No comments about Essential Anais Nin CD: Excerpts from her Diary and Comments (Caedmon Essentials).

5 comments about Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS.

1. Wow! a blockbuster. Women have been used and perused for years. It is good to see that someone acknowledges that.



2. I love the premise of this book, and I admit that I learned a lot from reading it. It reveals a part of OSS history that is not often explored in detail. The contributions of women to the wartime efforts of the OSS are impressive.
   
   I did not find the book easy going, though. There is no narrative. It's a string of anecdotes, often told backwards or sideways. The author skips around from telling us where the woman was from to telling us where she lived after she retired, then throws in a bit about what she did in the war, then skips to her husband's story, then back to the war, then maybe back to her early schooling. The reader is left dangling when important bits of the wartime history are simply omitted. Some stories are told in a way that only a WWII OSS enthusiast could make any sense out of them.
   
   I wish it had been better. These women are fast disappearing, and their stories need to be told in a better, more compelling way.



3. This book was an easy read, with all the background into the beginnings of the OSS. I was amazed to find out what a large role women played in the OSS, was shocked actually. Some of the stories are pretty gripping knowing what kind of danger the people were in. If you love to find out little known history this book is for you.



4. This wonderful books reveals a side to the spy wtory that is at best undertold. The women who cracked codes, recruited contacts and worked undercover are an important part of our history. Their secret, hidden but heroric actions shows the skill and bravery with shich they undertook they assignments. Great reading and important lessons.



5. Well written, with both serious and funny anecdotes about WWII. It's nice to see women's contributions so well documented. Brings home the fact that the war could not have been won without the help of the "invisible women" behind the scenes who filed the papers, answered the phones, typed up reports, etc. Not to mention the women who were spying behind enemy lines and thinking up propaganda strategies. It reminds us that women also willingly died for our country during WWII. For anyone who wants to learn more about the intelligent and courageous women of the O.S.S., I highly recommend this book.

5 comments about Bad Blood: A Memoir.

1. I read through this book in a long afternoon, finding it totally engrossing. The story is about a young girl growing up under the roof of her grandfather, an intellectual vicar who led a double life of sex and booze, and her grandmother, an angry, disappointed anti-intellectual diabetic who lived for the treats of going to movies, candy, and scented soaps. The two detested each other, and their daughter wore herself out and sacrificed her personality to keep the household going in a very marginal way. The daughter had a daughter of her own, the author of this memoir, Lorna Sage. I don't think the point of this story is that her life was a nightmare, though it was hardly happy. It was about how, as humans, we all just keep making messes of our lives, generation after generation, and we all have our own family history and genetics which determine our strengths and our devastating flaws. Lorna inherited her grandfather's "bad blood", along with his use of books to escape both the place he was in (an isolated, wet, postwar depressed backwater), and the mess he was actively making of his life. In the middle of this mess, Lorna used this gift to survive, and even to struggle out of the quagmire by getting an advanced education.



2. This finely written memoir of her childhood as an Anglican minister's granddaughter. Today, or recently, [she died in 2001] Sage is an English literary critic and her memoir is both appreciably granular and endowed with a coherent overview. Highly recommended. Won the Whitbread Biography Award.



3. I grew up in the same 1950's in England and apart from her randy grandad shared many of the same experiences, feelings and general discomfort with the miserable, narrow social conditions in England. Put another way a perfect breeding ground for the english character of inhibitions, repression of feelings, violence and fear of economic success riddled with Edwardian class distinctions of no value/relevance in the 50's. Jealousy of the American post war success and hide bound by genteel poverty everywhere it was not surprising that England's social scene exploded in the 60's and 70's. I left England for the US many years ago to escape the trapped kingdom of the mind and the pathetic lack of real freedoms, nostalgia is the UK's greatest industry and the more books like this that appear will help people understand that england's "ennui" is not that attractive after all !



4. Holy moly! You wanna talk about a dysfunctional family? Here it is. It's during the years of WWII. The author's father is off fighting for God and country, and her mother is having a delayed adolescence, so author Lorna Sage is shipped to her grandparents house somewhere in rural England. Her grandparents are weird, weird, weird, but it is their very faults that ultimately make Sage, a well-known and powerful literary critic, into the person she becomes.
   Her grandfather is a debauched, intellectual, furious and infuriating vicar whose idiosyncrasies were seemingly limitless. Her grandmother's rage at her lot in life and the man who was responsible for it (and by extension, ALL men) never once abates - and you almost champion her for her constancy.
   Bad Blood reads as wicked fun with a strongly feminist underlying message. I loved it.



5. The story of an unexceptional childhood - mild neglect, some poverty and a very filthy home - neither sordid nor tragic nor eventful enough to be compelling reading. Especially for a person raised in India the dysfunctionality level of childhood/family seems average. The only redeeming feature is Lorna Sage's writing style. Witty and insightful. Normally this should raise a book to atleast 3 and a half stars but somehow this one does not quite make it past "interesting enough to read when there's nothing better to do". To use review cliches since they work so well in describing a book, it is readable but far short of unputdownable.

