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All the Other Mothers Hate Me
Florence Grimes is a mess. Once part of a popular girl rock band, after a brief interlude with the manager who is really in love with another of the women in the group, she’s cast out and left with a baby to raise courtesy of the man who fired her. Sure, he pays for their…
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Letters from the Dead: A Q & A with Isabella Valeri
Mesmerizing, atmospheric, Gothic, and lyrical, Isabella Valeri’s first novel in a trilogy, took me into an opaque and lawless world of ancestral and deadly family dynasties beholden to no nation and no one but themselves. Valeri, who writes and lives under an assumed name and in an undisclosed Alpine location, is described as an avid…
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Sidney Karger: Best Men
The youngest of five children with a father who was jokester and a mother who did impressions, Sidney Karger learned early that being funny garnered attention from his parents. It also instilled in him a sense of comedic timing coupled with an obsession with both “Comedy Central” and “Saturday Night Live” as well as director…
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“Let’s Call Her Barbie” by Renee Rosen
In 1956, there were baby dolls for little girls to play with but the idea of an eleven-and-a-half-inch tall grown women with feet permanently arched to wear high heels was a totally alien concept to the men at Mattel when Ruth Handler presented the idea for Barbie. Because the times were more “Mad Men” than…
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Bearer of Bad News
Lucy Rey is having a very bad week. Besides finding out Julian, her fiancé—the one who convinced her to move to Las Vegas and rent, in her name, an expensive apartment and then decamped to Hollywood in order to find work as an actor—is cheating on her, her hairdressing business is in a slump, and…
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Join me at the Classic Restaurants of Michiana Book Signing Wednesday, June 11th
The members of the Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church Book/Movie Discussion Group have invited me to speak this Wednesday, June 11th at 6:30 p.m. If you have the time and are interested in the history of restaurants in Michiana, please come. The church is lovely, located in a beautiful country setting at 51841 Leach…
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The Story of Perfume: A Lavishly Illustrated Guide
In the beginning, perfume in the form of oils belonged to the divine, and rare scents typically sourced from resins were reserved for dedication to the gods. Used in funeral rituals and in cremation with the burning of resinous woods such as cedar, early references trace the use of scents back at least to the…
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Esquire Magazine’s 2025 Best Books So Far
Esquire Names Best Books of 2025 So Far https://flip.it/rNn_xx
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NPR: 17 new books our critics can’t wait to read this summer
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/21/nx-s1-5356141/best-new-books-summer-reading
Shelf Life
From my shelf to yours
Shelf Life 