bookpagedev

by Ron Wynn

One historical area where African-American involvement is frequently overlooked is in the development of the American West. Historian William Loren Katz’s newly updated and reprinted work The Black West thoroughly corrects this oversight. Katz’s pioneering volume covers every phase of African-American life out West, from fur trading and homesteading to serving as scouts, guides and explorers to the military campaigns of the Buffalo Soldiers. First published in 1971 and now in its fifth edition, The Black West has an improved photo archive, offering more rare shots of black riders, ropers, cavalry members and ranchers, and includes a fresh section on black women on the last frontier. Katz also touches on such areas as black participation in rodeos and the creation of western films designed for African-American audiences. While longtime fans of westerns have always known who Nat Love, aka Deadwood Dick, and Mary Field, aka Stagecoach Mary, were, The Black West provides new information for those fooled by John Wayne films and TV shows like Gunsmoke into thinking only whites wielded six-guns and broke broncos.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

One historical area where African-American involvement is frequently overlooked is in the development of the American West. Historian William Loren Katz's newly updated and reprinted work The Black West thoroughly corrects this oversight. Katz's pioneering volume covers every phase of African-American life out West, from…

Memoir

Memoir

Learning to live with grief and loss

Review by bookpagedev

by Maude McDaniel

Vincent was a giver. All his life he believed in, and put great thought into, giving gifts to his friends. Perhaps that is why he got so upset in ninth grade about the O. Henry short story, The Gift of the Magi, which tells about two gifts that went considerably awry. Writer Elizabeth Stone first remembers Vincent as an Italian kid she taught in a Brooklyn school, railing at the ending of the stupid story by O. Henry.

After that year, Stone heard nothing from the young man except for unilluminating Christmas cards. Then, 25 years later, in 1995, she received a carton filled with a decade’s-worth of his personal diaries, along with a letter he had written before he died of AIDS, asking her to make the journals into a book. With A Boy I Once Knew, a poignant new memoir that combines the story of Vincent’s life with her own, Stone fulfills his request.

What begins as a bewildering bequest turns out to be a true gift for the author. Stone doesn’t protest the time and energy she gives to the reading of the journals, a labor of liking that turns into love. Vincent’s emotional growth in his approach to death sends a powerful and timely message to the author, who never dared to deal with the deaths of her own grandmother and father. With the death of her mother approaching, the diaries could not have come at a better time for Stone.

Reading Vincent’s words, Stone relives his last decade, shuddering at the risks he took in living an unfettered gay life in San Francisco, knowing the inevitable outcome. But in his last few months he moved to a self-acceptance and apparent truce with his illness, and with the deaths of his friends in the gay community. Through his acceptance, Stone learns to come to peace with the realities of her own life. As a result of my time traveling with Vincent, I knew the terrain, and I knew what to do for my mother and for myself with surprising clarity, she writes.

In the end, Stone, better able to manage loss and grief, knows that there is a terrain beyond mourning, and that relationships can evolve and grow not only in the face of death but beyond. A gift indeed. Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Creating a family

Review by bookpagedev

by Linda Stankard

For Anne Rivers Siddons, who counts Up Island and Low Country among the 14 previous titles to her credit, Islands is her first since 2000. Interestingly, though the two books tell very different stories, Islands is also a novel with the theme of connection at its core. Siddons’ protagonist, Anny Butler, is 35 and devoted to her work as director of a “part federally, part privately funded sort of clearinghouse for services for needy children.” When she totes a frightened, clubfooted child through the pouring rain to Dr. Lewis Aiken’s Orthopedic Clinic, she’s unaware that this action will change her life. Siddons’ rich prose and trademark capacity for evoking time and place is evident as Anny describes that afternoon as “humid and punishing as spring can often be in the Carolina Low Country, when the air felt like thick, wet steam and the smell of the pluff mud from the marshes around Charleston stung in nostrils and permeated clothes and hair.” Anny eventually marries Lewis, and their union is a happy and fulfilling one, but it is being accepted into the “Scrubs,” a group of childhood friends (all of whom became involved in the medical industry in some way hence the name “Scrubs”) and their spouses who share a beach house on idyllic Sullivan’s Island, which gives her a true sense of family. Although each couple has their own additional residence, the beach house is where they all meet as often as they can, and where Anny feels she truly “lives.” Like the unpredictable storms that lash the island, life too unleashes tragedy and devastation on the group, challenging the remark by the group’s most faithful member, Camilla Curry, who vows “the center will hold.” Devoted readers and new fans alike are sure to appreciate these two Southern authors who have once again delivered, with their individually distinct flair and flourish, lush and engrossing tales. Linda Stankard writes from Nanuet, New York.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

