How's your reading for Women in Translation Month? I haven't actually read anything new in translation yet this month, but I can recommend three fantastic memoirs by women in translation that I've read recently. Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, by Marie Jalowicz Simon, translated... Continue Reading →
A Wild Snail and a Story of Survival
Review: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey (Amazon / Book Depository) Twilight vanishes the hills into the mountains; then all is lost to the dark. Elisabeth Tova Bailey was at the end of a vacation, staying at a hotel in an Alpine village, when she started to feel ill. Her... Continue Reading →
A Woman’s Rediscovered Memoir of Fleeing the Nazis
Book review: A Bookshop in Berlin, by Francoise Frenkel (Amazon / Book Depository) Francoise Frenkel, born Frymeta Frenkel, was a Polish Jew who opened Berlin's first French-language bookstore in 1921. She fled Berlin after the infamous Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, that targeted Jewish shops and institutions, abandoning the beloved shop she'd had to... Continue Reading →
Nonfiction Classic on Making Fear Work For You
Book review: The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker (Amazon / Book Depository) Do not listen to the TV news checklist of what to do, or the magazine article's checklist of what to do, or the story about what your friend did. Listen to the wisdom that comes from having heard it all by... Continue Reading →
An Atlantic Shipwreck Seen Through its Sole Survivor
Book review: Adrift, by Brian Murphy with Toula Vlahou Amazon Adrift tells the story of the packet ship John Rutledge, which in 1856 crossed the North Atlantic from Liverpool to New York with a cargo consisting mostly of mail and around 100 passengers, many of them emigrating from Ireland. The ship navigated turbulent winter conditions before... Continue Reading →
The Minutes of An American Tragedy
Image of World Trade Center fog, November 1998. By Flickr user Beija (http://www.flickr.com/photos/beija/243997357) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Book review: 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn Amazon From the moment the first hijacked plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, 102 minutes passed... Continue Reading →
A Family’s Life After A Cult
Book review: In the Days of Rain, by Rebecca Stott "No one would guess that I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist cult or that my father and grandfather were ministering brothers in one of the most reclusive and savage Protestant sects in British history." Rebecca Stott is the daughter of Roger Stott, a minister turned defector... Continue Reading →