Marx & Lennon: The Parallel Sayings
by Joey Green Hyperion Books
Our Price: $8.95
No, not THAT Marx. Here is a good demonstration of the saying that “Great minds think alike.” This book is what used to be called a 'jeu d'esprit' — but some of these comparisons are truly spot-on. Don't believe me? Try pages 16, 17, 71, 84, 88-89, 117, 125, 156-157, and 189. Or flip through it at random. You're sure to get a chuckle....
This artist, who has been very aptly described as “the Bruegel of the Bible Belt” and whose 'American Gothic' is one of the most iconic images in American art, turns out to have been a complex man with a repressed and rather sad personal life. His ambivalence toward the Iowa he both loved and felt stifled by reveals itself in the way his work quietly (if affectionately) subverts and satirizes as much as it celebrates. The simple homespun Midwest we think we're being shown turns out to have something of the dark undercurrent of Michael Lesy's 'Wisconsin Death Trip', if one knows where to look for it. You may never look at these deceptively wholesome-seeming paintings in quite the same way again.
Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner
by Henry James Pushkin Pr Ltd
Our Price: $17.95
These letters are a real treat for anyone who admires Isabella Stewart Gardner and the great museum she created here in Boston, as well as for fans of Henry James. The introductory chapters by Rosella Zorzi and Gardner Museum curator Alan Chong, plus the very extensive footnotes, are a mine of information about not just writer and recipient but the cultural and artistic world of the Gilded Age. We see the author both fascinated by Mrs. Gardner and determined to keep a degree of distance from her flamboyant personality. To be honest, I find her to be the more interesting of the pair and think she led a more interesting life, too. The letters also make it plain that James’s inability or unwillingness to write a simple declarative sentence without several subordinate clauses was by no means confined to his fiction!
The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America
by Louis P. Masur Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
Our Price: $16.00
This photograph, taken at the height of Boston’s busing crisis, still retains its power to shock more than 30 years later. Masur’s study of the picture and the incident where it was taken — by no means as simple as it appears at first glance — illuminates the history of that time as well or better than some far longer books do. At once an analysis of the uses to which an image can be put, an examination of the meaning of the American flag in popular culture, and a meditation on how far we’ve come since the 1970s, this little book covers a lot of territory brilliantly.
Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships
by W.H. Bunting Tilbury House Pub
Our Price: $30.00
This book is several fascinating histories in one. It’s the story of a 19th-century Maine shipping company whose owners, fortunately for historians, saved nearly every scrap of paper generated by the firm; a study of the construction and voyages of the last sailing fleet in New England; and (most of all) a rip-roaring narrative of life at sea more than 100 years ago, with shipwrecks, murders, mutinous crews, and drunken or sadistic captains, while the owners — either hardnosed Yankee businessmen or micromanaging skinflints, depending on your viewpoint — tried to keep tight control of everything from their home offices ashore in Bath. Bill Bunting — something of a ’live Yankee’ himself, in his own way — tells this very complex tale in a dryly understated voice and has a well-honed talent for annotating and explaining historic photographs which sometimes approaches genius. This is a book for everyone who loves sailing ships and the sea.
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
by Alison Weir Ballantine Books
Our Price: $28.00
On May 19, 1536 Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second queen, was beheaded at the Tower of London on sensational charges of adultery; her destruction had been accomplished in less than a month. Anne's story has been told in many good biographies (and a few really bad historical novels), but this book is the first time her fall has been studied in depth as an isolated event in itself. The reliability of the surviving documentary sources varies wildly and constitutes something of a minefield, but Weir, in laying out the case for and against Anne, leaves little doubt that she was the victim of a ruthless frameup by Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist of Hilary Mantel's recent Wolf Hall . Anne's legion of enemies rejoiced at her downfall while remaining skeptical about her guilt. Among the relevant facts Weir brings to light is that a French executioner was summoned to behead Anne many days before she had even been found guilty — so much for Tudor justice. We are left with the portrait of a difficult, fiercely intelligent woman facing an increasingly certain disgrace and death with courage and who maintained her innocence to the end with a spirit worthy of the mother of the future Elizabeth I.
