Book Reviews

Rose Madeline Mula: If You Can’t Stand the Heat

Rose Madeline Mula Writes: “It was with considerable trepidation, therefore, that I entered the kitchen of my hostess, the legendary actress, Joan Fontaine, one long-ago Thanksgiving morning, to offer my assistance. Acting was not Miss Fontaine’s only talent. Not by a long shot. She was also a hole-in-one golfer, a prize-winning fisherwoman, a hot air…
An Undocumented Childhood by Rose Madeline Mula

Rose Mula Writes: Some people never leave home without their American Express card; I never leave home without a camera. Digitized pictures of the twenty-five countries and forty-plus states of America that I’ve visited since my first tour of exotic New Hampshire constantly flash on my computer monitors and digital frames throughout my home, helping…
Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library

Julia Sneden Wrote: My mind’s eye can still see the face of the Children’s Librarian, although I have long since forgotten her name. We will be wise to continue to back up our knowledge of history and literature and art and science with hard copy. She kept up with my reading level, suggesting writers and…
Julia Sneden Wrote: If The Shoe Fits … You Can Bet It’s Not Fashionable

Julia Sneden Wrote: My mother was a mini Imelda Marcos. She kept upwards of 40 pairs of shoes well into her 80’s, and was crushed when she had to give up high heels following a heart attack at the age of 89. Her sole criterion in buying shoes was style, not comfort, and she was…
Joan L.Cannon Wrote: A Family Inheritance: More Than ‘Things’ … Emblems of Our Lives

Joan Cannon wrote: As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it’s psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material. Perhaps the most obvious example is a…
Julia Sneden Wrote: Old Dogs, New Tricks

Julia Sneden wrote: At the age of 37, I started a new career as a kindergarten teacher. My first day on the job, the lead teacher, who was in her 70’s and scared me every bit as much as she scared the children, watched me writing a note. “You’ll have to change the way you…
Joan Cannon Writes: Finding the Right Excuse; Committing Words to Paper Because …

Joan Cannon Writes: Think of the poets and novelists and playwrights whose words sink into the consciousness of thousands and even millions and remain there, as emblems, guides, beacons of hope or warnings of disasters, and the excuse (as if one is needed) presents itself. Maybe there’s information or a revelation for some unknown viewer…
Joan Cannon Asked: What is a Book Club? An Old-Fashioned Book Report? A Program Given By an Author? What Is the Accepted Practice?

Joan L. Cannnon wrote: A year or so ago, I was invited to attend a tea given by the combined membership of all the book clubs in the town where I now live. A presentation was scheduled for the proprietor of the much-loved local independent book store cum gift shop. She is a legend in…
‘The American People’?

Joan L. Cannon writes: Every day during campaign seasons, and far too often for my taste on general days, there are too many mentions of ‘The American people.’ How in the world can anyone be so foolish as even to attempt to make some kind of monolithic entity out of that collective noun?
Oooh-La-La: Posters of Paris

Exhibition celebrates the art of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Paris Belle Époque. Posters of Paris resurrects the boulevards of nineteenth-century France This summer, the Milwaukee Art Museum transports visitors to nineteenth-century Paris with its featur…
Three Bedrooms, A Fireplace, Two or More Baths: 2011 Cost, $272,900

Jim Blandings as played by Cary Grant: “It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. The minute you start they put you on the all-American sucker list. You start out to build a home and wind up in the poorhouse. And if it can happen to me, what about the guys who aren’t making $15,000 a year?”
Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

From idyllic rural landscapes to gritty cities, the exhibition will showcase a literary map of the British Isles and highlight how writers, from William Shakespeare and Walter Scott to John Lennon and J K Rowling, have recorded the changing spaces of the British Isles in some of their greatest literary works.
Summertime, When the Living Is … Easy? A Teacher’s Perspective

Julia Sneden writes: I’ve always contended that the very best of summer vacation comes before you’ve had a chance to squander even a minute of its glory. Coming home and — whether you were student or pupil — flopping on the sofa in a kind of mindless haze, or sitting on the porch with something…
Ray Bradbury: Lunch With A Legend

Jean Pond wrote in 2006: It was a heady feeling passing rolls and making small talk with a man who has had a crater in the moon named by the astronauts Dandelion after his story Dandelion Wine. So what if he’s never driven a car or operated a computer. He has five typewriters.
George Soros On the European Union: A “fantastic object” – unreal but immensely attractive

The authorities didn’t understand the nature of the euro crisis; they thought it is a fiscal problem while it is more of a banking problem and a problem of competitiveness. And they applied the wrong remedy: you cannot reduce the debt burden by shrinking the economy, only by growing your way out of it.
League of Women Voters of Florida v. Browning: Blocking Enforcement of A Restrictive Voting Law

The Justice Department will monitor elections on June 5th in the following jurisdictions to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other federal voting rights statutes: Alameda, Fresno and Riverside Counties, CA.; Cibola and Sandoval Counties, NM; Shannon County, SD; and the city of Milwaukee. Complaints may be reported to the Voting…
Agnes Mary Clerke and The Transit of Venus

Agnes Mary Clerke wrote in 1885: “Throughout the twentieth century there will be no transit of Venus; but the astronomers of the twenty-first will only have to wait four years for the first of a June pair. The rarity of these events is due to the fact that the orbits of the earth and Venus…
Intangible and Invisible: Caring for Critically Ill and Terminal Patients Can Generate Grief Reactions in Health Care Professionals

Like smoke, this grief was intangible and invisible. Nonetheless, it was pervasive, sticking to the physicians’ clothes when they went home after work and slipping under the doors between patient rooms.