“The Quiet Side of Passion” by Alexander McCall Smith
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
Alexander McCall Smith must be one of the best-selling storytellers alive today. He is the author of the beloved No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels and a number of other series as well as stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and are best-sellers throughout the world. This new one is the twelfth in the Isabel Dalhousie series. It tells the story of this Edinburgh lady who has money of her own and spends her time editing articles for The Review of Applied Ethics. Or that is how she would like to spend her time. She is married, however, to Jamie, a su ..read more
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“The Written World” by Martin Puchner
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
Martin Puchner is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books range from philosophy to the arts. He is best-known for his six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature which brings four thousand years of literature to students everywhere In The Written World, he outlines what people have written and read over the last 1,000 years. It makes for an ingenious history of civilization. To do this, Puchner travelled across continents “from Mesopotamia, Nineveh, clay tablets, cuneiform and Gilgamesh.” The Apollo 8 read from Genesis using an alpha ..read more
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“Vi” by Kim Thuy
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
The author of this new book, entitled Vi, was born in Saigon in 1968, and left Vietnam with the boat people at the age of ten to settle with her family in Quebec. She has done a great many successful things, including studying and practicing law, as well as working as an interpreter, restaurant owner, and commentator on radio and television. She has published an earlier book, Ru, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In Vi she uses her own experience to describe the life of four children of which Vi is the youngest, and the only daughter. They escape the Vietnam war, but her f ..read more
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“My Twenty-Five Years in Provence” by Peter Mayle
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
Peter Mayle was a well-known English journalist who worked in London and New York and wrote fifteen books, including trips he had made abroad, mostly to southern France. His favorite spot, to which he and his wife Jennie kept returning, was Provence, in the south of France. They found the three hundred days of sunshine, as well as the fine countryside, historic old building, special food and a world-famous variety of the Wine, Rose. They finally took the plunge and decided to leave England permanently and move to Provence. This book tells of their experience in finding an agent who finally tur ..read more
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“Calypso” by David Sedaris
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
David Sedaris has been writing ingeniously funny stories for over twenty years. He has done this from England, where he lives, as well as an apartment he keeps in Paris and a beach house on the Carolina coast in the United States, which he calls the Sea Section. Three of the titles of his collections are: Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. They are hilarious and misanthropic at the same time. In Calypso, Sedaris tackles middle age and mortality. He is as funny as ever but the hilarity darkens as he realizes that life is made up o ..read more
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“Bloody Scotland” edited by James Crawford
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
Scotland has always had a romantic side for many people, with its old castles and misty moors. But these same castles can also have a dangerous turn. In this book, the writer gives twelve such examples. James Crawford is a Scot, who lives in Edinburgh. He is Publisher of Historic Environment Scotland, the organization that cares for over three hundred historic properties and holds Scotland’s national collection of archaeology and architecture. He tells of how he went with a small group a few years ago to visit the ruins of Castle Campbell, in the Ochil Hills above the small town of Dollar. Whe ..read more
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“The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse” by Alexander McCall Smith
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
The new book by Alexander McCall Smith takes a new tack, which turns out to be just as touching as his world-famous series on Mma Precious Ramotswe, as well as stories from 44 Scotland Street. The hero in the title of this one is “The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse” who proves to be a lovable Boston Collie. This dog was owned by a farmer in the UK who beat him regularly. This was discovered by a neighbour, a city girl called Val Eliot, who was recruited to the farm next door as part of the war effort in the Women’s Land Army. She rescued the dog and gave him a safe home. She was soon to meet an Am ..read more
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“A Secret Sisterhood” by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
This book tells the quite fascinating stories of a number of famous women writers and the support they received from female friends. The authors are successful women writers themselves who have become friends through their writing – and so they know wherof they are writing in this book. We are all familiar with male literary friendships – all the way from Byron and Shelley to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the most celebrated female authors are mostly known as solitary geniuses or isolated eccentrics. In this book we learn of the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants cal ..read more
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“I Am, I Am, I Am” by Maggie O’Farrell
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
Maggie O’Farrell is a well-known Irish writer with a number of prize-winning novels to her name. In this one, she looks at the near-death experiences that have jarred her own life. She takes the title from another writer, Sylvia Plath who, in The Bell Jar, wrote: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” O’Farrell describes the man she meets on a mountain path who puts his binocular strap around her neck, but then frees her, only to turn up later in police records. O’Farrell was born with a childhood illness, encephalitis, which damaged those parts of h ..read more
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“The Ghost Orchard” by Helen Humphreys
Books On Beechwood | Book Reviews
by Hilary
3y ago
Helen Humphreys is a prize-winning writer, living in Kingston, Ontario who loves to write about nature, agriculture, and how people relate to them. This book was inspired when she found a White Winter Pearmain – considered the best-tasting apple in the world – growing beside an abandoned cabin near her home. The book has superb colour photographs of this apple as well as a number of others. It has an imaginary chapter on how Pearmain might have been discovered, in England, AD 1200. But there are lots of actual facts about the history of apples, including how bountiful orchards run by the indig ..read more
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