Reviews

"Ladies in Lavender" (2004) is a British film about two spinster sisters in pre-WWII  England, and filmed in the beautiful area of Cornwall on the south western tip of Great Britain.  The sisters are played by two grande dames of the British theater: Judi Dench and Maggie Smith;  they play their parts as naturally as breathing.  The simple plot finds the sisters on their beach the morning after a heavy storm.   They discover a nearly drowned young man who was swept overboard from his ship.  The sisters nurse him to health, and learn in the meantime he is P

Master of the DeltaIn the early 1950s, Jack Branch returns to his home town of Lakeland to teach at the the local high school as his father did before him.   The Branchs are the aristocracy of this southern community and Jack has attended some the finest private schools and universities.   The Branc

Really good noir fiction about a bygone era in Hollywood can be scarcer than hens’ teeth, but Kanon provides a fine tale, with historical overtones.  The period is set immediately after WWII, and a returning GI is traveling across country, after learning his brother, a successful screen writer, has had a fatal accident.  Or was it?  As Ben Collier becomes familiar with his brother’s life, ma

Carl Hiaasen's children's book, Scat is written in the traditional Hiaasen flavor which blends humor, suspense, action adventure and heroism all thrown together in the Florida swampland. All of us, at one time or another, have encountered scary teachers and found ourselves in unfair situations. Bunny Starch, the biology teacher, struck fear in the hearts of every student until one day on a biology field trip to the Black Vine Swamp, she mysteriously disappeared.

I picked this book up after hearing the author interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Aire program. In his memoir, Crazy for God, Frank Schaeffer, recounts his life as the son of evangelical Christian missionaries who founded a community in Switzerland, where Frankie spent his childhood. No family secret goes unrevealed.

Back pain is a common problem that can range in intensity from an annoying occasional pinch to a flat-on-your-back debilitation. If you find yourself suffering from back pain and tell others about it, you’re sure to get lots of sympathy and stories of others’ back woes. Sometimes you’ll also get suggestions for things to try to remedy the situation, which is what happened to me recently when a colleague recommended a book recommended to her when she was suffering.

The Sound and the Fury is one of the few novels that I have read many times. I find something new in it with each reading. It is also one of the most difficult novels I have read. The story is centered on the Compson family in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Point of view shifts from section to section. The first part is written in a stream of consciousness style and this technique also reappears later in the novel. The voice that we hear in the first chapter will puzzle the first-time reader.

In her latest book Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, Jeannette Walls introduces her maternal grandmother Lily Casey Smith, an intelligent, resourceful and hardworking woman.

Four women met regularly at the Cedar Roe Library to share their stories and write this book; the result is an inspiring collection of thoughts on family, spirituality, happiness, struggles, and friendship.

Mark Jackson, Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, contributed a volume on asthma for Oxford University Press’s series Biographies of Disease.  Asthma and allergies, as you may know, have been on a progressive trend afflicting more and more people since the beginn