Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry; Counterpoint, 2004. 186 pages; $16.95 (paperback); reading level: adult. The year is 2001. Hannah Coulter is looking back on the seventy-nine years of her life, spent mostly in the fictional Kentucky town of Port William. In words that are both plain-spoken and elegant, she chronicles her childhood, the loss of… [Read More]

This Is Chance!; The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together by Jon Mooallem; Random House, 2021. 315 pages; $18.00 (paperback); reading level: adult/young adult. Beginning with the epigram (a quote from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town) and a “Cast of Characters” followed by Acts One, Two, and Three (instead… [Read More]

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; 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; (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. 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; 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; 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]