Just what it says: a collection of verse to cheer you through hard times. Poets range from Whittier to Gibran and Shakespeare to Browning.
I find the darnedest things at Books-a-Million. This one was amusing and sad and thoughtful all at once, a collection of anecdotes from police officers and detectives across the country, talking of everything from violent crime to amusing incidents involving kooky complaints. There are some very sobering stories about domestic violence and violence against children, sad stories of relationships gone bad, of the suffering caused by criminal violence, and among prostitutes and their pimps.
Some good reading in short, digestible bits.
Tenth in the "Noodle Shop" mysteries, and Lana Lee has become part of the team preparing for a big Chinese New Year celebration at the Asia Village shopping center, where her parents run their noodle shop. Part of the celebration includes the performance of a dance troupe featuring the traditional Chinese dragon doing a Lion Dance. Unfortunately, the performers behind the Chinese dragon are in contention with each other, and then one of them is killed.
Of course, everyone assumes Lana will investigate the crime, since she's been so successful in the past! Even her boyfriend, Adam, a police detective, doesn't seem to mind this time around.
I guess I'm getting a little jaded with the "Lana (and Megan) solve a mystery" plots and didn't read this one with as much joy as in the past.
I thought McNiven would never finish this history of US-20. The first book came out ten years ago.
Once again—sigh—McNiven has left the footnotes online.
The rest of the book is delightful, following US-20 from Chicago and the year of the exposition and "The White City" to the end of the "trail" in Oregon, touching on the rise of mail-order and the decline of the once-great newspaper empire, the creation of "the plow that broke the Plains" (and then nearly destroyed them), Western painters and prairie hardships, the great cowboy adventures, the epic journey of the camera, and more.
After the Great Depression destroys both her mother's and father's means of making a living, pre-teen Ellie, her older sister Esther, and her little brother Samuel, and their parents must live in a roughly-built house on Echo Mountain, trading with five other families to be able to eat and survive. Her father hunts and cuts trees for lumber until the day one of the trees falls and severely injures him. Now Ellie must help her family survive, but she's also determined that she will help cure her father, who lies deep in a coma.
Unfortunately, in doing what it takes to survive, Ellie makes herself unpopular with both her sister and mother.
This is a rather grim look at the Depression days and what people had to do to survive. Strong stomachs are necessary for reading this, as many of the medical emergencies Ellie and her family face are graphically described.
This was a small one-off volume that
Taber wrote after the death of her lifelong friend—they met in college—and co-owner of the Connecticut
farmhouse known as Stillmeadow, Eleanor Mayer, known as "Jill" in
Gladys' magazine columns and subsequent books. It appeared that Mayer passed away after a
sudden illness, but there are not many details and it sounds more like cancer). Both
Gladys' daughter and Eleanor's two children are grown, so she must
adjust to life alone in the house. She talks about her grief and then
her efforts to recover.
As a Stillmeadow book, this fills in the blanks between The Stillmeadow Road and Stillmeadow Calendar.|
