Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
In some respects, I miss the point of Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. Alice Waters is the original proponent of seasonal, local, and organic foods. But because I grocery shop for a family on a budget, I can never justify going “organic.” I also live in Chicago suburbia, which means that there are
The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution by Linda Monk is simply brilliant. Monk takes the Constitution of the United States, including its amendments, and dissects it line by line, explaining the historical significance and the modern significance of the wording. She does so in layman’s terms, with amusing quotes in
In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington attempts to define the post-Cold War world. His conclusion is that, instead of an “us” and “them” approach to world politics, we must view the world as that of many civilizations, including mainly the West (generally Christian), Sinic (Chinese), Islamic, Hindu
I like history and I always want to know more about American History. But in all the nonfiction and fiction about the Revolutionary War, it’s rather limited to dead white guys who fought the battles and otherwise founded our nation. Enter: Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts. In a conversational tone, Roberts shares some of the
Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny (published in 1988 as Daughter of the East), tells a completely unique story. Bhutto was the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country (Pakistan), and she first went through years of struggle, including years of solitary confinement, before she could be an example of democracy. Much of her autobiography
Sometimes I read nonfiction to get a general idea about something I don’t know anything about or a person who intrigues me. Other times I read nonfiction to learn something specific in depth; such books may be hard to read cover to cover, but they still merit a careful reading. The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis sets out to share what he believes the core of Christianity is. He makes it clear in the introduction that he is not sharing doctrines of a specific faith, but rather Christianity in general. I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative
Last June, I had just barely begun book blogging. My reading was beginning to expand beyond my comfort zone (i.e., go to the library and randomly take a book with a pretty cover off the shelf) and into the world of TBR lists. When I read the preface to Harold Bloom’s How to Read and
Rose, Where Do You Get that Red? by Kenneth Koch is written for educators, and yet it is accessible to others. Reading it as a mother shows me that reading classic poetry to my young child can be inspiring in not just their own understandings of poetry but also in their own writing. There is
I let myself browse the library a few weeks ago, and I ended up coming home with a huge coffee table book of photography, Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs by Hal Buell. I thought I’d browse through the award-winning photographs and then return it. To my delight, the short summaries on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs
In Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dogs: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, Kitty Burns Florey sets out to tell why diagramming sentences is so much fun and the brief history of the art of diagramming sentences. To some extent, I felt Florey’s book was more memoir and humor than it was history. Yet,
In A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal, Leonard Marcus illustrates the long road six Caldecott illustrators followed to produce to an award-winning book. This book is a combination of biography and art history as it looks at how six artists approached children’s book illustration over the last six decades.
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