Book Reviews

On a recent trip to New York, we had to stop by John Singer Sargent's famous portrait of Virginie Gautreau. Ms. Gautreau was a wealthy young Paris socialite woman originally from New Orleans. The painting of her, titled Madame X, was displayed at the 1884 Paris Salon, an art competition of artists of the day. At the time, the painting was considered scandalous because one strap of her black gown dangled from her shoulder.

If they ever make a movie of my life, I hope Julia Roberts is chosen to play me. Getting Julia Roberts to portray her in a movie is just one of the good things that have happened since Elizabeth Gilbert decided she didn't want to live a boring suburban life and left her husband. Her run of luck started when she wrote a book called Eat, Pray, Love about leaving said husband and traveling around the world in search of inner peace.

Love, loss, heartache, redemption...sex, drugs and rock 'n roll....boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, but wins her back....standard chick lit fare - except that this is Marian Keyes.

A book about conjoined twins born to an Indian Carmelite nun living in Ehtiopia, Cutting for Stone was published to great acclaim in 2009. A starred review from Publishers Weekly, author interviews on all the radio and TV talk shows, and reviews in every magazine and newspaper I picked up told me that this was a book to watch. But: Conjoined twins. Born to a nun. Raised in a hospital in Ethiopia. Stop me when I get to something that makes you want to read this book.

"It's in our nature to seek purpose. But that nature is now being revealed and expressed on a scale that is demographically unprecedented and, until recently, scarcely imaginable. The consequences could rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world."

In Daniel H. Pink's second best seller, DRIVE, the purpose driven life comes front and center.

I picked up this book while browsing the "summer reads" section of a bookstore. I love Jane Austen books, and am always willing to read books based on the same plot of her books, but written in modern times.

I stopped trusting my brain about ten years ago. After a lifetime of confidence in my brain's ability to retrieve dates, poems memorized in high school and names of everyone in my office-and their kids, I was stunned to realize those facts were harder to find. I could almost recall the information only to have it leap just out of reach.

This book starts out dramatically with a plane crash. Phil and Naomi are killed in a crash while sightseeing at the Grand Canyon when half-sisters, Julia and Ruthie are sixteen and thirteen, respectively.

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Ms. Kingsolver chronicles a year in which her family decided to eat locally produced foods, homegrown when possible, with few exceptions. Each family member got to pick one item that is not local to continue to consume.