A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game
by Jennifer Uglow Farrar Straus & Giroux
Our Price: $35.00
Charles II — witty, engaging, tolerant, charming, generous, untrustworthy, charismatic, promiscuous, secretive and (above all) a survivor — remains one of Britain's most popular monarchs more than 300 years after his death. This fine study focuses on the first decade of his reign when, newly returned after years of bitter exile, he was learning the business of kingcraft. Determined at all costs to never be 'sent on his travels' again, he was forced to become a high-stakes gambler in the game of politics. You will find much social history here as well, with absorbing accounts of the Great Fire of London, the naval wars with the Dutch, and the Restoration theater. But Uglow never loses sight of the urbane, enigmatic figure at the center of everything — Charles II himself.
G. B. Shaw perceptively observed "Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness."
A Place of Greater Safety
by Hilary Mantel Picador USA
Our Price: $18.00
Hilary Mantel has been garnering much praise lately for her historical novel Wolf Hall. But as an amateur Tudor historian I feel that although the book is beautifully written, she makes Thomas Cromwell too much of a freethinking rationalist and Thomas More simply a medieval crank in ways the evidence will not support. However, I can wholeheartedly recommend her earlier A Place of Greater Safety. I have never read a better and more gripping fictional treatment of the French Revolution, or one so closely based on fact. The story practically tells itself, in all its lurid grandeur, and boasts a cast of larger-than-life characters a novelist could hardly invent. The way the Revolution slipped out of the control of the young idealists who created it and, like many later ones, ended by destroying its own children is masterfully presented. We know what's going to happen to Desmoulins, Danton, and Robespierre. They thought they had their whole lives in front of them.
Crocodile, Crocodile
by Peter Nickl Crocodile Books
Our Price: $7.95
Crocodile, Crocodile, by Peter Nickl & Binette Schroeder, is a welcome re-issue of a darkly charming children's book from 1975. The story is told in rhyming couplets, in the style of 'Madeline', but the sensibility is far closer to Lemony Snicket. Omar the crocodile journeys to Paris in search of the 'crocodile store' he's heard about, only to meet with an unpleasant surprise. But Nature's revenge is sweet — and appropriate.
The French Renaissance Court
by Robert Knecht Yale Univ Pr
Our Price: $45.00
I realize this is an unusual book to recommend to the general reader ; it has no dramatic tension or narrative framework, and no more plot than a biography would have. But for those (like me) who love French art and culture but prefer the whiteness and airy grace of the Loire chateaux to the heavy splendors of Versailles, or Clouet to Rigaud, this is simply a must-have book. And if you haven’t had much exposure to this period, its richness may come as a revelation.
Knecht’s primary focus is on the achievements of Francis I — an outsize figure who was basically a Gallic version of Henry VIII without the cruel streak or the wives (mistresses instead !). He was, more importantly, one of the greatest patrons of the arts in history and was primarily responsible for bringing the Renaissance north of the Alps to France. I was also pleased by the author’s assessment of the under-appreciated queen mother Catherine de’ Medici, who, in the realm of cultural patronage no less than in the wider world of politics, did more than any other single individual to ensure that at the end of the Wars of Religion there were enough pieces left for Henri IV to put back together at all.
This is also, for my money, one of the most lavishly produced and best-designed books of its kind I’ve seen in quite a while (as well as the densest— just heft it to see !).
Nearest Thing to Heaven
by Mark Kingwell Yale Univ Pr
Our Price: $17.00
Nearest Thing To Heaven : The Empire State Building and American Dreams, by Mark Kingwell, is an utterly absorbing study of the building’s iconic status in popular culture. Far from being merely an architecture book and a history of the great skyscraper, it’s a loving evocation of the Empire State Building’s multifaceted presence in our collective consciousness and the way that is manifested in things like film (not just ‘King Kong’), literature, and how it has come to be an essential part of what New York means to the nation and indeed to the rest of the world. This little book is a mine of quiet insights and fascinating facts. The World Trade Center’s twin towers were basically giant boxes that impressed by sheer size. The Empire State Building — not very much smaller — has magic. Here is why.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
by Annette Gordon-Reed W. W. Norton
Our Price: $35.00
The Hemingses of Monticello, by Annette Gordon-Reed , poses and answers a question which should have been asked long ago; what if the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings controversy isn’t really ‘about’ Jefferson at all? What if instead we put the surprisingly well-documented story of the Hemings family front and center? Viewed in that light, the entire picture changes. Gordon-Reed brilliantly and sometimes movingly draws the group portrait of several generations of slaves who had both a keen interest in freedom and an acute awareness of just how much their mixed-race ancestry — in some cases 7/8 white — and their varying degrees of kinship to Jefferson counted for in terms of bettering their own lives. (Fifty years later these things would have made no difference at all.) Sally Hemings herself, described as “mighty near white” with “long straight hair down her back” looked far more like half-Indian Norah Jones than the Aunt Jemima caricature drawn by Jefferson’s enemies (and latter-day defenders).
