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Book Reviews
Just Fine The Way They Are – "If the current crop of children's books doesn't make environmentalists out of the next generation, I don't know what will…bursting with imagination, great stories, exhilarating ideas and wonderful art. How we move around our country — Cars? Bicycles? High-speed rail? — is a big issue in environmentalism, and "Just Fine the Way They Are" shows readers that making decisions about technical progress is not always easy. Beginning in 1805 and hitting every new transportation fad along the way, the book gives a history of U.S. roads, from dirt track to superhighway. At every point, there were people who embraced new technologies…and people who thought things were "just fine the way they were." That's a fine philosophical debate to introduce to budding environmentalists."
— Sonja Bolle, Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 3, 2011
Category Archives: The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton in the Magazine Popular Science
I’ve gotten used to seeing Edith Wharton’s name all over the place but when I found out she’d popped up in the magazine Popular Science, I really had to check it out. Before I hit the link, I took some guesses on what her scientific connection might be. One possibility: She was intrigued by Charles Darwin and his hot new
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Julian Fellowes on Edith Wharton
I know both Downton Abbey and Edith Wharton fans will appreciate this article from the Berkshire Eagle in which Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downton Abbey talks about how his late-in-life reading of two Wharton novels inspired first his failed writing venture, then Gosford Park and then, of course, Downton Abbey. “She observes but she does not judge…” is Fellowes’
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The Doorway to High Society
In Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age New York, the new-money people were storming the gates of High Society and the Old Guard (people of birth, background, and breeding) were making a vain attempt to keep those gates firmly closed. Today, Society is open to all comers! The only requirement to entry is the desire to become immersed in a particular subject
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Diana Morón Meets Edith Wharton
When I wrote The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton, I was hoping the book would be discovered by high school teachers and used to introduce a new generation of readers to Edith Wharton. You can imagine my delight when Diana Morón, a sophomore at Porterville High School in Porterville, California, introduced herself to me by e-mail last November and asked
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My Dear Governess; The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann – Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
My Dear Governess; The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann edited by Irene Goldman-Price; Yale University Press, 2012. 296 pages; $30.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. On May 31st, 1874, twelve-year-old Edith Wharton (then Edith Jones) wrote to her beloved twenty-five-year-old governess, Anna Bahlmann, inviting her to come to the Jones’ summer home in Newport, Rhode Island: “…we shall have
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More Letters From Edith!
Just as my Edith Wharton biography was going to press, a stash of letters from Edith to her governess (and later secretary) was discovered. How can I get my hands on those? I wondered. The answer wasn’t long in coming. In April of 2011, when I spoke at The Mount, I met Irene Goldman-Price who was hard at work editing
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A Late Arrival at Downton Abbey
I confess. I arrived late to the Downton Abbey party. When season one began I was intrigued, but Sunday nights didn’t work for me. Then everyone was watching it and my contrarian instincts kicked in: Who wants to watch what everybody’s watching? When season two began I told myself I didn’t want to jump in to the thing midstream. And
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Tales of the London Book Festival and John Ericsson Events
If you want to find characters for a novel, there’s no better place to look than a writer’s event. Since the January 26 awards dinner for the London Book Festival was an international gathering the “characters” were even more colorful: A former Yugoslavian who spoke very little English, a tall-tale teller from Montana, a charming widow from South Africa, a
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“Loud Voices”
Lucretia Jones could not have had an easy time raising her daughter Edith. She was a woman of average intelligence and superficial interests suddenly confronted by a child whose brilliance was apparent from the get-go. She probably tried valiantly to maintain her maternal authority and, if her daughter’s claim that pleasing her mother and pleasing God were at the top
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Up and Coming Writers
Those of us involved with books – writers, editors, librarians, teachers – worry a lot about the whole reading and writing process. Will there be people in the next generation willing to read challenging literature? Will there be people in the next generation who can write articulately? I can name one for sure. She is Rachel Baumgarten, a high school
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Arguing With Friends
I met one of my oldest friends in Athens where we both attended a year-long college program. Together we studied the architecture of the Parthenon, flew to Cairo and rode camels, and spent endless hours deciding which Greek island we would sail to next. When the year came to an end, she departed for her home in Los Angeles a
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Edith Wharton…Pleased
Connie & Emily Tarjick, poet Edith Wharton would have been enormously pleased at the event that took place at her former home – The Mount – on Saturday, April 29. She would have been pleased with the guests: aspiring high school writers who participated in the Edith Wharton Writing Contest, families and friends, published authors, and people from near and
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Translating
The biography that first introduced me to Edith Wharton was Shari Benstock’s No Gifts From Chance (1994). From there, I worked my way back to R.W.B. Lewis’ Edith Wharton; A Biography (1975) and then forward to Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (2007). By the time I’d devoured these three books I was grabbing anyone I met by the lapels and insisting
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