James Patterson rides again

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Green

If you’re a James Patterson fan it might help to be a speed reader, since this prolific suspense author turns out books at an incredible pace. Since his career began 30 years ago, Patterson has written more than 30 novels. In the last two years alone, he has published 10 new books, including his current bestseller, Mary, Mary, and his first two books for children, santaKid and Maximum Ride.

His latest is 5th Horseman, a new entry in the Women’s Murder Club series arriving in bookstores just in time for Valentine’s Day.

It’s a doozy, if I do say so myself, Patterson tells readers on his website. Four San Francisco women friends a lawyer, a reporter, a police detective and a medical examiner are on the trail of yet another killer, this time one who’s knocking off patients at the San Francisco Medical Center. The Women’s Murder Club series began with 1st to Die in 2001 and continued with 2nd Chance, 3rd Degreeand 4th of July, all bestsellers.

How does Patterson keep up this frenetic publishing pace? One answer can be found on the cover of 5th Horseman, where New York author Maxine Paetro is credited as Patterson’s co-writer. Paetro’s name first showed up on the cover of 4th of July, and she had been mentioned in the acknowledgments of several previous books. Though it’s a touchy subject, Patterson has been using collaborators for years, including Howard Roughan, Peter de Jonge and Andrew Gross, who was the credited co-writer on the two previous Murder Club books as well as the 2005 beach novel, Lifeguard.

Serving as co-writer for a brand-name author like Patterson can be a smart career move, as Gross discovered late last year when he landed what is believed to be a multimillion dollar deal to write three books for William Morrow. Whether he can achieve the incredible success and longevity of his mentor, only time will tell.

If you're a James Patterson fan it might help to be a speed reader, since this prolific suspense author turns out books at an incredible pace. Since his career began 30 years ago, Patterson has written more than 30 novels. In the last two years…

Arts & Culture, Pop Culture

Pop Culture Arts & Culture

Examining the roots of love

Review by bookpagedev

by Sandy MacDonald

Psychologist Carol Gilligan is best known for elucidating the ways in which preadolescent girls, acceding to societal expectations, learn to stifle their innate wisdom and exuberance. In her latest work, loosely encapsulating two decades of variegated studies, she broadens her area of inquiry to extend to both sexes (young boys entering grade school, she has observed, begin to curtail their expressiveness in much the same way) and, by extrapolation, to question the diminution of joy that typically accompanies growing up. Ultimately, her aim is to examine, and possibly uproot, Western civilization’s deeply ingrained adherence to a tragic story . . . where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and Gilligan covers a lot of ground cited sources range from W.E.

B. Du Bois to the Indigo Girls to prove an elusive point. Central to her thesis is an insistent gloss on the ancient story of Psyche and Cupid, whose dramatic, near-tragic courtship ultimately gave birth to a child named Pleasure. Beautiful Psyche, Gilligan holds, was something of a proto-feminist, refusing to accept the image imposed on her by a patriarchal society and deciding instead to seek love on her own terms. This reductionist approach often rankles: after all, the beauty of myths, their enduring value, lies in the fact that their meanings can’t be so neatly confined.

