I had little idea what to expect when I picked up Timothy Egan’s new book, A Fever in the Heartland. I knew it was about the Ku Klux Klan, but its subtitle seemed a bit dramatic: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. It actually proved to be accurate in this little-known history of the KKK at a time and in a place I had never heard ... Read More...
The Many Lives of Mama Love
It's a picture-perfect Saturday in Northern California with soccer parents lining the field and watching their kids play. As the game winds down most mothers go to retrieve their young, but Lara Love hangs back. And surreptitiously lifts cash out of a wallet in one of the handbags left behind in the stands. She moves onto the next before joining her friends and her children. ... Read More...
The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
I love books about art, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction so Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief was an easy reading choice. It’s the true story of a modern day art thief in France and is a heady combination of both fiction and nonfiction in that it’s true, but reads with the pace and plot twists of a thriller. Stéphane Breitwieser was not a man who would stand out in person or ... Read More...
March Reading Recap
March has been a month of extremes. There was no middle ground to my reading. I had six books four stars and higher, but I also had four books I didn’t finish. This could be due, in part, to the fact that I overcommitted on books to read for March. Where I might normally push through on a book (and sometimes be rewarded with a turnaround) I had to jettison anything that wasn’t ... Read More...
Deliberate Cruelty
I’ve always had a fascination with high society and the people who chronicle it. Fiction like The Swans of Fifth Avenue and memoirs like Dilettante are some of my favorite reading. In keeping with that theme, but straying from the ‘giving thanks’ aspect of the week, I’m back with a bit of wealthy people behaving badly nonfiction in Deliberate Cruelty by Roseanne Montillo. A ... Read More...
May Reading Recap
Wait a minute—is May over? I’m pretty sure I was cheated out of a week. Or maybe it’s just that the bad news is coming at a faster pace, whether it’s the increasing attack on women’s rights or the unrelenting uptick in gun violence. I veer between apathy and a rage that wants to know: why doesn’t the government apply the same attention and rigor to young men buying guns as they ... Read More...
