I am a writer whose day job involves preserving land, so I loved this story about a writer striving to prevent development of her family’s property in coastal Maine—though I hope I never came off as badly with a landowner as the book’s land trust characters.
Agnes, the protagonist, is fascinating in her quirks, intelligence, and risk-taking even as she copes with aging. I wanted to be friends with her.
Dark deftly shows the myriad influences on her characters. She sent me to my journal to copy one brilliant line about growing up in a household where manners ruled: ”Our mother’s anxiety that we not be the object of anyone’s disapproval influenced our actions and even our thoughts.”
The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century.
Celebrated children's book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy-to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders…
This is not a new book, but after listening to Tobin speak in 2022, I wanted to read his treatment of Henry James, an author who always intrigued me because of his devotion to writing, choice to live as an ex-pat, and highly intelligent, slightly crazy family. Among other things, I learned from Tobin that James’s family wasn’t just slightly crazy.
The book is a beautiful examination of the differences between solitude and loneliness, and I was fascinated to read of the many ways in which the people who mattered to James in his life found their way, reimagined, into his fiction. Tobin was audacious to try to enter the mind of Henry James, but he pulled it off brilliantly.
Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.
I don’t only love books about writers. Candido Rondon led Theodore Roosevelt down the River of Doubt in the Brazilian Amazon, continually making strategic, life-saving decisions based on his knowledge of indigenous peoples (he was one) and years of experience laying telegraph cable through the rainforest. Yet history reduced Rondon to Roosevelt’s “guide” and the river was named after Roosevelt, not Rondon.
I learned some of the truth about Rondon while researching my first book, set in the Amazon, but Rohter gives us a fuller and gripping account of Rondon’s life, courage, and beliefs, including his atypical dedication to peaceful interactions with indigenous tribes. I hope the book helps give Rondon his rightful place in the history of exploration.
Candido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them-and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated "River of Doubt" journey in 1913-14. Upon leaving the Brazilian Army in 1930 with the rank of a two-star general, Rondon, himself of indigenous descent, devoted the remainder of his life to not only writing about the region's flora and fauna, but also advocating for the peoples who…
In 1913 the Army charged a rising star, Maj. Benjamin Koehler, with groping 16 men. Many who knew Koehler believed the claims were concocted—but why? My book examines this perplexing case, which played out on a remote island, in New York City and at the highest levels of the federal government.
A few years earlier, federal authorities had begun vetting foreigners for alleged signs of homosexuality. Now it was the Army’s turn to presume how gay men looked and behaved at a time when gender attitudes in America were changing—to the detriment of independent women and men who did not adhere to the new muscular masculinity. We also see attorneys grapple with a case of alleged sexual harassment well before the phase came into being.
