September 6, 2017 | madame librarian
This month we've read a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize winner, David McCullough, the real story about America's 'Wild West', the 1947 World Series--the first to be televised, and two thrillers.
This collection of speeches by historian David McCullough reminds us of fundamental American principles. Over the course of his distinguished career, David McCullough has spoken before Congress, the White House, colleges and universities, historical societies, and other esteemed institutions. Now, as many Americans engage in self-reflection following a bitter election campaign that has left the country divided, McCullough has collected some of his most important speeches in a brief volume that articulates important principles and characteristics that are particularly American.
A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made The open range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players--from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.
August 14, 2014 | madame librarian
The movie rights have been purchased for M. L. Stedman's THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS. wonderful book about a lighthouse keeper and his wife. Tom is a WW I veteran, one of the 'lucky ones', he has lost a limb nor his mind but he deliberately seeks the solitude of an island off Australia. He meets and marries, Isabel. But times on the island are tough for Isabel as she suffers multiple miscarriages and a stillbirth in just four years time. When a boat with a dead man and a young baby washes ashore, Isabel convinces Tom to let her keep the baby as their own, but the consequences to her actions may be dire. Similar books are:
The sandcastle girls: a novel by Chris Bohjalian
The orchardist: a novel by Amanda Coplin
The secret keeper: a novel by Kate Morton
