In what must be the most frightening birthday surprise ever, on Dana’s 26th birthday, as she is moving into a new house with her husband Kevin, she suddenly feels dizzy and gets transported away from her safe and familiar surroundings in 1976. She comes to in the woods by a river, where a boy is in the process of drowning. Dana reacts instinctively and wades into the water, rescuing the boy. Faced with the boy’s hysterical mother, and more terrifyingly, the boy’s angry father, who […]
Love during the American Civil War
Until she was thirteen, Marlie Lynch grew up with her mother, a freed slave and wise woman. After her white father’s death, she was taken in by her half-sister and has been able to combine her knowledge of herbs and root magic with scientific principles. Three years into the American Civil War, Marlie and her half-sister are working surreptitiously to aid the cause of the Union, giving aid to runaway slaves and Freedmen, taking medicine and food to imprisoned Union soldiers, and with Marlie sending […]
America was born in the crucible of the civil war, and Ulysses Grant was the avatar for its renewed life.
This was a marvelous biography of an iconic American who’s life coincided with some of the most tumultuous and divisive events in American history. But I find myself struggling to review it. H.W. Brands doesn’t skimp on the details. His Ronald Regan biography tips the scales with more than 800 pages. His book on FDR is even more ambitious, being close to 900 pages – though, when you consider that FDR had nearly twice as much time in office as Regan, it may be said […]
Great expectations brought low
I don’t know who has written the book on Grover Cleveland, but I don’t think this book is it. It’s an insightful appraisal of the man, and an informative snapshot of the era, but it isn’t nearly detailed enough in the latter respect to be able to draw much of a parallel to current affairs, and the subject perhaps isn’t interesting enough to safe the former respect. I liked the book, but it’s a fairly middling biography, for a president often ignored and little taught […]