Need For reads

Nonfiction Abolition on Earth, canals on Mars THE LOWELLS OF MASSACHUSETTS: An American Family By Nina Sankovitch 382 pp. St. Martin’s Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. Over fifteen generations the Lowell clan, originally the Lowle family of Bristol, England managed to be a successful and productive family in New England life. Through this well-written book the author shows the family morphing from prominence in religion to manufacturing to public service to astronomy and then into literature. Though there are setbacks, sometimes major ones, the family seems to survive through it all as if it were a living entity. The family left England because though prosperous, the taxes and duties were rising, harvests had failed and then, in 1639, the King called for able-bodied men to join a fight against Scotland. The family settled in the small community of Newbury north of Boston. Church was important, and the Congregationalist Puritans did not want to create a new church like the Pilgrims. ...

Nonfiction A warrior’s closeted heart FBI GIRL: HOW I LEARNED TO CRACK MY FATHER’S CODE . . . WITH LOVE By Maura Conlon-McIvor 306 pp. Resource Publications Reviewed by Diane Diekman FBI Girl: How I Learned To Crack My Father’s Code . . . With Love is the coming-of-age memoir of Maura Conlon-McIvor. Originally published in 2004, it is being reissued in softcover and as an audiobook. The story was adapted for the stage at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The press release promised a Nancy-Drew-type murder mystery in real life, with a little-brother sidekick and an FBI father. This reviewer’s expectations were high. Joe Conlon is a career FBI agent who moved his family from New York City to Los Angeles, where he and his wife raise their five children in the late 1960s. Seemingly unable to show feelings of love, he interacts with his children mainly through his passion for baseball. The memoir is written in present tense, through the voice of fourth-grader Maura, the second eldest c...

Nonfiction The sun looked like the moon PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Caroline Fraser 515 pp. Metropolitan Books Reviewed by Diane Diekman Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder recently won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. And deservedly so. Caroline Fraser did a masterful job of researching and describing both the life and the times of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser writes in the introduction that Wilder’s life was “a story that needs to be fully told, in its historical context, as she lived it.” That is exactly what Prairie Fires does. Wilder became world famous through her Little House books, written in the 1930s about her childhood as a pioneer girl and a teacher in one-room schools on the South Dakota prairie. With the editorial assistance of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, she produced an eight-volume series of children’s fiction based on fact. Wilder died at age ninety, in 1957, at the time I was beginning t...

Fiction Music had become a political instrument A SYMPHONY OF RIVALS By Roma Calatayud-Stocks 414 pp. Calumet Editions Reviewed by Alan Goodman A Symphony Of Rivals is the second book in a planned trilogy by Calatayud-Stocks. In this story the protagonist, Alejandra Morrison, a young lady possessing an exceptional musical gift as a concert pianist, seeks an opportunity to make a name as a major orchestral conductor in what is traditionally a man’s domain. The story moves between Minneapolis, the home town of Ms. Morrison, and her medical doctor husband, Richard, to 1933 Berlin, a city experiencing the ominous political currents inspired by the rise of the Nazi party. The story begins in Berlin with Alejandra and Richard riding through the streets of Berlin, and then in their hotel, the famed Adelon in Pariser Platz. The Nazi presence, crude, ruse and unsettling, makes itself known almost immediately with an encounter in the hotel bar. A loud disturbance drew her attention....