Carolyn Phillips is a most sensuous writer whether her topic is her garden in Taiwan, food she is eating or the man she loves, so her memoir ("with recipes") is a pleasure to read. Unlike other food writers, she comes to the subject not as a professional chef, food critic or restaurateur, but first as a lover of delicious food and eventually as a scholar of regional Chinese cooking. Phillips was fortunate to find the perfect man to love, a Taiwanese scholar and gourmet whose family histories reflect the history of 20th century China. Readers will revel in the dishes that they share through the stages of their life together—and perhaps rush to the closest Asian market to replicate some of them using the 22 recipes provided. This is a cross cultural success story, a tale of food and love and language, with great appeal to a wide readership.

If Belle da Costa Greene, born Belle Marion Greener, had not existed, Hollywood would have had to invent her, and many people would have thought the story pure fiction co-authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray have written a riveting fictionalized biography of a fascinating woman, the daughter of a prominent black Reconstruction-era civil rights activist, who lived most of her life passing white in New York City as millionaire J. P. Morgan's personal librarian.

Without formal training, Greene was the force that shaped the important Morgan collection of medieval manuscripts and early modern books for over forty years, and helped steer the Morgan family into opening the collection to the general public. A fascinating story in itself, Belle da Costa Greene's circumstances and inner monologues give an unusual double view of white privilege at a time even more intolerant of "the other" than today. Largely forgotten today and hardly recognized at the institution she led for decades, Greene is a figure deserving of greater recognition, which this compelling novel should achieve.

I requested this book because I had been admitted to the Yale Class of 1974 and was wondering what I had missed by going elsewhere. Nothing. And everything.

Yale admitted women to the undergraduate class in fall 1969 for the first time, largely because the school had lost a significant number of highly qualified male applicants who preferred to go to co-educational colleges. Having taken this step, the university took virtually no further actions to integrate women into its culture. Outnumbered seven to one, women were isolated, without administrative or self-support systems, regarded as classroom curiosities or sexual prey. Anne Gardiner Perkins' history of the incipient women's movement at Yale traces how over the course of four years, Yale women—undergrad and grad students, the very few faculty and administrators, nonacademic staff—and even some men worked on issues that influenced change not only at the institution at the state and federal levels.

This is a page-turner of a story, built around compelling individuals, a must-read for those interested in the history of the women's movement. It's a chronicle of survival in higher education, told by the women who lived it. The problems these women faced are still rampant in our society today: this is a history you should not pass up.

Spend a pleasant afternoon reading Ellie and the Harpmaker and meet two quirky and appealing characters who—of course!-- eventually recognize their need for one another. The two primary characters are well delineated, the secondary characters are few and sufficient to their purpose, and the setting—Exmoor—is beautifully described. Our villain is a man who smashes someone's loved Beatrix Potter children's china, one of the several interesting details adding a little complexity to an essentially simple story along with Phineas the pheasant, Sam's train-riding rabbit, and all those sandwich fillings. Does this pique your curiosity? Then enjoy this sweet romance.

There is such a pervasive sense of melancholy, regret and lack of purpose in this novel, that I found it hard to continue reading at times. The characterization is excellent-- even minor characters are well delineated, and the multiple narrator structure is very successful. Characters are living their lives, but it is as if their vital spark died in 1918 even if they did not. The narrative centers on the saintly sinner Daniel Pitt, a WWI flying ace, whose long ranging motorcycle rides become a metaphor for his years-long journey toward fulfillment. As one of the minor characters comments, "Not being at war never felt quite right." Good focused portrait of Britain, its Empire, and Germany between the two world wars.

House of Fallen Angels is an exuberant family saga full of comedy and sentimentality as well as tragedy and violence. It's a novel of contrasts: heaping platters of American fast food and hungry children, mariachi bands and transvestite nightclub singers, a college professor and a drug dealer. Family members' foibles and eccentricities are lovingly delineated as individuals clash and cooperate, argue and embrace. Through the stories, memories, secrets and confessions of the terminally ill patriarch Big Angel and the members of his extended family, Urrea reflects on what it means to be American, what it means to be Mexican, and shows how the American experience can be so varied between the generations. It examines the outsider experience on a national and a family level. As Little Angel, the half-American half-brother and college professor reflects: "if only the dominant culture could see those small moments, they would see their own human lives reflected in the other."
I wish I knew more Spanish. Though many individual words could be deciphered through context, I believe I would have gotten even more from this rich novel if I understood the longer phrases and the birthday song which are not translated.

