Book Talk

Interesting Lives

Daughter of the twenty-fifth Thane of Cawdor, Lisa Campbell was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle. If that name sounds familiar, think back to high school English when you read Macbeth. Though her father inherited immense wealth, as well as the castle, the fairy-tale existence turned nightmarish when he slides into a drug and alcohol fueled madness. Read A Charmed Life: Growing up in Macbeth’s Castle.

New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller who covered the White House from 2001 to 2006 has written Condoleezza Rice:  an American Life. Using interviews with Rice and 150 others, she follows Rice from her childhood in Alabama to her current attempts to salvage the Administration’s Iraq policy and avoid war with Iran.

Within days of the German army’s arrival in his western Polish town Roman Halter witnessed the bayoneting of his Jewish schoolmates. He was one of the lucky ones; he lived to survive the firebombing of Dresden, and the Auschwitz and Stutthof camps.  Roman’s Journey: a Memoir of Survival came to be written because a German couple hid him after his escape from an SS death march.

Born in 1950’s Switzerland at the evangelical community founded by his parents, Frank Schaeffer had remarkable access to notable conservative Christian leaders and was on track to become one of them. He became an accomplished speaker and Christian author until a crisis of faith prompted his withdrawal from the movement. Crazy for God: how I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it back.  Schaeffer recounts a fascinating period in the evangelical movement.

Set in the Los Angeles of the 1880s, Souls of Angels by Tom Eidson, follows Isadora Lugo from her religious calling in India back to LA to defend and investigate her eccentric father. Don Maximiato, who is considered a saint by some of the Mexicans, is arrested and convicted of the murder of a local prostitute. Isadora seeks to confirm or refute the charges, finding instead a darker more sinister plot.

Fans of seafaring adventures like those of Patrick O’Brian will want to pick up Joan Druett’s newest, Deadly Shoals. In the 1840s, a New England whaler arrives in Patagonia in search of a trader who stole his money and his ship. Explorer Wiki Coffin, de-facto representative of the U.S. Government, searching for the ship finds a dead body, half buried in the sand

Receiving great reviews is Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson.  The New Orleans of the 1970’s was a difficult place for a young girl to grow up. Preyed upon by older men, treated as a servant by her mother and ostracized because of the lightness of her skin, nine-year-old Sadrine has only the refuge of her grandmother, Mamalita. After Mamalita’s death, Sandrine knows she has to leave New Orleans and her mother, to survive.

Irish actress Harriet Smithson travels to 1827 Paris with her troupe, intending to perform Shakespeare. There she takes Paris by storm and is know as La Belle Irlandaise. Pursued by intense, young composer Hector Berlioz, she becomes the inspiration of a revolutionary charge in music. Read Symphony by Jude Morgan.

A routine training exercise involving the navies of the United States, Japan, Australia and South Korea, turns deadly when a perfect storm of bureaucratic indifference, faulty weapons and a typhoon tilt the world towards a nuclear war. Korea Strait is David Poyer’s twenty-sixth novel

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian
January, 2008