Monthly Archives: February 2016

“If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger,” Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems.  With Felicity … Continue reading →

The Swans of Fifth Avenue [print and cd] by Melanie Benjamin (The Aviator’s Wife)takes inside Truman Capote’s NY Circle. In Missing Pieces by Heather Gudenkauf, a couple is forced to confront a past that they have long avoided. In Where My Heart used to … Continue reading →

Going Clear is an insiders look at the Church of Scientology. The documentary was created by former members. It presents a capsule history of Scientology and highlights the difficulties faced by members in separating  from the movement. For more on this … Continue reading →

…. Alan Rickman, giant of acting, who stopped performing in this world in January.  Rickamn was a talented  Shakespearean who had no qualms about taking roles in popular films, from the terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard to  Severus Snape in the … Continue reading →

Just in: 3 new espionage thrillers. Spectre finds James Bond (Daniel Craig) Bond pitted a against the global criminal enterprise which is seeking to compromise the surveillance capability of British intelligence.  Bridge of Spies is a true story about a tense cold war negotiation over … Continue reading →

The final season of Downton Abbey is now out on DVD. All the important questions on this, the final season, will be answered:  will Mary marry?  Will Edith find happiness? Will marriage mellow Carson?  Has granny met her match?  Last Tango in Halifax 2 … Continue reading →

Three books by Alan Taylor reveal the growing pains of our early republic.  In William Coopers Town, Taylor describes the rise and fall of one William Cooper, a  self-made gentleman by way of a dodgy land deal, who rose to power, … Continue reading →

There was a time when books were considered art objects.  Here is one such from our collection:  The Romance of King Arthur and his Knights (1917).  The Romance was abridged for younger readers from Malory’s Morte D ’Arthur by Alfred Pollard, … Continue reading →

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante is the concluding chapter of Ellena Ferrante’s series about two young women making their way in Naples rough slums.  The girls, perceptive and intelligent,   try to create lives for themselves within a violent … Continue reading →

Iowa-born Bill Bryson is noted for his humorous books on travel.   His latest is The Road to Little Dribbling, an account of his travels in Britain.  ‘From Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the north, by way … Continue reading →