Beethoven; A Life in Nine Pieces by Laura Tunbridge Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge…

Beethoven; A Life in Nine Pieces by Laura Tunbridge; Yale University Press, 2020. 276 pages; $39.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. Timed to appear for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, this book’s fascinating structure drew me in. Each of the nine chapters centers on a work by Beethoven and focuses on “a theme… [Read More]

Foster by Claire Keegan Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge…

Foster by Claire Keegan; Grove Press, 2022. 92 pages; $20.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult/young adult. Originally published in Great Britain in 2010 (with a shortened version appearing in The New Yorker that same year), both a movie (under the title The Quiet Girl) and the book Foster finally appeared in the U.S. in 2022. The… [Read More]

Brideshead Revisited; The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge…

Brideshead Revisited; The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh; (originally published in Britain, 1944); Back Bay Books, 2020. 402 pages; $17.99 (paperback); reading level: adult. In 1944, as Waugh’s magnum opus was going to press, he observed that Brideshead Revisited “is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that… [Read More]

Oceans of Grain; How American Wheat Remade the World by Scott Reynolds Nelson Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge…

Oceans of Grain; How American Wheat Remade the World by Scott Reynolds Nelson. Basic Books, 2022. 356 pages; $32.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. This is more a textbook than an informational read for a lay audience and requires those willing to soldier through it to bring a lot of knowledge to the table: a background… [Read More]

The Barbizon; The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

The Barbizon; The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren; Simon & Schuster, 2021. 321 pages; $27.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. This book is equal parts fascinating and flawed. Bren tells the story of New York City’s Barbizon, a women-only hotel that opened in 1928 and didn’t admit its first male guest until 1981…. [Read More]

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead; Doubleday, 2021. 318 pages; $28.95 (hardcover); reading level: adult. Through fast-moving scenes that careen from humorous to tenderhearted Whitehead deftly juggles a host of themes here: racism (both inside and outside the black community), family ties, getting ahead in a hostile environment, and change—both particular (the forced uprooting of black… [Read More]

The Post Mistress of Paris by Meg Waite Clayton Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

The Postmistress of Paris by Meg Waite Clayton; HarperCollins, 2021. 402 pages; $27.99 (hardcover); reading level: adult. We meet twenty-eight-year-old heiress Nanée Gold (a beautiful American expat living in Paris, loosely based on a real figure) in the year 1938 as she pilots her private airplane and socializes with an artistic community that includes both… [Read More]

Shelf Life; Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef; Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

Shelf Life; Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 224 pages; $27.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. In 2002, at age 27, Nadia Wassef, her older sister, and a friend decide to open abookstore strikingly different from the ones available in Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak: “those mismanaged by the… [Read More]

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2018. 464 pages; $17.00 (paperback); reading level: Adult Centering her 1887 tale around the Swan, an inn on the River Thames, Setterfield goes to great lengths to insist that this is an old-fashioned story: The first chapter is entitled “The Story Begins…” and… [Read More]

Night Becomes Day; Changes in Nature by Cynthia Argentine Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

Night Becomes Day; Changes in Nature by Cynthia Argentine; illustrated with photographs; Millbrook Press/Lerner, 2022. 32 pages; $27.99 (hardcover, reinforced library binding); reading level: Ages 7-12. Academic credentials can distance a nonfiction writer from young readers. Here, the author’s degrees in English, environmental science, and environmental law have accomplished the opposite. Argentine’s meticulously-researched narrative is… [Read More]