When I went home a little while back, I saw a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in my little sister's room. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I went home and started reading the battered copy on my bookshelf. I don't know how many times I have read this book (almost as many as Harper Lee's To Kill...
Posted to
Books Blog
by
KickinLibrarian@evpl
on
09-30-2009
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Filed under: reviews, fiction, books, historical fiction, teens, families, Mothers & Daughters, poor, World War I -- Fiction, growing up, love
Anyone familiar with John Krakauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven will be familiar with the polygamous, Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In that book Krakauer recounts how religious polygamy was often used as a cover for pedophilia, and how anyone who questioned the motives...
Rose and Norah were little girls when their little mother died. They both came in from playing in the yard to find their mom dead in the bathroom, an apparent suicide. As the two girls grow up, that day shapes their lives. Rose is a single mother working hard as a house cleaner to raise her son, while...
In September of 1965 Lorree Rackstraw was a graduate student in her second year at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, apprehensive about her new teacher, a relatively unknown writer named Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut had published just three books: The Sirens of Titan , Mother Night , and Cat's Cradle ....
Posted to
Books Blog
by
Bufkinite@evpl
on
09-07-2009
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Filed under: reviews, books, World War II, families, biography, memoir, old man, WWII, Word War II -- fiction, books and reading, love, friends, relationships, Loree Rackstraw, Kurt Vonnegut, writers
Are you a fan of the Shopaholic Series by Sophie Kinsella? If so, let me introduce you to Kinsella's alter ego, Madeleine Wickham. Both personas write about English women who have found themselves in a predicament. Whether it be money (Shopaholic series), quitting a job and winding up in the country...
It's every parent's worst nightmare.... you wake up early one morning to find that the child that you tucked into bed the night before is gone -- not playing in another room or downstairs watching TV, but truly, hopelessly, nowhere to be found. Missing! The terror, the panic, the overwhelming...
Thanks to a recommendation by my friend, I watched a stunning film this weekend. Set in a Castilian village somewhere in early 1940's rural Spain, this movie has won international acclaim as a masterpiece - labeled one of the greatest Spanish films of the 1970's. On the surface, it is a coming...
Posted to
Movies Blog
by
wag.mado@evpl
on
12-30-2008
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Filed under: dvd, reviews, good and evil, families, movies, murder, films, dying, childhood, Spain, foreign films
After seeing it mentioned on one or two best movie lists, I decided to check out this 2005 film although I wondered if I would enjoy its story about a 1980s Brooklyn couple's decision to divorce and the resulting damage to their two sons. I was swayed by the casting of Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney...
With its sympathetic portrayal of a family in crisis, "The Condition" reminds me of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and Joyce Carol Oates' "We Were the Mulvaneys." All three novels convey the message that every family has points of stress and conflict -- we...