Richard Peck
young adult novel; Newbery Medal Winner - 130 pages
paperback
The year is 1937, and the Great Depression has hit the Dowdel family hard. Fifteen-year-old Mary Alice is sent downstate to live with her unpredictable Grandma Dowdel while her Ma and Pa eke out a meager living in Chicago. Mary Alice is less than thrilled with the arrangement. Grandma's farming community couldn't be more different from Chicago if it tried. Soon, however, she becomes Grandma's partner in crime, helping to carry out madcap schemes to benefit friends and avenge enemies. (Rosalie's comment: it was a fun read with some laugh-out-loud moments.)
Dorothy Wickenden
non-fiction - 226 pages
In 1916 Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, shocked their families and friends in Auburn New York by taking teaching jobs in a remote school in northwestern Colorado. Based on their letters and interviews, Woodruff's granddaughter tells of the events leading up to their decision and their year in Colorado. These rich and well-educated young society women, tired of social conventions, came face to face with another America in the years before World War I–one that was poor, diverse, remote, lacking in modern conveniences, occasionally violent, and yet spectacularly beautiful and "new." The book offers a wide cross-section of life in the American West, but the core of the story is the girls' slow adaptation to a society very different from the one in which they were raised, and their evolution from naive but idealistic and open-minded society girls to strong-willed and pragmatic women who later married and raised families in the midst of the Great Depression. (Rosalie's comment: I skimmed the first hundred pages about their lives in Auburn, but really liked it when they started teaching.)
Erik Larson
non-fiction (history/biography) - 448 pages
paperback
This book covers the experiences of U.S. ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd and his family during his first year as US ambassador in Berlin in 1933-1934. Dodd had been teaching history at the University of Chicago when he was summoned by FDR to the German ambassadorship–a job several others had turned down. Larson, using lots of archival as well as secondary-source research and Dodd's diary, chillingly portrays the terror and oppression that slowly settled over Germany in 1933. Dodd quickly realized the Nazis' evil intentions but his warnings to his superiors in the State Department were ignored. His daughter Martha, in her mid-20s and an indiscriminate flirt, was initially smitten by the courteous SS soldiers surrounding her family, but over time she, too, became disenchanted with the brutality of the regime. Larson also traces the Dodds' lives after their time in Germany. (Rosalie's comment: I liked the historical parts, but skipped Martha's affairs.)
No comments:
Post a Comment