Yet if one is willing to go along with this premise and attendant pronouncements, the journey yields all sorts of eye-opening moments, the most vivid of which involve Gilligan’s recollections of her own mother, whose social and private selves seemed scarcely the same person. Still, memories of pleasure resurface, as well as her encouragement of my pleasure. Love does invariably entail loss, in that those we love die; it’s the human condition. Gilligan is to be commended, though, for advocating in this brave, if sometimes frustrating book that we question our predilection for living on the far side of loss, east of Eden, as a way of protecting ourselves. Men and women alike, she contends, need to summon more courage if we are to transcend an age-old script. After all, as she notes: The birth of pleasure in itself is simple, but staying with pleasure means staying open. Sandy MacDonald is a writer based in Cambridge and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Female bonding

Review by bookpagedev

by Linda Stankard

Kaye Gibbons, whose debut, Ellen Foster, was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, Divining Women is her first novel since 1999. Darker than Gibbons’ previous novels, Divining Women evolves into an almost gothic tale as the somewhat na•ve and unsuspecting young Mary Oliver heads south from Washington, D.C., to Elm City, North Carolina, in the autumn of 1918 to be a companion for her pregnant aunt, Maureen. Because the war has interrupted Mary’s plans to study abroad, her mother thinks this experience will enrich her. “These next months of your life will always be a blessing,” she says, unaware that her brother, Troop, is a pretentious, cruel man who has not only abused his wife emotionally, but subjected her to excruciating “cures” for her “melancholy.” As a bond of trust develops between niece and aunt, Maureen begins to awaken from her self-protective stupor and realize the full extent of Troop’s crimes against her. The tension mounts as Maureen’s confidence builds, Mary becomes more outspoken, and Troop, in reaction to the threat to his power, attempts to tighten his stranglehold over the women even further. In spite of being isolated, Mary and Maureen become connected to other female family members and friends through letters, and that connection, that safety net, that encouragement to grab onto life, so skillfully handled in Gibbons’ lyrical style, renders the tortuous experience a blessing after all. “This house is full of women,” Maureen says cryptically. “They come and go like nothing you have ever seen.” Linda Stankard writes from Nanuet, New York.

Kaye Gibbons, whose debut, Ellen Foster, was chosen for Oprah's Book Club, Divining Women is her first novel since 1999. Darker than Gibbons' previous novels, Divining Women evolves into an almost gothic tale as the somewhat na•ve and unsuspecting young Mary Oliver heads south from…

Fiction

Fiction

The people in the neighborhood

Review by bookpagedev

by Arlene McKanic

Few writers today write with the empathy Diane McKinney-Whetstone shows to her characters. Granted, most of her characters tend to be ordinary working stiffs who, though flawed, are fairly easy to love. But her latest novel, Leaving Cecil Street, is a masterpiece of compassion. It portrays, among others, Joe, a former jazzman who has settled down into a pretty good marriage with Louise; their teenage daughter Shay; Alberta, a wounded religious fanatic and her naive daughter Neet; and Deucie, a madwoman in search of the daughter she had to give up as an infant.

It’s 1969, and Philadelphia’s Cecil Street is almost paradise. Professionals live in neat row houses, and happy children play in the street. Though folks might wear Afros and daishikis, the disturbances of hippies, the black power movement and women’s lib are kept on the periphery of this oasis. But Cecil Street isn’t as perfect as it appears. There’s also the little room above the barbershop set aside for the assignations of married men, and the house of the woman who performs abortions, which are still illegal. It is a near-fatal abortion performed in this house that unsettles the foundation of the community.

McKinney-Whetstone understands men in a way that’s rare for women writers: Joe and his male friends are as brilliantly drawn as her women are. Her themes include parental love, friendship, the rites and responsibilities of tribal life for the denizens of Cecil Street are a tribe and how people cope with devastating pain. The author also creates webs of interconnections that even her characters aren’t quite aware of. In the hands of a less skillful writer, these secret ties would seem preposterous; rendered by McKinney-Whetstone they feel inevitable, like karma.

As in her other novels, McKinney-Whetstone’s characters get tossed up in the air, but come back down whole, maybe not in the same places as before, maybe not without dings and chips, but whole. Arlene McKanic is a writer in Jamaica, New York.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

A young widow’s triumphant journey through grief

Review by bookpagedev

by Amy Scribner

A young widow’s triumphant journey through grief During the first few months of Sophie Stanton’s life as a widow, she goes to work dressed in her bathrobe, finds herself sobbing in the produce section of her local grocery store and is crippled with fear by the pattern on her shower curtain. It is safe to say she is deep in mourning over her husband, Ethan, who died of cancer, leaving behind a 30-something wife with no idea how to move past such a loss and the deep loneliness it has left in its wake. "Now I understand why rock stars wreck hotel rooms," thinks Sophie as she stands alone in her kitchen, contemplating smashing every dish she owns. "To shatter the relentless stillness of a room." Good Grief, the truly extraordinary debut novel by journalist Lolly Winston, trails Sophie through the first year of her widowhood. But this novel is anything but textbook Grief Recovery 101. It’s different, because Winston has the nerve to admit that recovering from the death of a loved one is a ridiculous thing to have to do, and that it often has moments of humor mixed in with all the bad stuff. In Good Grief, we see Sophie through every messy stage, from denial to anger.