1 comments about Migrations of the Heart: An Autobiography.

1. I read this book right before my first journey to Ghana. I was participating in a study abroad program, and I was advised to read some books about Ghana and West Africa before I left. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon, and I'm so glad I did. Marita Golden is a brilliant storyteller, and she is so honest. I love her writing style, and I could relate to so many of her experiences. I also love the way she relayed her precarious position as a black woman in America, as well as her anxiety about her place in African society. Her book has also helped me understand some of the cultural divides btwn Africans in Diaspora, and those on the continent. I highly reccomend her book!

No comments about Lily Tomlin: Woman of a Thousand Faces.

5 comments about That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta (Theater in the Americas).

1. There is lots of interesting information in this biography of a somewhat forgotten woman, but it reads more like a dissertation than an engrossing story. The challenge for a biographer is to bring his or her subject to life, and unfortunately the facts are not enlivened in this volume.



2. This is an interesting account of her life. I found that there is even more information at the author's website - take a look and you'll learn more about this woman...There is a paperback coming out soon so check out the site and come back to get the paperback!

   www.mercedesdeacosta.com




3. Schanke's previous book on the stage actress Eva Le Gallienne was a knockout, and this one suffers in comparison. Perhaps the character of Mercedes was just too hard to pin down, and this may not be Schanke's fault. Acosta's work seems slight and dated, and no amount of cutting and pasting is going to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. This leaves her as a curiosity, a woman who must have been something in her prime, when so many gorgeous women succumbed to her; and then as a victim of what we would now call "erotomania," desperately clinging to the hope that someday Garbo would smile on her again, even though she must have known that "outing" Garbo in her insipid memoir "Here Lies the Heart" (which Le Gallienne heatedly called, "The Heart Lies and Lies and Lies") wasn't the way to curry favor with such a private individual. The last chapters of the book are pathetic in extremis, it's almost hard to believe Mercedes stayed alive from week to week she was so poor and abject, having no money of her own and totally dependent on charity from others. She was like Job in every way except, of course, genitally. But then again Job was probably pretty annoying too. Schanke does a fine job putting together the pieces of a fabulist's life, jigsaw pieces from many different puzzles.



4. De Acosta has long needed an biography since her own autobiography "Here Lies the Heart" often feels fictional. While Schanke gets the facts and corrects some of the autobiography's inaccuracies, he does not ever convince one that this was a story worth telling. The vitality and outragousness of her own book makes de Acosta a compelling figure, but the recitation of facts in this one does not.

   This book has a hard task: telling the life story of a mediocre writer best known for who she had sex with. And while the book does not make a strong case for de Acosta being worth the attention, it is quite facinating for anyone interested in gay history. In addition, the figures arround Mercedes (such as her sister, Garbo, Poppy Kirk) emerge as intriguing in a way that de Acosta does not.




5. I guess it took the Roman Church 500 years to rehabilitate, integrate, and neutralize a troubling voice from the past. Mercedes de Acosta had no such qualms and reincarnated Jehanne in the person of Eva le Gallienne in the 1925 production of Jehanne d'Arc.

   Robert Schake's " That Furious Lesbian": The Story of Mercedes Acosta is a sustained effort to peel away the recurring labels that obliterate the magnificent other that was Mercedes.

   Schanke's re-creative efforts, stemming in large part from Mercedes' poverty driven sale of her "Aspern Letters" to the Rosenbach Library, are well worth the attention of those still capable of amazement before those bolides which burst through Victorian conventions into a new century.

1 comments about In Those Days: Tales of a Happy Childhood 1926-1940.

1. Frances Cheston Train is the real McCoy, a Philadelphian right out of the Philadelphia Story. The tomboy daughter of older parents, she romps through the edges of her family life in the company of family servants and retainers, of her adored cousins and of various animals of all sizes and persuasions. She is disarmingly frank about her budding sexuality, her eccentric relations, her family's complex marital history, her upbringing by a Scots nanny and her stubborn refusal to be the perfect young lady. From a less perpetually optimistic being this memoir might be full of self dramatizing angst. In Train's hands there is nothing but sunny delight and appreciation for her colorful privledged, though in contex unpretentious and considerate, world. Find a hammock and settle down for a trip back to those days.

1 comments about Will I Cry Tomorrow?.

1. This book does a wonderful job of walking the reader through the painful decision of abortion, and the aftermath. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has lived their own story of abortion. Stanford does a great job of showing that there is real hope on the other side of this silent burden.

No comments about Out of Silence.

2 comments about Second Story Woman: A Memoir of Second Chances.

1. A very readable memoir of challenges faced with courage and willingness to change lifestyle behavior. A gift for anyone coping with middle age and wanting to embrace "second chances" and choices! Upbeat!



2. 
   Great read and very insightful and believable--would be a joy to know this woman personally as she appears to be most real.