Phillipa Maakestad has a reputation as "moody and erratic ... difficult to work with," and says and does things throughout this novel which even she sometimes acknowledges as being "stupid and selfish." She lives in an Iowa that perpetuates the stereotype that the Midwest flyover states feature only farmland, bad weather, lack of cell service, one-star motel rooms, and truck stops where all food is fried and someone who looks like the Unabomber is always nursing a beer at the bar. Culture is an indifferently-directed (by Phillipa) university production of Drood! The end –of-the-world scenario Philippa agonizes over after the Bush presidential election victory over Kerry seems sadly dated in view of our last election. And though Phillipa says she's "a typical American" heading west on a highway, her dream of the ideal life for her family, friends and acquaintances takes place in France.

"Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind": in a nutshell, the driving force for the 3 major characters in Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink, two in the 21st century mining historical documents to define the mysterious life of the scribe known as Aleph in Restoration London. Ester Velasquez—intellectual, undowered, and rebellious—is an outsider to even the small outsider Jewish community of 17th century London. Historian Helen Watt—alone, underappreciated, and ailing—shows us that the plight of intellectual women has not progressed much in 4 centuries. Kadish gives us the sights, sounds and smells of Charles II's London, including the terrors of the Black Plague. Her depiction of scholarly academic politics and the tyranny wielded by Rare Book Room librarians made me smile with reminiscence. The conclusion of the two intertwining stories is somewhat fairy tale-like, but I feel we want these characters to be rewarded after the trials they have undergone rather than opt for Hobbesian determinism. The Weight of Ink is a love story—though there are amorous couplings of many sorts in the novel, true love for its main characters is a love of learning, a love of intellectual discourse, a love of discovery. If you liked A. S. Byatt's Possession and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, this is the novel for you.

Laura Thompson’s The Six was a compelling read, a fascinating portrait of a family interacting in the most extreme and radically different ways to the major political and economic movements of the first half of the 20th century. I had read several of Nancy Mitford’s novels some years ago, and was generally familiar with the varying paths each sibling followed; I couldn’t put down Thompson’s well-researched book as it fleshed out the individual lives of the Mitfords, parents and siblings. If the story of the Mitford daughters was presented as a novel, readers would say the characters and plot lines were not believable. I feel that linking the book to Downton Abbey is unfair because the ever-shifting loyalties, rivalries, deceits and betrayals among the sisters—as well as their so different political and cultural interests-- are so much more complex than fiction. Thompson at one point says they were the Kardashian sisters of their era, and I find that a more telling comparison. These were women with little or no family income, who were trained to do nothing except become a beautiful patrician ornament on some man’s mantelpiece, and yet five of them became financially secure, internationally respected writers or managers of major country estates. As for the book’s organization, I found the first chapter on the who/what/whys of what constitutes “Mitfordian” to be invaluable, and the chronology of the subsequent chapters presented no problem for me. Two thumbs enthusiastically up!

Not a cookbook, not a memoir--these loosely strung chapters concluded by recipes may be called the confessions of three remarkable lives lived with generosity of spirit, faith, and fellowship, much of it centered around food. The overachieving Andersons--mom and two daughters--have lived enviable lives to date, but they candidly write of how their current harmony and success were sometimes hard fought for or underappreciated. Be near a kitchen when you read this book--you'll want to cook with these women, and more importantly, you'll want to sit at their tables and eat with them.

A biography of the Romanov sisters is necessarily a biography of their nuclear family as their parents kept their children insulated from not only the general public but even from members of the Russian aristocracy until the outbreak of the war when the tsarina and her daughters became involved in nursing and visiting wounded soldiers. Tellingly, a quarter of the book covers the final year of their lives, when they were forced into the public view by their incarceration. Readers expecting that the Romanov daughters take the lion's share of attention in this history will be disappointed, but this very readable history provides much insight to the many lost opportunities and missteps taken by Nicholas and Alexandra in their choices, both personal and political. The author does not detail the family's death (her earlier book covers this subject), but the final chapter details the fates of many of the family's friends, associates and servants, lending a wider perspective to their deaths.

It is unfortunate that the review copy does not include the planned photographs/illustrations especially as the publisher's blurb describes the princesses as "perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals" of their time.