And Jefferson — anxious to do the right thing (as he saw it), provided always that it didn’t inconvenience him too much or force him to confront the harsher realities of slave ownership — comes off far better than one might expect. Unsettling as it may be to 21st-century sensibilities, Jefferson and Hemings appear to have set up a situation between themselves in which all parties concerned got what they wanted. Much has been made of his failure to free her in his will; the author shows how difficult this would have been to legally do. Instead he simply saw to it that she was allowed to go free after his death without any embarrassing paperwork.
On page after page here you will find incisive discussions on a range of topics — the meaning of race in America, the nature of slavery, the dynamics of power between master and slave, intimate relationships between men and women (free white women as well as enslaved ones), relationships within families — which are full not merely of insight and common sense but of profound wisdom. (We are shown the irony of two generations of Jefferson’s womenfolk grappling with the very unwelcome reality that both they and a widowed father or father-in-law might be better off if he kept a slave mistress instead of marrying a hostile stepmother with an agenda of her own.)
The Concubine, by Norah Lofts, long overdue for reissue, is my own ideal of what a historical novel ought to be. As someone with a passionate interest in Tudor history in general and the dramatic story of Anne Boleyn in particular, I’ve been gritting my teeth at the plot absurdities of Philippa Gregory’s inexplicably best-selling The Other Boleyn Girl. (Basic fact: Mary Boleyn was the experienced ‘bad girl’ elder sister, NOT the innocent younger one — this has always been known !). Now at last I can offer people a better — and better-written — alternative. Lofts here does full justice to the mercurial and flamboyant personality of Anne Boleyn, as well as the complex true relationship between the sisters. Best of all perhaps is the way the author conveys the terrible vulnerability of what it meant to be Henry VIII’s queen. To say that the final chapters are profoundly poignant despite every reader’s already knowing how the book will end is a measure of Loft’s success.
What To Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!
by Barbara Kerley Scholastic
Our Price: $16.99
Anyone who knows me (or has read my recommendation of Stacy Cordery’s recent biography) is aware of how much I like Alice Roosevelt and the way she broke all the rules so stylishly during her 96 years. So there is little more I can say in praise of this book other than to observe that they NEVER had neat kid’s history books like this when I was growing up!
Ninety years after her execution by the French government on a rather dubious charge of spying for Germany, Mata Hari still intrigues the popular imagination, to the point where the legend has almost completely obscured the facts—a thing which would probably have pleased her. This new biography stresses how her entire life was an exercise in audacious self-fashioning unencumbered by any regard for the truth. Fleeing a failed marriage to an abusive husband, this bourgeois Dutch woman moved to Paris, passed herself off as Malaysian, became a celebrity by performing pseudo-Javanese-cum-striptease dances, and embarked on a series of torrid affairs with prominent men.
The First World War brought about her swift downfall, since (contrary to legend) she was far more successful as "exotic" dancer and courtesan than as a spy. In brief, she seems actually to have been attempting to work for France, but the results were so meager the authorities concluded she must be a German double agent. She was far more useful as an example of the sinister "enemy within". As another author put it, "if she had not existed, the French would probably have invented her, which is what they almost did." She had played into their hands by continuing to trade on her sexuality and carefully-constructed image in a war-torn France which was determined to put the Belle Epoque behind it and now demanded that its women be loyal wives and mothers. There was no place in it for a Mata Hari, as she discovered to her cost. But I find it difficult not to be moved by the courage—insouciance, even—with which she faced the firing squad.
For those who want more of the story, the recent novel "Signed, Mata Hari" by Yannick Murphy is a clever and entertaining re-imagining of her life.
I take great pleasure in recommending this re-release of a modern sci-fi classic novel. More than thirty years before Ian Caldwell’s The Rule of Four, Robert Silverberg came up with the same basic plot device — four college students discover an ancient manuscript in the library of their college (not named here, but pretty obviously Yale) which claims to hold the key to arcane mysteries, complications ensue — and took it in a very different direction. The story is told in an alternating first-person narration as the young men drive across the country to investigate the secrets of the book. In the best tradition of such quests, the journey itself is almost the destination.
