Non-fiction

  • Dec 11th: The Suffragents by Brooke Kroeger

    “The story of how and why a group of prominent and influential men in New York City and beyond came together to help women gain the right to vote. The Suffragents is the untold story of how some of New York’s most powerful men formed the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which grew between 1909…

    Read more →

  • Day 9: The Witches by Stacy Schiff

    “The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not…

    Read more →

  • Dec 8th: The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein

    “The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for words, confronting an uncertain creative future…

    Read more →

  • December 7th: Silk and the Sword: the women of the Norman Conquest by Sharon Bennett Connolly

    “The momentous events of 1066, the story of invasion, battle and conquest, are well known. But what of the women? Harold II of England had been with Edith Swanneck for twenty years but in 1066, in order to strengthen his hold on the throne, he married Ealdgyth, sister of two earls. William of Normandy’s Duchess,…

    Read more →

  • Dec 6th: Inseparable: the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American History

    “In this “excellent” portrait of America’s famed nineteenth-century Siamese twins, celebrated biographer Yunte Huang discovers in the conjoined lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874) a trenchant “comment on the times in which we live” (Wall Street Journal). “Uncovering ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called ‘the tyranny…

    Read more →

  • Dec 3rd: Ten restaurants that shaped America by Paul Freedman

    “Combining a historian’s rigor with a foodie ’s palate, Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveals how the history of our restaurants reflects nothing less than the history of America itself. Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco’s fabled The Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma…

    Read more →

  • Dec 2: The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker

    “For 200 years after 1650 the West Indies were the most fought-over colonies in the world, as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar – a commodity so lucrative that it was known as white gold. Young men, beset by death and disease, an ocean away from the moral anchors of…

    Read more →

  • Dec 1: The Sisters, the Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell

    “This is the story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the world wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; beautiful Diana married the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; and Unity, a close friend of…

    Read more →

  • So tomorrow is the 1st of December and Christmas is officially open for business in our house. Child 3 has been trying to change that, embarking on a list for Santa designed on Canva (I kid you not) some weeks ago, but we have held resolute. On the side, however, I have been building up…

    Read more →