At first, she functions at the most primary level, sleeping for days and stuffing herself with Oreos until her mouth hurts. From there, Sophie moves on to bargaining with God. Maybe there was a clerical error, she thinks. Maybe the angel of death grabbed the wrong guy, and Ethan will be returned as soon as they straighten things out Upstairs. Finally realizing this isn’t going to happen, and determined to make a fresh start away from the ghosts of the home she shared with Ethan, Sophie trades her soulless cubicle job in Silicon Valley for a fresh start in Ashland, Oregon, home of Shakespearean festivals and hippies of all ages.

Once there, she rents an overpriced but charming house and sets about her new life, which at first consists mainly of occasional panic attacks and a job prepping vegetables at a tony local restaurant. She spends her days at work and her nights cuddling with Ethan’s old clothes.

But slowly, she settles into her new life. She takes on a teenage girl in desperate need of guidance and works her way up the chain of command at the restaurant. Then she meets a possibly too-good-to-be-true actor who just has to go ahead and complicate her purposefully simple existence.

Good Grief is strikingly original and stunningly brave in its honest portrayal of moving on, warts and all. Winston acknowledges that the real mourning process is not a Jackie Kennedy photo: a perfect, brave widow wearing a wrinkle-free outfit as she says a final farewell to her husband. The details may vary, but in real life, mourning is sloppy and filled with setbacks and anger, too many calories and too little sleep. And, yes, full of humor. Winston gives us such a lively gift of a character in Sophie, who, after her grief-stricken stupor starts to dissipate, turns out to be a touchingly normal person, alternately neurotic and strong. She worries that she’ll betray her dead husband if she sleeps with another man. She finds the nerve to open her own bakery without ever having run a business in her life. In short, she gathers her life back together in a way that is both triumphant and unforgettable.

Good Grief marks the arrival of an exciting and ambitious new voice. Winston’s story sparkles with wit and sympathy, but her musings on what it means to really live even in the shadow of death are the true reward here.

Amy Scribner writes from Washington state.

A young widow's triumphant journey through grief During the first few months of Sophie Stanton's life as a widow, she goes to work dressed in her bathrobe, finds herself sobbing in the produce section of her local grocery store and is crippled with fear by…

Sports

Sports

Dark horse makes a run for the roses

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Hamilton

Is there anything more American than horse racing? Anything as classy and earthy? Down on Jim Squires’ Kentucky horse farm, blue-jean clad millionaires mix with rough-talking horse handlers, all of them victims of Derby Fever, a personality disorder that overtakes people who spend too much time around thoroughbreds.

Squires, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune, brings all the black arts of journalism he learned at the big city paper to Horse of a Different Color, a tale that unfolds his passion for both horses and women. Squires is shifty in the way he spins his story, burying his own identity the way a skilled journalist sometimes buries the lead. He refers to himself in the third person, as though he were a skeptical reporter rather than a passionate participant. He never uses his given name, but instead riddles the reader with a string of nicknames like breeding genius, underbidder and Two Bucks guy. Horse of a Different Color revolves around the breeding, selling and training of Monarchos, a colt whose athletic prowess the author predicted when he was born. Monarchos’ career is far from guaranteed, however. Underpedigreed, he fails at auction when an x-ray turns up a bone lesion on his hip. His lineage is snubbed at the Saratoga Springs Derby, and he’s ranked as an outside chance at the big event the Kentucky Derby. With one eye on Monarchos, Squires leads his readers through the labyrinth of the thoroughbred horse industry. It’s a high-stakes world with huge gambles, crushing losses and unexpected windfalls that literally save the farm a complex, often contradictory world where traders deliberately overpay for a horse to stir up interest in its prospects, where an owner may buy her own horse at auction just to protect its reputation, where Japanese tycoons and Middle Eastern sheiks vie with Kentucky breeders to produce a champion. It’s an industry in which the proverbial dark horse the one nobody’s seriously betting on may steal the trophy. Like so many of the blueblooded beasts he writes about, Squires’ new book is a winner. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

