Blog by Kathryn Smith, author of The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency. Thanks, Cathy, for letting me be your guest blogger today. Missy LeHand was one of Somerville’s most famous residents in the 1920s-1940s, when she was the private secretary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Especially…
By: Aimee Bender This endearing book is set in California and is about Rose Edelstein, who when tasting food, can feel the hidden emotions of the person who cooked it. The book is about her relationship with her out of touch parents, disappearing brother, fake classmates and how she handles all the emotions people dump…
NBC nightly news correspondent Richard Engel has written an intriguing book, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East, about his experience living in the Middle East. From witnessing bomb explosions, kidnappings, and briberies, meeting Saddam Hussein, and at one point was the only living American reporter in Baghdad during the…
If you’re lucky you’ll have some time off next week. Many Americans aren’t that fortunate. What do you plan to do with your time? I will be reading Jenny Lawson’s new(ish) memoir Furiously Happy and returning to some old favorites: Carl Hiassen’s Tourist Season and Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers. If you’re looking for book suggestions,…
It’s been a big week at the Supreme Court: the Affordable Care Act upheld, gay marriage bans struck down, and a blow struck against housing discrimination. The Supreme Court’s rulings have had a profound impact on American society: their decision in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) ultimately ended legal school…
On November 18, 1985, people across the country opened their newspapers (this was back when most people read newspapers) and met a sandy-haired six-year old named Calvin and his stuffed (but sentient) tiger Hobbes. Calvin was every babysitter’s nightmare, the bane of his teachers, Dennis the Menace on speed (but with a much better vocabulary…
Reading the published diary of someone who died early can be a poignant experience. You can only speculate on what they might have become had they lived. Sometimes all you can think is, “The world lost this person too soon.” Petr Ginz (1928-1944) was a child of extraordinary energy and gifts: between the ages of…
by Eileen and Sujei If you’re like me, you have a ton of things on your mind/plate. And although I knew July was International Zine Month, I couldn’t quite pull the trigger on this blog post till now. But, all this information is still valid – and it’s always a good time to enjoy and make…
In honor of Halloween, some denizens of the Interwebs are indulging their list-making mania by compiling lists of scary books or movies. Below is a brief list of my own: six works—three books, three movies—that were created with one purpose in mind: to scare the bejesus out of us. The Haunting of Hill House by…
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a great heart-wrenching book about the lives of two women, born a generation apart, and how they become entangled in an unlikely friendship amongst the ongoing wars in Afghanistan. I highly recommend it, either for summer reading or just for fun! It is very interesting and you…
