Recommended Books

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Buckley Rumford Fireplaces
Books Recommended by Others
7/16/09

Books recommended by Alice
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009
Subject: Re: 15 favorite books
From: Alice Michtom
To: Jim Buckley
I think you would just love Russell Banks' Continental Drift (from my list). And Anne Fadiman's book as well - about what happened when an immigrant Hmong child with status epilepticus encountered the American medical system in California. It's anthropology, reportage, medicine, public health, psychology and many other things rolled into one. And pretty much un-put-downable. Or so I thought.
Re your list: I read The Prof. and the Madman, and liked it. Snow Falling On Cedars, too, though I liked the beginning of the book better than the middle and the end, as I remember (it's been some years now). Team of Rivals I own, though I haven't read it yet, but I'm dying to - when I can get through a 900 page book. I haven't read Berg's Lindbergh book, but I read his quite wonderful bio of the editor Maxwell Perkins (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe)...that was a fascinating book. And the McCulloiugh John Adams is sitting on my shelf, too. I guess great minds think alike.
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 8:36 PM, Jim Buckley wrote:
Alice,
I'm happy to have your list of books especially since I never heard of most of them. I agree this is better than food fights on facebook but I think I don't have time for either. The books I would recommend are on line (not completely up to date) at http://www.rumford.com/store/books.html#good
Jim At 12:24 PM -0400 7/14/09, Alice Michtom wrote:
One of my cousins sent me one of those Facebook list thingies - 15 books that will always stick with you. The idea was to write down the first 15 that come to your mind in 15 minutes. But I'm too old for that - as you will see at the end of this message - and the list that follows is part remembered and part jogged by looking at my bookshelf (thank you, bookshelf - another reason I love you!). If you want to play, send out your list of 15 to me and any others you think would enjoy said endeavor. We all like to have lists of good books to read, right?
Alice
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Embers, Sandor Marai
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
My Son's Story, Nadine Gordimer
The Conduct of Inquiry, Abraham Kaplan
The Sabbath, Abraham Heschel
Continental Drift, Russell Banks
Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Tolstoy, Henri Troyat
A Mathematician's Apology, G.H. Hardy
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
The Drowned and The Saved, Primo Levi
and let us never forget The Elements of Style, Strunk and White. Now this list leaves out two I wrote down in the office and can not now remember!!!!!!!
All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren is one of the two from this morning that I couldn't remember. Does this mean that if you age enough you remember everything?
The second one I forgot was a truly wonderful and fascinating book, Emma's War, by Deborah Scroggins. It uses the romance between an English NGO worker (in Sudan in the late '80s and early '90s) and a rebel leader to talk about the complicated, layered history of the region, NGOs, the UN, and is yet another reminder of why we should mind our own business.

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Books recommended by Connie
The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton - Fiction - 1958 Biographical novel of Elizabeth Winthrop, a courageous woman who defied Puritan conventions and beliefs
My Theodosia by Anya Seton - about Aaron Burr and his daughter and "the duel".

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