Twentieth Century
History on Display: Americans and the Holocaust
On a recent trip home to Springfield, Missouri, I had the chance to visit a traveling exhibition titled Americans and the Holocaust at the local public library. Sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum and the American Library Association, the exhibition is small but powerful. The exhibit includes some well-done general context about the Nazis’…
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Chasing Beauty
I just finished reading Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. Here’s the short version—wow! Here’s the slightly longer version: Beautiful prose. Rich with insights. Wonderful storytelling. Not necessarily in that order I did not go into Chasing Beauty cold. Natalie and I became deadline buddies and fast friends in the…
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Another Book That Sat on the To-Be-Read Shelves for Far too Long: Fast-Talking Dames
Fast-Talking Dames by Maria DiBattista is both a study of and homage to the fast-talking heroines of Hollywood comedies in the 1930s and 1940s. Like me, DiBattista discovered the women she writes about in her early teens, when she watched old movies after school and late at night. Like me, she saw them as a…
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