We recommend No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin. My husband started reading it and telling me about it so I became interested and began reading it when he set it down. It is so deeply researched and readable. No wonder it won the Pulitzer Prize. Awesome!

The subtitle of Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann is “a sheep detective story” but the book is so much more. It’s unique and wise and fun to read!

Being familiar with the English Bloomsbury writers, I was curious about American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever so I bought the book and read it. What a revelation! Captivated, I moved on to the biography “Margaret Fuller” by Carolyn Balducci. She was a century ahead of her generation. Both are good reads.

The House that George Built by Wilfrid Sheed includes delightfully intimate portraits of the icons of Tin Pan Alley. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rogers stand out among those creative geniuses who gave us the songs that have become known as American Popular Music.

I am reading Banker to the Poor by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. It is a subject I find deeply interesting.

My wife and I are enjoying the detective novels by Swedish writer Henning Mankell. His hero, if he can be called that, is Kurt Wallander, a divorced, middle-aged, depressed detective in a small-town police department on the southern coast of Sweden. The constantly overcast weather darkens the moood of the principal characters and evokes a strong sense of place. My favorite so far is the 1993 The White Lioness.

I turn off the TV and go to The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser for my late-evening enjoyment.  I had no idea that my art history classes could have led me into a life of crime.  I do appreciate journalist/writers.

The Five Wisdom Energies by Irini Rockwell is a refreshing look at mental health from a Buddhist perspective.  This is  a non-judgmental look at problems we all experience.  The five energies, or personality types, have a wisdom aspect and a neurotic aspect.  Understanding how to transform the neurotic aspect to the wisdom aspect, which this book does a good job of explaining, is something most people, especially our political “leaders” could benefit from.

So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba is a spectacular book. Ramatoulaye is a widow when the novel begins.  Because of her present grief and her past sadnesses she writes a lengthy letter to her best friend, Assiatou.Her friend has a listening ear and a caring heart. In this letter to Aissatou, Ramatoulaye gives details about her marriage to Madou Fall. This lengthy letter is  a flashback in time. Both Aissatou and Ramatoulaye have  faced ian dentical situation with their husbands.  However, each woman chose a different way to handle new circumstances. I adored the book for so many reasons. I loved the friendship between the two African women. I enjoyed learning about the West African culture and I liked learning more about the African male. At the last page, I had my pen ready to write down other titles by Mariama Ba. Unfortunately, this is her first and last novel. Ba died tragically in 1981 in Dakar after a long illness, just before her second novel, “Le Chant Ecarlate,” appeared. “So Long A Letter” by Mariamb Ba is translated from the French by Modupe Bode-Thomas.

I am reading Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America by Nathan Winograd.  This book is both a history of the American animal welfare movement from Henry Bergh to the present, and a prescription for fixing the deeply troubled sheltering system which it has become.  A history book that is influencing the chapters yet to come–can’t beat that!

I’m reading Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, a thrilling account to tension and heroic efforts during the 1857 sinking of the USS Central America with more than $1.5 million in gold (1857 dollars!), and its eventual recovery by Tommy Thompson (an off-the-wall engineer/entrepreneur) and company.

I’m reading God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time by Desmond Tutu. I teach in a high school and need to recharge on all levels over the summer. This book is giving me courage, hope, and inspiration to begin again in the fall.

For Mother’s Day I received The Woman Behind the New Deal by Kirstin Downey - the biography of Frances Perkins. Perkins was first woman ever to be named to a Cabinet post, and served as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor for twelve years.  She was the sponsor of many programs now taken for granted, i.e. unemployment compensation, the 8-hour day, child labor laws, even Social Security. Her story reminds us of that other recent time, when jobs and homes were lost, when banks and businesses failed; and how the government responded to these crises. This biography is a splendid gift of history.

I’m reading The Jump Artist by Austin Ratner.  A unique piece of historical fiction about an untold story of a famous American photographer, Phillipe Halsman - it is the story of a personal metamorphosis from despair to success set against the backdrop of the beginnings of Nazism in Austria.  I picked it up because I’ve read the author’s short stories (Missouri Review fiction prize etc.) and then couldn’t put it down.  It is unique in the realm of historical fiction – beautifully written and meticulously structured so that the personal psychology of the protagonist  parallels external real historical events and a forbidding natural landscape.  Discover a new talent.  I did.

I’m reading Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Published in 1922, it provides amazing contrast to our current times. Individual towns across America were proudly creating themselves to compete with big American cities and to be uniform, to give citizens the sense that they were at home anywhere in America. Everything was American made; the boom was on. Babbitt is not a happy man; he does what he feels he is supposed to do. There are the powerful and the less powerful, but there is a sense that America is beginning its ascent to the top of a productive country, with pride in producing its own goods.