Well, we all know that you’re a mom of three enviable children. Or a nurse. Or a grad student with a super-interesting major. But maybe you’re tired of everybody thinking that’s all you’re about. You wish we'd sit beside you a little longer and ask more questions. Then you could admit that you played accordion in a family band. (Or maybe you don’t want us to know about [...]
This was the black sheep of my family. Take a guess at her most heinous crime: 1) eloped to Reno 2) smoked unfiltered cigarettes 3) stayed up long after the TV stations signed off for the night. The correct answer is: 3. Sister Black-Sheep was actually a pretty good girl. No elopements. No cigarettes. But her sleep habits? Yeah, a real stain on her character. [...]
I’ll bet you have never thought about what your life would be like without the Port of Los Angeles. Bill Sharpsteen helps you imagine the worst — empty shelves at Target and Dollar General, an empty floor at Kittle’s Furnitures, an empty lot at your Toyota dealer — in his engrossing book, The Docks. You know what a shipping container is, don’t you? No doubt [...]
Take an ordinary American family: mom, dad, two young boys. Put them through a common American ordeal: packing up their furniture, their books, their toys, and moving it all to a new home. In Beijing. Foremost Good Fortune is Susan Conley’s memoir of two and a half years in China which, I don’t have to tell you, doesn’t much resemble her native Portland, Maine. For [...]
Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is an almost idyllic story in spite of the fact that the characters have just survived the war in a no-name country that sounds like Yugoslavia. In this post-war world, Natalia, a female doctor, adjusts to the new normal — orphans, tuberculosis, shortages just starting to let up, cities that used to belong to “us” and now they belong to [...]
First off today, I made a guest appearance on this blog. ====================================== Now, back to our normal programming. Long ago, Nick Nolte starred in the movie Cannery Row. I never saw the movie. I just assumed that, with Nolte starring, it would be about a sad young drunk in a sad part of town. When I opened the by John Steinbeck, I braced myself for [...]
I just fought my way through one of the most exhaustive, repetitive, acronym-choked books I have ever read.The good news is that I only had to read half of Eurabia, by Bat Ye’or, since its remaining pages were appendixes and footnotes. The bad news is that it’s very bad news indeed. Two hundred and seventy pages of bad news. I had no sooner shut the [...]
Tell me if this is how last day of your vacation goes: You gather up your toiletries and dirty laundry and stuff them into your suitcase. You buckle into your car/plane seat and watch sadly out the window as the skyscrapers/seacoast/mountain range recedes from view You regret all the shops you didn’t shop/restaurants you didn’t try/views you didn’t gaze on. You wish you could stay [...]
You might be one of the adoring fans of the 2004 BBC miniseries, North & South, the story of the Hale family, as they move themselves from the pastoral south of England to the grimy, industrial north.The television production is adapted from the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. In case you’ve missed both the book and the TV show, let me catch you up on things: [...]
Today, we ate the Lazy Woman’s Sunday Dinner. Our dessert, Coconut Blueberry Cake was so easy, I made it late last night after a long bout of staring at a job list I didn’t want to finish. This Smoky Bean Stew was a rapid-assembly wonder that cooked itself during my Sunday nap. This was one of those dishes where I swabbed my finger around [...]
