** Amateur Hour by Kimberly Harrington

I might have read too many motherhood memoirs and Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words felt a little flat and repetitive to me. That said, some of the essays are hilarious, as when she concocts a dreary formal job description for mothers.

*** The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner

I do not usually think about monks, medieval or otherwise, but I was fascinated by The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction and how very modern their problems with distractions seemed to be. It seems that peace and quiet, no worries about making a living, and a total absence of digital devices would allow for full concentration but they struggled, and built all kinds of rules and discipline-keeping mechanisms to maintain focus. A lively and enjoyable book!

** The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s may try to tell too many stories: that of Radcliffe’s 1960 experiment to offer paid fellowships to women of talent but with family responsibilities that weighted them down, those of five of the women who were selected for the experiment and became friends, and those of many others. It makes for a sometimes meandering tale, especially since the author chose to follow multiple women for decades. For me, the best part was the opportunity to peek at the individual stories, which clearly show that even in a pretty homogeneous group of white, mostly middle- to upper  middle-class women, trajectories can vary a lot.

** The Cigarette by Sarah Milov

The Cigarette: A Political History traces the growing popularity of cigarettes during the 20th century and their fairly swift demise in the last decades. Viewed from today, it’s astonishing that cigarettes were placed in every WWII soldier’s ration, that tobacco was treated as any other agricultural product, and that the government spent millions subsidizing its cultivation. Protecting non-smokers and encouraging smokers to quit came in very small steps, from a lone Bell Labs worker who sued to be able to work in a smoke-free office to the designation of non-smoking areas in restaurants and planes.

Sadly, I found the book to be quite tedious in its relentless details.

* The Appointment by Hera Muller

The heroine of The Appointment has been summoned to yet another questioning session after being caught stuffing notes into suits made for export in Romania.  She reviews her family’s and her miserable lives during her long tram ride, which makes for a thorough history lesson of post WWII regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I just could not get past the unrelenting gloom.

*** The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Deesha Philyaw wants us to know that church ladies have needs that do not match their pious demeanors in church. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies lets us in to the secrets and on the arrangements they (and their preachers) make with their conscience, their mothers, their daughters, and their friends.

*** Speaking American by Josh Katz

Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide is a fun and short book that illustrates dialect differences in the US, from drinking fountains (bubblers in Milwaukee and New England) to semis (big rigs in Northern California). There are tips to identify residents of each state, but my favorite part were the maps (all based on online surveys, so to be taken with a grain of salt).

** Madam Restell by Jennifer Wright

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist tells the story of an enterprising English immigrant who learned to concoct birth control and abortion “pills” and provide abortions during the late 19th and early 20th century. She was very successful, both in managing to keep her patients safe at a time when infections were deadly and also in amassing a fortune. Her reign ended as abortion and even birth control started to be severely restricted legally (o hello, Anthony Comstock).

The author adds an epilogue that heavily compares the story with today’s abortion rollbacks, which I did not think was necessary as the story speaks for itself, and what a story.

** But You Seemed so Happy by Kimberly Harrington

If memoirs leave you queasy from the voyeuristic experience, But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits will set your teeth on edge. Where’s the author’s partner and what’s his side of the story, not to mention his reaction to hers?

Still, there are some wonderful essays in the lot, including the one that describes her description of the rough transition from couplehood to parenthood.

*** Empress of the Nile by Lynne

Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction is the biography of a French archaeologist called Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt who did, indeed, launch a campaign to save several temples threatened by the construction of the Aswan Dam–but also had a storied life in the machist world of egyptology, starting before WWII.

There’s no detail left unsaid in this story, so we also get a compendium of modern Egyptian politics (germane to the story and useful as a refresher, if nothing else), an elaborate account of the rivalry between the British Museum and the Louvre (somewhat relevant to the story, but only partially), and extensive descriptions of how Jaqueline Kennedy, who helped rally the American financial support to the temple relocation, also helped various completely unrelated preservation efforts in the US…  Fortunately, the author keeps an engaging pace, even if I do readily admit to skipping through the Jackie O pages.