reviews

La Tour Eiffel: a novel of lust and engineering Author: Beatrice Colin Beatrice Colin’s To Capture What We Cannot Keep seemed a sure thing: it’s been receiving good press here in the United States, and I embrace any book that puts me squarely in Paris in the 1880s. Perhaps I came to the novel with unrealistic expectations, but it wasn’t quite the seamless read I was anticipating. If anything, it’s a book of odd contrasts: half is four-star material, the other half is two. To Capture What We Cannot Keep is the story of widowed 30-year-old Caitriona Wallace, who gets [...]

Tedious Torpidity with a Hint of the Sublime Author: Herman Melville My self-induced classics kick, also known as all the books that I somehow missed reading during school, threw me a curveball when the dreaded Moby Dick surfaced as the next random assignment. Lauded for both its complexity and literary references, few think that Melville’s posthumous masterpiece (at the time of his death it was out of print and grossly unpopular) is an easy read. Having encountered and loved harder authors, such as Dickens, Shakespeare, and Honoré de Balzac, I felt up to the challenge. The Masters in Writing helped. What I [...]

Marriage and war... Author:  Elaine Showalter She’s famous for one thing.  But while her singular contribution to the Union cause – The Battle Hymn of the Republic, published in 1862 – served to preserve her status with American history trivia buffs, Julia Ward Howe was much more than just an accomplished poetess.  She was one of the earliest American women to espouse a feminist point of view, at a time when the idea was considered disruptive and impolite.  Much of her drive for equality was limited by the willful interference of her husband, the acclaimed philanthropist Samuel Gridley Howe.  Previous [...]