But what I like best about the novel is the picture-perfect way it captures the ethos of the early 1970s — the sexual politics, the self-absorbtion, the drugs (I was in high school then, but I remember it well) — and the vividness of the main characters. There is more than a little of myself in both Ned and Eli, something of two other friends in Oliver and Timothy, and Timothy’s stepmother Saybrook is my best friend’s stepmother to the life. (The very funny scene where all the parents meet is worth the whole book.) And in the end — is the book truly science fiction, or simply a cleverly-plotted novel? The ending is ambiguous: the reader gets to decide!
The Complete Saki (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by H. H. Munro Penguin Classics
Our Price: $17.00
Saki’s short stories are among the funniest things I’ve read in my life. Imagine O. Henry’s stories, with their surprise endings, as if written by Oscar Wilde — the sentimentality replaced by mordant wit and an utter delight in language and wordplay (“the black sheep of a rather greyish family”).
These little gems — most no more than four or five pages long — are positively addictive. Try ‘The Reticence of Lady Anne’, ‘Gabriel-Ernest’, ‘Tobermory’, Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger’, ‘Sredni Vashtar’, ‘Wratislav’, ‘Laura’, ‘The Scharz-Metterklume Method’, ‘The Lumber-Room’……
Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
by Stacy A. Cordery Viking Adult
Our Price: $32.95
I’ve been fascinated by Theodore Roosevelt’s flamboyant eldest daughter since my high school days and was delighted by this study of how, over the course of her very long life, she constantly reinvented herself — from teenaged White House rebel to behind-the-scenes political operator to finish at last as ‘Washington’s other Monument’. She was a brilliant wit and a champion hater specializing in (as she herself put it) “detached malevolence”, with a particular talent for making her Democrat Roosevelt cousins miserable. And yet whenever she chose to she could be absolutely and utterly enchanting. I find I like her best both as the beautiful and wayward First Daughter and as the indomitable dowager only made stronger by personal tragedies and disappointments (such as an initially charming husband who turned out to be an old-fashioned Victorian cad).
She was both the grandest of grande dames and utterly original — “herself and no one else” as someone described her. I enjoyed the final chapters most of all. Of how many of us could it be said that to a great degree our best years were our 70s and 80s? I think her life is a lesson in how to age with vigor and panache. Oscar Wilde wrote that “One’s style is one’s signature always.” Her life was a spectacular demonstration of this.
-Alan
Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition
by The Onion Little, Brown and Company
Our Price: $27.99
This world ‘atlas’ is the perfect showcase for The Onion’s distinctive and very determinedly un-PC “Oh wow, that’s RUDE…. but they have a point, unfortunately” brand of snarky humor. Look up the countries that interest you most — or those which you dislike worst. (For the record, I was best amused by Mexico, Cuba, Ireland, and the Netherlands). Be prepared to laugh out loud. Or at least to do a lot of guilty snickering.
— Alan
What makes a perfect gift? I am glad you asked : something original, intelligent, very funny, and containing maps, of course ! I didn’t even know this existed until a few days before it came out; nevertheless, I am very pleased. There is the silly (Chile), the tragic (the picture of the little girl in Sierra Leone), and the obnoxious (San Marino). While most Onion stuff is hilarious, I think the atlas format makes this a better present than anything else they have published.
— Josh W.
An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege
by Heidi Ardizzone W. W. Norton
Our Price: $35.00
Belle Marian Greener, the daughter of the first black man to graduate from Harvard, changed her name, obliterated her true background, invented a Portuguese ancestry, and successfully ‘passed’ for white in turn-of-the-century New York society. Hired at just 26 as librarian to the great financier and art collector J. P. Morgan, she quickly became his close confidante and indispensable agent in purchasing rare books and manuscripts — the famed Morgan Library in New York City is very much their joint creation.
In that capacity she led a flamboyant life, ‘hiding in plain sight’ and carrying on a long affair with the noted connoisseur/critic Bernard Berenson (and numerous others on the side). She was a unique and unforgettable character — sometimes admirable, sometimes utterly exasperating — and this biography paints her portrait vividly. More than anything else, I found myself amazed at her sheer audacity. (There is a plaque to her father Richard T. Greener located just inside the entry of 1430 Massachusetts Avenue, near C’est Bon.)
