Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser; Dover Thrift Editions, 2004 (first edition Doubleday, 1900). 352 pages (paperback); $7.00; reading level: high school/adult. In 1889, when nineteen-year-old Carrie Meeber, arrives in Chicago from a small town to look for a job, she is, by turns, dazzled and defeated by big-city life. We look through her eyes with… [Read More]
Cyrus Field’s Big Dream; The Daring Effort to Lay the First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable by Mary Morton Cowan Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
November 4, 2018 By
Cyrus Field’s Big Dream; The Daring Effort to Lay the First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable by Mary Morton Cowan; Calkins Creek, 2018. 224 pages; $19.95 (hardcover); reading level: grades 4-12. Cyrus Field didn’t know the first thing about telegraphs when he retired from running a successful paper mill in 1853. But when his “big dream” took hold,… [Read More]
Winter by Christopher Nicholson Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
July 9, 2018 By
Winter by Christopher Nicholson; Europa Editions, 2015. 269 pages; $17.00 (paperback); reading level: adult. Novels about famous writers are in vogue just now. This one, narrowly focused on the last four years of the life of British novelist/poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), rises to the top of the stack. When a stage version of Hardy’s novel,… [Read More]
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
June 13, 2018 By
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black; Picador/Henry Holt and Company, 2006. 340 pages; 16.00 (paperback); reading level: adult. Can a Man Booker Prize-winning novelist write a good mystery without letting his literary skills overwhelm the basic demands of a who-done-it? In his first installment of the “Quirke” series (which, as of 2015, includes seven volumes), John… [Read More]
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
June 1, 2018 By
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu; and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer; Simon & Schuster, 2016. 279 pages (hardcover); reading level: adult. Hammer has to lay a lot of groundwork before he gets to the “bad-ass” rescue promised in the title. He puts events a relatively well-informed reader might… [Read More]
They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
May 17, 2018 By
They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 290 pages; $26.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. Only a seasoned writer could have pulled this one off: As I read Schine’s clear-eyed novel, I laughed and cried at the same time. I cried with the protagonist, eighty-six-year-old… [Read More]
The Mothers by Brit Bennett Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
May 15, 2018 By
The Mothers by Brit Bennett; Riverhead Books, 2016. 275 pages; $26.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. Oceanside, California is a comfortable, middle class black community, but Nadia Turner wants out anyway. She plans to graduate from high school, pursue a degree at the University of Michigan, and achieve all the things her mother (who has just… [Read More]
Bellevue by David Oshinsky Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
May 10, 2018 By
Bellevue; Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky; Doubleday, 2016. 387 pages; $30.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. As the subtitle promises, this history of New York City’s oldest public hospital is far from dry. Following Bellevue from its beginnings as an almshouse established in the early 1700s to… [Read More]
On My Reading List – September 2018 through June 2019…
February 12, 2018 By
Early each year I pick out the books I’ll be reading with my Book Discussion Group for the coming year. We read nine books from September through June, three nonfiction and six fiction. After reading reviews, getting opinions from readers I trust, and scanning classics I might have missed, here are the titles I’ve come… [Read More]
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
December 20, 2017 By
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich; Random House, 2017. 308 pages; $27.00 (hardcover); reading level: adult. The central act of Ruskovich’s graceful first novel – the murder, on an Idaho mountain, of 6-year-old May by her mother, Jenny – has already taken place when we begin reading. We are haunted by two questions: Why did Jenny (who… [Read More]