I really was eager to read this book because the premise of related historical/contemporary crimes is one of my favorite narrative devices, and to have it revolve around a book was like hot fudge on top of a sundae. Things seemed very promising since the book starts with one of the most exciting openings that I have read in the recent past. However, the narrative is extremely choppy with two contemporary story lines as well as the historical one, and there are time shifts within each of the 3 narrative lines. The pacing of the book is also uneven, slow and drawn-out in the first 200 pages or so, then rushed in the last parts. Characters are presented rather than developed; the most interesting character is peripheral to the narrative. Some good ideas, but clearly a first time author in terms of execution.

I very much enjoyed The Sisterhood, which I found to be a real page-turner. The author is skilled at creating individual characters (and there are a lot of them in this book), and I think she was successful in managing her dual narrative structure. This would be a good book for book clubs with its non-preachy examination of women's rights and religious tolerance through the ages. Be warned that there are a few logical disjuncts and at least one mighty fortuitous coincidence as well as some quibbling caveats such as why does the Spanish police officer who attended an university and a police academy in America for five years speak in pidgin English? On the whole, a very enjoyable and fast read.

As someone who found herself driving the wrong direction against 3 lanes of traffic in Italy, and who almost tossed the rented GPS unit out the window in France after it tried to lead us onto another boring backroad, I can only admire Dina Bennett's decision to act as her husband's navigator on the 2007 commemorative Peking to Paris rally in a vintage 1940 LaSalle Coupe, particularly as she claims to have no sense of direction and gets carsick reading a map in a moving car. This is not the bohemian rebellion of Jack Kerouac on the road or John Steinbeck's philosophical musings with Charley; it's a somewhat lightweight but charmingly related adventure travel tale, at its best when focusing on the relationship between Dina and her husband Bernard. Don't expect to learn much about the exotic places the rally passes through-- the rally is all about the car, not its context. When the narrative brings in the other contestants, I can't help but think that these are people who have too much money and too much free time on their hands who've chosen to go on the 35-day package tour from hell. I like Bennett's writing style, but would be more interested in reading about her subsequent adventure travels where she and her husband went where they wanted to go and at their own pace without having to nurse a vintage car—the details of car maintenance and repair don't interest me.

From its first pages, Charles Todd’s latest installment in the Bess Crawford series, An Unmarked Grave, is a compelling and suspenseful “stay up all night even if I have to get up in two hours” read. A real page-turner, this is one of the tighter plot structures in the series despite an eyebrow-raising coincidental but fateful meeting three-quarters of the way through the novel. I also felt that the identity of the murderer came out of left field and was something of a let-down in an otherwise exciting denouement. The authors’ description of Bess falling victim to the devastating flu epidemic is very effective, as is their way of showing how hospitals, families, and villages were affected. As always, character depiction and development is strong, and Bess’s relationships with her family as well as with some characters who are new to the series continue to develop. Definitely the strongest entry in this series to date.

I have read most of the dozen-plus books in Deborah Crombie’s series featuring Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James and never been disappointed. Her latest installment No Mark Upon Her is a strong entry in the series, presenting a murder with intriguing complications and continuing to move Duncan’s and Gemma’s ever-evolving relationship forward. Along the way, the reader is given some insights about the culture of rowing (is it fanciful to imagine a Scotland Yard detective winning an Olympic medal in rowing? Well, one did win the Leeds piano competition) as well as into the famous annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. One of Crombie’s strengths has always been presenting well-developed characters; she also takes the time to add dimensions to secondary characters who reappear in the series, and she gives us a sense of the ethnic diversity among her characters. Finally, I like Crombie because there is an over-riding sense of rightness and goodness in her books despite the presence of real evil, of moral ambiguity, and of compromise.

Katherine Weber’s family memoir The Memory of All That is being marketed as a “colorful, insightful, evocative and very funny” portrait of the extraordinary family (the Warburgs) she descends from on her mother’s side. Readers may see its subtitle “George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and my Family’s Legacy of Infidelities” and fall into the same trap I did, thinking that much of the book would discuss Weber’s grandmother Kay Swift and her relationship with George Gershwin. Instead, the first half of the book is a rather bitter evocation of Weber’s relationship with her father Sidney Kaufman. The second half of the book is more in line of what was promised, but I would have liked to have read much more about the many members of the Warburg family (who I had some trouble keeping track of—a family tree diagram would have been helpful)..