Is there anything more American than horse racing? Anything as classy and earthy? Down on Jim Squires' Kentucky horse farm, blue-jean clad millionaires mix with rough-talking horse handlers, all of them victims of Derby Fever, a personality disorder that overtakes people who spend too much…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Follow the money

Review by bookpagedev

The ninth novel in Ridley Pearson’s series featuring Seattle police detective Lou Boldt cleverly combines a high-tech crime with one of the oldest plot twists in the mystery genre: the stolen object hidden in plain sight device first used in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” In fact, the title of the novel, The Body of David Hayes, is itself something of an exercise in misdirection.

David Hayes once worked as a computer specialist at the bank where Lou Boldt’s wife, Liz, now directs technical operations. A digital whiz kid, Hayes managed to embezzle $17 million that no one could trace, though investigators suspected it had been stashed in an offshore account. Convicted of wire fraud and sent to prison for four years, Hayes is paroled just as the bank is about to conclude a profitable merger. When the two institutions’ records are merged, the $17 million transaction that he has apparently hidden somewhere in the bank’s computers will disappear.

Liz Boldt is not only one of the few people with access to the bank’s highest-security computers, she was also having an extramarital affair with Hayes at the time of the embezzlement. Oh, and a videotape of her having sex with Hayes has surfaced and is quickly circulating. The Boldts’ marriage is threatened by her affair, and both of the Boldts are in danger of, at best, losing their jobs and, at worst, being implicated in an ever-lengthening list of criminal offenses. Ultimately, Liz must make an anguished choice between what is best for her family and what is best for the bank.

Pearson shows his usual mastery of the intricacies of structure and the subtleties of suspenseful pacing. He is clearly fascinated by the kinds of ironies that keep character and situation connected even as events accelerate and the characters’ understanding of those events seems always a day late and a dollar short. The situation he presents is pretty close to absolute misery for the Boldts, but this gripping thriller is a terrific diversion for Pearson’s readers. Martin Kich is a professor of English at Wright State University.

The ninth novel in Ridley Pearson's series featuring Seattle police detective Lou Boldt cleverly combines a high-tech crime with one of the oldest plot twists in the mystery genre: the stolen object hidden in plain sight device first used in Poe's "The Purloined Letter." In…

Nonfiction, Politics

Nonfiction Politics

LBJ: King of the Hill

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Bishop

In Master of the Senate, the third volume of his magisterial study of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro continues to probe the personal and political sides of a complex man who, during the 1950s, put on a show so riveting that Capitol Hill had never seen anything like it during the previous century and a half of the Republic’s existence. Detailing his subject’s fierce ambition to be somebody in particular the president of the United States Caro offers a fascinating look at this respected and feared leader.

As Senate majority leader, Johnson skillfully maneuvered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to enactment, the first civil rights legislation Congress had passed in 82 years. Johnson, who throughout his career had always opposed civil rights bills, seemed an unlikely politician to accomplish what many principled reformers had tried and failed to do for decades. But Caro demonstrates that he was the only person who could have achieved this legislative goal. Under Johnson’s leadership, key decisions were made in negotiations away from the Senate floor. A principle that determined whether legislation would be passed or defeated during this period was whether or not it would further Johnson’s personal career. Compassion was sometimes on a parallel track with ambition, but if there was a conflict, ambition won.

