Perhaps you have heard of Ruby Bridges, the little girl shown at right. She was the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in 1960. But have you heard of Lucile Bluford or Ada Lois Sipuel? What about Marguerite Carr, Karla Galarza, Barbara Johns, Betta Bowman and Elaine Chustz? In Rachel Devlin’s A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America’s Schools, we have an outstanding history of the unsung heroes of the American Civil Rights movement — […]
Killer Queen
I honest to the heavens thought I’d reviewed this one. The short version is: True crime fans/Murderinos will probably enjoy this one. I’m not sure anyone else will; the subject matter is pretty grim and the person in question warped like HH Holmes. Lizzie Borden may have killed her father and stepmother with an axe, but Belle Gunness killed a hell of a lot more, including her own children.
My favourite book of 2018
I know it is a terrible cliche, but every chapter inevitably had me thinking “this sounds familiar, I feel like we read this every day, the more things change…” While I did not grow up watching the television series, I was a voracious reader as a child, and repeatedly read The Little House of the Prairie series. I am also very interested in biographies of writers I enjoy, particularly when my perception of them isn’t particularly well matched by the reality (see also L. M. […]
Femme Fatale
I really enjoy these kinds of “historical short story” non-fiction books. This book is in the same vein as Jennifer Wright’s books and I was all over those so this is right up my alley. Tori Telfer goes back through the ages, and around various parts of the world to pretty much debunk the myth presented by FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood in 1998; namely that there are “no women serial killers.” She has any number of women here in this book that handily fit the […]