit in. Children are brought up in decidedly hands-off, sometimes cruel ways but manage to find their ways [...]
My Life at First Try is the funnily told life of a Russian Jew who emigrates to the United States in search of freedom and a more comfortable life.The book is written in very short chapters that each give a snapshot of the hero, Alex, at a different point in time. Alex is an engineer [...]
A team of archaeologists in present-day Iraq, but at the time a very decayed and corrupt Ottoman Empire, are struggling to make important discoveries as they are threatened by the construction of a railroad line, the start of WWI, and the costly love yearnings of their local helper. At the same time, they unknowingly harbor [...]
Pedaling Revolution describes how cycling enthusiasts are changing the transportation culture throughout the United States, focusing on the usual suspects: Portland, Davis, San Francisco, with the mandatory look at Amsterdam thrown in. The style is occasionally plodding, awkward even, but the book is interesting in gauging the progress that has been made by advocates of [...]
Whatever It Takes tells the story of Geoffrey Canada and his quest to transform the way the children of poor, poorly educated parents are raised in Harlem. Canada’s vision is for a “conveyor belt” that would start with educating expectant parents on such topic as exercising during pregnancy, reading to their children, and using appropriate [...]
Not Becoming My Mother is a sweet and sad paean to the author’s mother, who was a smart, career-minded woman forced by the era she lived in as well as her parents to content herself to be a wife and mother, both roles she had very little talent for. The descriptions of the snacks she [...]
A woman who is not who she claims to be travels to a small town in Wisconsin to marry, sight unseen, a rich man who was widowed years ago. The man sees right through her but marries her anyway (as if there were no other women available in the world?) and they live a marriage [...]
How to Sell will appeal to the language nerds amongst us — of which a surprising portion are non-native speakers, always on the lookout for some interesting convergence between two languages they know. Others may choose to read it in small doses!
The book can be seen as a series of essays on different aspects of [...]