A man who abhorred debate and dissent, Johnson drove himself, his wife and his staff relentlessly. He demanded absolute loyalty from those he worked closely with, particularly other senators. But there was another side to Johnson, a leader who, according to Caro, was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in the halls of government during the 20th century. Along with Johnson’s personal story, Caro gives us a mini-history of the Senate that helps to put LBJ’s remarkable career in context. Caro, who spends years researching and writing his books, has added another authoritative, insightful narrative to his admirable series. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Fiction

Fiction

Love is the best medicine

Review by bookpagedev

by Becky Ohlsen

What do you get when you cross a junkie with a lunatic? No, that’s not the lead-in to a bad joke; in fact, it’s the premise of a really good novel. The junkie is Oscar. The self-styled “lunatic” is Alba. They’re both patients at Abenaki, an upscale mental institution in Maine. What happens when they meet is the basis of Lisa Carey’s touching, multilayered third novel, Love in the Asylum. Alba is young, beautiful, bipolar and then some. She’s been in and out of Abenaki more than a dozen times in her 25 years; the first was when she’d gone three weeks without sleeping and then set her house on fire. She’s a successful author of children’s books, but her mental illness forces her to be on medication most of the time, and it’s hard to write through a lithium fog. When Alba first meets Oscar, he’s being dragged into the clinic by his brother as a last-ditch effort to get him cleaned up. Oscar is mostly addicted to heroin, but he’ll pretty much take anything that helps to keep him insulated from the harshness of reality. Scraggly, skinny, unwashed and unhappy, he is, in other words, a wreck.

Oscar and Alba’s mutual attraction is strong and instantaneous, though clearly saddled with all kinds of potential problems. They’re not so much lost souls as broken ones, half hoping to find in each other some way to piece themselves back together. Meanwhile, Alba finds a series of hidden letters from a former inmate of the asylum committed against her will to the son she’d been taken away from. The letters are written by Mary, a woman of the Abenaki Indian tribe, who had the power to heal the spirits of others by searching out the missing parts of their souls. Alba is clearly intrigued. Seeing one last chance for healing her own soul, she sets out, with Oscar’s help, to find the piece of herself that’s been missing. As in any such quest, what she finds might not be what she thought she was looking for. But the journey, much like this novel, is good medicine.

What do you get when you cross a junkie with a lunatic? No, that's not the lead-in to a bad joke; in fact, it's the premise of a really good novel. The junkie is Oscar. The self-styled "lunatic" is Alba. They're both patients at…

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

Inside the city of death

Review by bookpagedev

by Kenneth Champeon

One of the better known "failed states" is Somalia, which has been at war with itself since the collapse of its ruinous military regime in 1991. The country gained notoriety during the disastrous attempt by the United States to intervene in the conflict, which was portrayed in the book Black Hawk Down, later adapted into an acclaimed film.

Failed or no, Somalia has produced Nuruddin Farah, whom many regard as the best African novelist writing today, an heir to Chinua Achebe and even V.S. Naipaul. Farah’s new novel Links provides an extraordinary glimpse into life in Somalia’s capital Mogadiscio, "the city of death."

Links describes the homecoming of the Somali-American Jeebleh, a former political prisoner seeking to settle scores with his jailer, the sadistic half brother of Jeebleh’s old friend, Bile. But Jeebleh is distracted by the recent kidnapping of two girls under Bile’s care. Despite himself, Jeebleh becomes mired in Mogadiscio’s culture of guns and mistrust.

Farah references Dante’s Inferno at several points, and the comparisons are apt. In Mogadiscio, AK-47s can be had for six dollars, armed youths shoot children for sport and much of the populace is maimed. Starving cows nibble on shoes, plastic bags, live grenades. Rumor has it that a funeral director is selling the corpses’ organs abroad. Yet somehow Jeebleh suspects that for Somalia the worst may be over.

Farah is an unflinching writer of admirable skill—erudite, analytical, with a talent for arresting analogies ("as happy as a yuppie throwing his first housewarming party"). The novel’s title refers in part to the country’s divisive clan loyalties. But with no functioning banks, no universities and unreliable utilities, it’s hard to fault the Somalis for trying to preserve the connections they can.

In any case, anyone wishing to understand this struggle between failed states and those rather more successful would do well to read, and heed, this timely and gripping book.

Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

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bookpagedev

How the West was

Learning to live with grief and loss

Creating a family

James Patterson rides again

Examining the roots of love

Female bonding

The people in the neighborhood

A young widow’s triumphant journey through grief

Dark horse makes a run for the roses

Follow the money

LBJ: King of the Hill

Love is the best medicine

Inside the city of death

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