If you own white- and black-tie apparel, occupy a home that wouldn’t be cramped with 100 guests, and think relaxed is making wild mushroom risotto cake and poached pears wrapped in pastry for a dinner party, you’ll relate to the elaborate ideas in designer and lifestyle author Carolyne Roehm’s A Passion for Parties. If you’re like rest of us, you’ll still enjoy seeing what a lot of money, time and a staff can accomplish when celebrating holidays and other special occasions. Roehm throws an elegant autumn hunt club barn dance at her place in Connecticut, Christmas in Aspen, an intimate Valentine’s Day dinner in Paris, a children’s Halloween party complete with cobweb mazes and buckets of dry ice, and Fourth of July with fireworks. The parties are illustrated like Vogue fashion spreads, and more ambitious readers can tackle the included recipes to lend their events that classy Roehm touch.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