The Camera's Coast: Historic Images of Ship and Shore in New England
by Historic New England Tilbury House Publishers
Our Price: $29.95
Maybe the highest praise I can give this book is to say that the wonderful introductory essay by John Stilgoe is really just a bonus feature. Bill Bunting’s informative but laconic and sometimes wry commentaries on these photographs cut to their essence in an endearingly Yankee way. The text and pictures left me with a vivid feel for a long-ago period one rarely gets from a book.
The overriding impression I came away with — a little saddening, and almost awe-inspiring in its scope — is how completely our use of the coast, and in fact our very attitude toward it, has changed in 100 years. In 1890 it was a hive of commercial activity — small businesses, fishermen, food processors, mills, shipbuilders, craftsmen, and amusement parks. Today (except for the major ports) the typical use of coastal property, and by far the highest dollar value it can realize, is as residential real estate for the affluent and the rich. The amusing story on page 47 illustrates this trend at its very inception.
It’s amazing, the little things that remain the same and the ones that have altered out of recognition — the fact that virtually every male in this book is wearing a hat of some kind, even in situations where nobody today would dream of wearing one; the way the photographs aboard the yacht “Gitana” (pages 82-83) demonstrate just how long the family of William F. Weld has had what is now called serious money.
Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600
by Evelyn S. Welch Yale University Press
Our Price: $45.00
As a person who above all else values and enjoys the human aspects of history — not the study of big ‘isms’ or the determinist ‘it-would-all-have-happened-anyway’ approach to the past, but rather the stories of individual lives and daily existence — I was totally enchanted by this book.
The author poses and then goes on to answer a host of fascinating questions (backed up by beautiful & unusual illustrations). How, 500 years ago, did townspeople buy foodstuffs and basic necessities? How could the customer guard against being cheated? How, in an age when business hours were strictly regulated but accurate clocks were rare, did people manage to tell time? How did merchants and civic authorities try to prevent shoplifting and burglary? How did the rich physically acquire their costly luxury goods? (Yes, they were different, even then. In fact, the best chapter here, ‘Shopping With Isabella d’Este’ brilliantly depicts that imperious noblewoman bombarding her agents with shopping lists and detailed instructions for purchasing fine brocades, silks, jewels, and paintings — all at roughly the same value. The fabrics have been dust for centuries, the jewels were long ago broken up and sold untraceably, but her paintings are now priceless!) Welch illuminates these questions with dozens of human vignettes and incidents.
I realize this book is not necessarily for everyone — it’s as far from a novel as possible — but it gave me, as an amateur Renaissance scholar, hours of delight. And for those readers who enjoyed good historical fiction like Leonardo’s Swans (Karen Essex) and The Birth of Venus (Sarah Dunant) it might well serve as a perfect window into the reality of the period. This is academic social history as it should always be written.
Blood and Roses: One Family's Struggle and Triumph During the Tumultuous Wars of the Roses
by Helen Castor HarperCollins
Our Price: $25.95
The unique survival of hundreds of letters written by the 15th-century Paston family makes possible this brilliant synthesis of the family’s history with a narrative of the turbulent Wars of the Roses.
The Pastons’ determination to rise in the world at whatever cost plunged them into the thick of a brutal civil war in which it was imperative to find a powerful nobleman as patron and protector — which in turn meant that his enemies became their own, and that his backing the losing side in the dynastic conflict or simply incurring the king’s displeasure could mean their downfall as well. It’s exactly as if your career (or mine, or the average man’s) were directly dependent, at only 1 or 2 removes, on the result of the latest Congressional elections or the fallout from a Presidential sex scandal.
I was also struck by how well the author depicted the colorful personalities of this human drama. Here are Margaret Paston, the family matriarch, strong-willed and sometimes difficult but as courageous and capable as any man; her two likeable sons (both confusingly named John), forced at a very early age to assume sole responsibility for the family fortunes; King Edward IV, the real hero of the Wars of the Roses — all brought vividly to life. If anyone enjoyed Juliet Barker’s recent Agincourt and wondered what happened next, here is the answer, splendidly retold.
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy
by Ian W. Toll W. W. Norton
Our Price: $16.95
Few people realize how close the United States came to not having a Navy at all — Jefferson, for one, insisted that the equivalent of the Coast Guard would be perfectly adequate. In the end, George Washington’s administration decided to build six large frigates more powerful than comparable ships in other navies — one of these six being the still-surviving USS Constitution now on view here in Boston.