Weber is at her best at the very end of the book where she describes her own relationship with her grandmother. Weber sets out to rehabilitate Kay Swift’s reputation as a musician, and here she succeeds very well in either debunking misinformation passed around among Gershwin biographers or providing fresh insight in Swift’s talent.

This is a well written book, and at times a very interesting book, but it’s not the book the publishers are touting.

I was eager to read Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead, the sixth novel in her mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Each novel in the series has built on characters and situations that occur in previous books, and Penny’s style and depth—which were always very good-- have also grown with the series. Bury Your Dead is absolutely superb in characterization, plot development and construction. It follows Gamache and his second in command, Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir, as they recover physically and psychologically from a terrorist threat that has left four agents of the Homicide Division of the Surete du Quebec dead.

Gamache, staying with his old Surete mentor in Quebec City, agrees to consult with local homicide authorities on a murder which has connections with Quebec’s founder, Samuel de Champlain, and which has the potential to provoke deeper divisions between Francophone and Anglophone Quebecoises. Beauvoir, at his Chief’s request, returns to the small village of Three Pines, the site of several of the previous books, to look again at the murder case which was the subject of the previous novel The Brutal Telling. In their isolation (Gamache is without his investigative team and far from his beloved wife Reine Marie; Beauvoir is without his badge and his Chief), each man not only solves the mystery at hand, but comes to a new understanding of himself.

Penny provides sufficient background of the case from The Brutal Telling to allow new readers to the series to follow Inspector Beauvoir’s case, but the greatest satisfaction and emotional impact from this novel will be felt by those who have enjoyed the investigations of Gamache, his team, and the denizens of Three Pines in the past. Readers would be well rewarded to read some prior books in the series, especially The Brutal Telling, before embarking on this excellent novel. Murder mystery aficionados looking for more than a cozy or romantic mystery, who want to look into the depth of the human heart and its capacity to both wound and heal, would be well advised to look at Louise Penny's series.

Readers of historical mystery novels will welcome the publication of Heresy by SJ Parris, a fast-paced novel of multiple murders at an Oxford college during the middle of the reign of Elizabeth I. Our detective protagonist is the Renaissance savant Giordano Bruno—excommunicant former monk and tutor in the study of memory to the King of France—whose latest move to escape the Inquisition on the continent is flight to England, where he becomes a somewhat unwilling spy in Walsingham’s secret service.

Charged with rooting out Catholic dissidents at Oxford, Bruno finds himself an outsider looking in, a good position for a detective, but a dangerous one for a foreigner and a nominal Catholic during this period of English history. The novel is cleverly plotted (it kept me guessing the identity of the murderer until the denouement), easily mixes historical with fictional figures, and gives a good sense of the intellectual and political atmosphere of the period. The Catholic threat to England’s stability as portrayed in the novel resonates with our own contemporary concerns regarding homeland security. Readers will need to be on the alert (or be able to flip easily back and forth) early on, when a number of characters are introduced all at once at Oxford. The ending implies that there will be additional books in the series, and I look forward to the author developing his major characters more fully in the future.

When Elizabeth Samet’s mother tells friends that her daughter teaches English at West Point, it is not unusual for them to reply, “You mean they read?” Though not as naïve or cynical as that about education at West Point, I found that I knew relatively little about this institution and what I learned about it from Samet’s memoir of her ten year experience there was fascinating.

“This is a story of my intellectual and emotional connections to military culture and to certain people in it, but the real drama lies in the way the cadets I teach and the officers with whom I work negotiate the multiple contradictions of their private and professional world, “she writes, and her analysis of these topics and individuals is as penetrating as the many analyzes of literary works on war which she draws on through her text. Though welcomed by her colleagues and the immediate West Point community, she remains a civilian, a woman, and a teacher of humanities who thus is able to maintain a certain critical distance for her (largely affectionate/sympathetic) observations.

As one who has had the opportunity of teaching English literature to undergraduates at a large Midwestern state university and to medical students (by the way, there is a surprising correlation between cadets and medical students, both of whom are at the very bottom of a strict hierarchy), I envied Samet’s classes (would I ever had had the opportunity to teach a course on the idea of London in literature?) and came to admire her and her students. At a time of life when most of their contemporaries are cutting loose on college campuses, these students willingly subject themselves to the most rigorous and iron-bound traditions and strictures, and commit their lives—literally in this time of war—to public service. Upon finishing Samet’s well-written book, I knew that West Point cadets and their faculty—both civilian and military-- not only read but they also think.