What We're Reading

Book Reviews by the staff of the Mendocino County Library

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Civil War Novels of Ann McMillan

Having grown up in Virginia just down the street from a fort built to protect Washington, D C, and yet knowing not much about the Civil War until I watched Ken Burns incredible series. It just was not discussed much except that my grandmother always said we were not rich because Albert Goddard had died and her father in law, Alfred Goddard was the dreamer and Shakespeare scholar, but not a money maker. I was just a kid. What did I know?

Ann McMillan's heroine described as a white widow turned Confederate nurse solves a series of mysteries all the while Richmond, Virginia is coming closer to being engulfed by the northern armies. She is aided by a free black herbalist and midwife, Judah Daniels. McMillan's 4 civil war mysteries are as follows:

Dead March
Angel Trumpet
Civil Blood
Chickahominy Fever

Since most books about war are from the male side, I am drawn to these books that bring the war down to a city, a block and a family. How are people affected. Her stories
are fascinating and certainly very possibe. I think of how one could be a nurse during the butchery of the Civil War, well probably any war. But that is what interests me.
If for nothing that they are well written and interesting stories, I recommend this series of 4.
Unfortunately, I do not see any new books in this series.

Eliza

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

What We're Not Reading


Top 10 Difficult Literary Works

Share This- Published June 7, 2010 by Xilebat - 320 Comments

Xilebat publishes the top 10 most arduous literary works.  I can't say I disagree and the commentary is amusing.
Link is here, but for those who don't want to click.  Here's the list from 10 to 1:
10.  War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
9.  Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
8.  Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
7.  The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
6.  Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
5.  Scarlet Letter, by Nathanial Hawthorne
4.  The Waste Land, by TS Eliot
3.  Naked Lunch, by WIlliam Burroughs
2.  Sound and Fury, by William Faulkner
and
1.  Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce.
Click on the link at the beginning of the post to see responses and/or post your own response here.
~mel

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Saturday, June 05, 2010

The Book of Spies and The Coil

The Book of Spies by Gayle Lynds was a bit too violent for me but I love the mystery of the search for Ivan the Terrible's lost library. Ms Lynd's interest in the Library was piqued by a newspaper article on the secret tunnels underneath Moscow.

One of the exquisite books appears and the murders start. It is left to rare books co-ordinator Eva Blake to find the Library and those that control it. It is a world of the rich and famous, the CIA and international espionage.


The Coil is an earlier book with similar parts of CIA, M6 of Great Britain, hired "janitors", European Union, free trade, Nautilus and those protesting free trade.
Again there is a secret group of powerful men who started out with a positive vision of helping the world economy (and themselves) but have slipped into murder, secrecy and self-promoting actions. Like The Book of Spies this is a fast paced ride through a world we can only hope does not exist.

Eliza

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