Out of the careers of these ships and their officers Ian Toll spins a fascinating and rip-roaring story of battles at sea (and no less vicious political infighting ashore) which rivals anything in Patrick O’Brian’s fiction — in fact, O’Brian made free use of these historical incidents in writing some of his own Jack Aubrey novels.
Interestingly, a number of precursors of future events can be found in this study — for example, the United States’ first (but far from last) conflict with an Islamic power, and the lessons the young Theodore Roosevelt drew from the War of 1812 and would later put into effect during his own presidency.
Walks Through Lost Paris: A Journey Into the Heart of Historic Paris
by Leonard Pitt Shoemaker & Hoard
Our Price: $22.00
I’ve never seen a book quite like this one. The closest equivalents might be Jane Holtz Kay’s Lost Boston or Peter Vanderwarker’s Boston Then and Now. Before-and-after photographs of areas destroyed or radically altered in the creation of the Paris we are all familiar with (which is by no means as old as it appears to be), maps, plans, and a truly amazing amount of history (urban and otherwise) are all combined in a beautifully designed small package. I was particularly impressed by the very informative discussion of the development of the Louvre/Tuileries complex (pages 112-119). Although the automobile would eventually have made many of these mournfully chronicled demolitions necessary in any case, much else done by Baron Haussmann in the name of urban renewal now seems simply wanton destruction.
This well laid out book by an expatriate American author in love with the city presents itself in the format of a travel guide but is actually very much more. In fact, one need not be anywhere near Paris in order to enjoy it — all that’s needed are a love of Paris and an appreciation of older cities’ urban landscapes.
A Journey Into Dorothy Parker's New York
by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick Roaring Forties Press
Our Price: $19.95
A Journey Into Dorothy Parker’s New York, by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick -- or is it more like an insightful and entertaining study (almost a pictorial biography) of New York’s Dorothy Parker? They are really inseparable. She embodied early 20th century New York’s literary life --especially that of the Jazz Age -- quite as much as she herself was shaped by it. This in-depth guide to the numerous surviving sites associated with her opens windows into many aspects of American culture and society of those days simply by placing the eventful, often sad life of this frail yet somehow indomitable woman front and center. It’s a very clever concept and works well even if you don’t actually bring the book to the city with you to seek out these locations.
(For the record, ‘DOROTHY PARKER’ can almost be made into the anagram ‘HER DARK POETRY’, but just one letter -- a vowel, at that -- doesn’t match. I think she would have been amused, both by the idea and the near-miss.)
Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman
by Sylvia Townsend Warner New York Review of Books
Our Price: $12.95
In a time -- not so very long ago -- when women viewed as unmarriageable were more or less drafted into service as the family caretaker and glorified maid, the notion of simply saying "To hell with you all!" to one's domineering relatives, moving to a remote country village, and becoming a witch (as our heroine does!) must have had enormous appeal. The matter-of-fact, even whimsical, treatment of the supernatural elements of the story -- long, civilized conversations with the Devil, for example -- are in the very English tradition of Saki and Shaw. But underneath the book's charm and cleverness it addresses very real issues about women's independence.
Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon
by Charles Slack Ecco
Our Price: $13.95
Hetty Green, known to her legion of detractors as ‘the Witch of Wall Street’, became the richest woman in the world through a combination of financial genius and utter ruthlessness, living like a pauper and caring nothing for what the world thought of her. (Her two children found it much less pleasant.) Not a likable character by any means, and yet there is something (almost) admirable in the way this flinty, quintessentially New England Yankee competed with powerful men in a man’s world – and won. This is a fascinating story, now largely forgotten, with numerous local angles and locations, from New Bedford to Vermont.
Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci
by Belinda Elizabeth Jack Other Press (NY)
Our Price: $24.95
The young Roman noblewoman Beatrice Cenci was executed in 1599 by Papal authorities for arranging the murder of her monstrously abusive father. To modern eyes the case fairly screams ‘extenuating circumstances’ and popular sympathy was overwhelmingly in Beatrice’s favor, but the Pope’s view seems to have been that transgressing against the patriarchal order in this way was the most unpardonable of crimes.
The case continues to resonate 400 years later, due to its elements of violence and incest and its issues of guilt vs. innocence, parental authority, and filial obligation. Its sheer human drama has lured such writers and artists as Shelley, Hawthorne, Melville, and Artaud to reinterpret the story, each bringing their own emotional baggage to it and some (like Artaud) becoming slightly unhinged themselves in the process. It all makes fascinating if sometimes grim reading.
