Where is your nonfiction section please.
Book review: The Only Street in Paris, by Elaine Sciolino (Amazon / Book Depository) Former New York Times Paris Bureau Chief Elaine Sciolino's The Only Street in Paris is a travelogue memoir meets micro-history and sociocultural study of the Parisian street where she and her family made their home for a time. There's a lot going... Continue Reading →
August is Women in Translation month, an event started by Meytal Radzinski of Biblibio to encourage reading more of the too-few books written by women that are translated into English each year (statistics are a bit hard to come by, but women writers only account for around a third of what's translated.) You can learn more... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Crimes of Paris, by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler (Amazon / Book Depository) The disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre stunned Parisians, who had long dismissed any impossible task with the remark that doing so 'would be like trying to steal the Mona Lisa.' The central defining event in The Crimes of... Continue Reading →
One last installment of 2019's upcoming nonfiction new releases: We've got cult insiders, lesser known Cold War tales, undercover in asylums, retracing Napoleon's Russian retreat, jackasses, life and death in colonial Sydney, women profiling women, and a genre-bending look at domestic abuse, and some new nonfiction in translation, among others. The Berlin Mission: The American... Continue Reading →
What's the best nonfiction you've read so far this year? Any standouts yet? Looking back from the halfway point, I think it's already been a pretty good year for nonfiction. In no particular order, here are my favorites from the new nonfiction published in the first half of 2019. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide... Continue Reading →
Book review: A Woman of No Importance, by Sonia Purnell (Amazon / Book Depository) To meet Virginia was clearly never to forget her... She was a woman ahead of her time who has much to say to us now. American spy Virginia Hall is one of the many heroes whose contribution to history has gone... Continue Reading →
Book review: But You Did Not Come Back, by Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Amazon / Book Depository) I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us...But I'm changing. It isn't bitterness, I'm not bitter. It's just as if I were already gone...I don't belong here anymore. Perhaps it's trite to say... Continue Reading →
Book review: My Life in France, by Julia Child & Alex Prud'homme (Amazon / Book Depository) In Paris in the 1950s, I had the supreme good fortune to study with a remarkably able group of chefs. From them I learned why good French food is an art, and why it makes such sublime eating: nothing... Continue Reading →
Book review: I'm Writing You From Tehran, by Delphine Minoui (Amazon / Book Depository) The taxi rolls along gray lines. That's all we can make out in the darkness: gray lines, as far as the eye can see, marking out the road to the airport. Outside, beyond the window, the night devours the last forbidden... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Consolations of the Forest, by Sylvain Tesson (Amazon / Book Depository) I'd promised myself that before I turned forty I would live as a hermit deep in the woods. I wanted to settle an old score with time. French author Sylvain Tesson felt an itch familiar to many: to escape the stress... Continue Reading →
I used to hold myself to a strict standard of finishing every book I started. It was painful. Why insist on spending precious time finishing something I'm not enjoying just because I made a decision one time to read it? Abandoning feels freeing in its own little way. Time for another look into some of... Continue Reading →
Book review: A Paris Year, by Janice MacLeod (Amazon / Book Depository) Bonjour Bonjour Ça va Ça va Ça va Ça va Bonjour Bonjour. It’s really that easy to have an entire conversation in French. There is no waving hello. This is not the French way. When you wave hello their eyes follow your hand... Continue Reading →
