The Man-eaters of Tsavo by Lt. Colonel J.H. Patterson, first published in 1907, steps the reader back in history to the 19th-to-20th turn of the century to an area at a time when place names reflected the non-Africans who arrived and set out to tame the continent. The initial chapters of the book tell ofContinue reading “Book Review: The Man-eaters of Tsavo”
Category Archives: Book Review
Book Review: A Paris Apartment
A mystery inside a mystery. April Vogt, Continental furniture specialist with Sotheby’s, gets the opportunity of a lifetime when the Paris office requests her assistance to assess the contents of a Paris apartment that had been closed for 70 years. Full of incredible furniture finds, as well as an unknown painting by Giovanni Boldini, theContinue reading “Book Review: A Paris Apartment”
Book Review: Scribbling the Cat
“The windows of the pickup were rolled down because we, in common with everyone else in this part of the world, were jealous of every drop of fuel we spent. And, under these circumstances, air-conditioning (like the exorcism of war memories and the act of writing about it) was an unpardonable self-indulgence. K had goneContinue reading “Book Review: Scribbling the Cat”
Book Review: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir covers her childhood in Africa, including stints at boarding schools far from her parents, ending with her marriage to an American who brought her out of Africa and into another land. Her parents were grounded in Africa, her mother by birth and her father by experience. Yet after the death of theirContinue reading “Book Review: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”
Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind
I’ve been reading so many memoirs and genre fiction books that it took me awhile to get involved in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s best seller The Shadow of the Wind. I sought the familiar three-act pattern as I read, and I was initially frustrated by the complexity of the story. There were more characters, all with foreign names spelledContinue reading “Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind”
Book Review: Deadly Little Secrets
In Loren Zahn’s second Theo Hunter mystery, Deadly Little Secrets, her protagonist, sometimes freelance journalist Theodosia Hunter, agrees to help out an old flame, now a Catholic chaplain, Tony Machado. Father John Fairbanks, a priest, teacher, and coach years ago at St. Augustine’s, a private Catholic high school when Tony attended, was found murdered, with theContinue reading “Book Review: Deadly Little Secrets”
A is for Antananarivo
“Cochecitos” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by copepodo Check out the toy cars made from soft drink cans. From September 2003 until January 2004, I lived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. Known as Tananariv during a period of French colonization, it got shortened even further to Tana, especially by foreigners who have trouble getting the multiple-syllable names out withContinue reading “A is for Antananarivo”
Book Review: The Orchid House
Lucinda Riley’s New York Times 2012 best seller, The Orchid House, spans seven decades and two continents, and addresses the lives of three generations of landowners and their employees and their descendants in Norfolk, England. The three generations of the Crawford family, owners of Wharton Park, are on the verge of losing the estate throughoutContinue reading “Book Review: The Orchid House”
Book Review: Farewell to Manzanar
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston revisits the three years she and her family spent in Manzanar, one of ten internment camps run by the US War Department for relocated persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Her father had been taken away earlier, arrested for presumably supplying fuel to Japanese submarines from his fishing boat offContinue reading “Book Review: Farewell to Manzanar”
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