Tag: august

Rogue Entrepreneur

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Krentzel, Elise. Rogue Entrepreneur: Building a Life the World Didn’t Have a Name For. Kumi Books, 2026.

Rogue Entrepreneur is the second book in a trilogy. Under My Skin: Drama Trauma and Rock and Roll was the first. Confessional: I didn’t read it and I probably won’t read the third. So little time for so many books!

What an adventurous life Elise Krentzel has led! There are so many things to unpack in Krentzel’s memoir Rogue Entrepreneur, I am not sure where to begin. Throughout Rogue Entrepreneur she was portrayed as an odd mix of poet and trouble maker; risk taker and romantic. Imagine being taken to court for not following laundry rules in your apartment building or being swindled out of shares of a company she owned with her first husband! Most of Rogue Entrepreneur takes place in the 1980s and 1990s, a era when women were not respected in the music industry (or any business for that matter). Krentzel upped the ante by not only chasing a career in music, but she chose punk as her genre and decided to make a name for herself in Japan. After Japan she moved onto Queens (New York), Switzerland, Germany, Africa and the Netherlands. With the changing times came changing ventures. Krentzel was able to reinvent herself time and time again. She enjoyed challenges and took crazy risks.
I try not to judge an author by the lines they write, but I couldn’t help thinking Krentzel really wanted to emphasis her callousness when she described carelessly leaving one man for another. She wanted to paint the picture of being a hardcore badass. When she had a child at age forty-four, I somehow knew she would end up a single parent.
Even though Krentzel does not frequently orientate her readers to the changing times in Rogue Entrepreneur, her description of the phonebook hanging from a public payphone chain put the timeline into perspective. So did her ability to smoke in the hospital while recovering from peritonitis.
My favorite portion of the book was the advice she gave at the end. She’s not wrong! The was such a fun book that I now want to be friends with her!
I am sure this will be cleaned up in the final edit, but there is some repetition in one of the footnotes, whole sentences were repeated (“Uelie played piano…”) and key words (like a verb) were missing from sentences. I was confused by one inconsistency: Krentzel met Ueli in the spring when flowers were blooming, but says she watched snow falling while at a party that same day. The Land of Mud was as clear as mud to me.

Book trivia: Rogue Entrepreneur should have been published by August 27, 2026.

Music: Al Jolsen, Robert Plant, Bob Geldof, David Bowie, “1-800-273-8255” by Logic, B52s, Baby Grand, the Band, Barry Manilow, the Beatles, Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Redemption Song,”, Brinkley Schwartz, Bruce Springsteen, Chopin, Earth Wind and Fire’s “That’s the Way of the World,” Eddie and the Hot Rods, Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ “Allison,” Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus, George Sand, Graham Parker and the Rumours’s “Stick to Me,” “Squeezing Out Sparks,” “Don’t Ask Questions,” “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down,” “Thunder and Rain,” and “Discovering Japan,” Grandmaster Caz, Herc, Iggy Pop, Joe Jackson’s “Black and White,” John Lennon, Kiss, Leif Garrett, Lene Lovich, Masayoshi Takanaka’s “Sexy Dance,” Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Champagne and Reffer, and “Honey Bee,” Nick Lowe, Noel Pointer, Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive album, Pink Lady’s “Kiss in the Dark,” the Plastics, Prince, Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Soldier of Love” by Sade, Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks,” Sinead O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2U,” Steve Khan, the Stranglers, Tot’s “Africa,” Talking Heads, Whipper Whip, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Yoko Ono.

Triple Jeopardy

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Stout, Rex. Triple Jeopardy. Viking Press, 1952.

Reason read: I am still working my way through Rex Stout’s entire Nero Wolfe canon.

Home to Roost – Mrs. Benjamin Rackell and her husband come to Nero to find out who killed their nephew. The young man died of cyanide poisoning in the middle of a dinner with five other people. Was it a communist conspiracy? Was he a plant working for the FBI? Stout tries to confuse the matter by introducing a few shady characters. Immediately, readers are supposed to suspect Fifi Goshen. She goads Nero by disturbing his orchids and pouring her cocktail into his beer. Is she trying to cause a commotion to distract everyone from the truth? And speaking of drinks, Archie has moved away from tall glasses of milk and now prefers cool coke and limes.

Cop-Killer – Two Illegal aliens working in a barbershop come to Nero Wolfe for amnesty. They are wanted for murder but cannot claim their innocence because they are too afraid of being deported back to Russia. The cop investigating the murder visited the barbershop to hunt down a lead on a hit-and-run that happened the day before. Carl and Tina Vardas fled thinking their illegal status had been discovered. Their flight makes them look guilty, but as Archie surmises, “to qualify as a hit-and-run driver you must meet certain specifications, and one of them is knowing how to dive a car” (Triple Jeopardy p 94). Dear Archie, I would beg to differ. I would argue that you are more likely to hit someone while driving a car if you have no idea what you are doing. It is during this case that Nero Wolfe leaves his brownstone to get a haircut. Shocking!

Squirt and the Monkey – Harry Koven, a comic book writer, accuses someone on his staff of stealing his gun. To reveal the culprit, Koven enlists the help of Archie. Instead of learning the identity of the thief, Archie is framed for murder, thanks to a rare tropical monkey named Rookaloo. As an aside, this case introduced me to the Sullivan Act of 1911.

True to form, Archie is always flirting with the ladies. I still think it is cute the way Wolfe cares for Goodwin’s appetite.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe: Too Good To Miss” (p 226).

From Sea to Shining Sea

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Thom, James Alexander. From Sea to Shining Sea. Ballantine Books, 1984.

Reason read: August is Friendship month and there is no doubt Lewis and Clark were friends. However, From Sea to Shining Sea is less about the relationship between the two adventurers and more about the entire Clark family.

What a violent time the late 1700s were for fledging America. Battling Native Americans and British soldiers simultaneously. It is as if James Alexander Thom lived in these brutal times in a previous life. His attention to every detail is astonishing. From chamber pots to fashion, mannerisms and foodstuff, real and imagined characters; it is all picture perfect. Each character is fully realized to the point you feel as if you are living beside them at every moment. Was is another character drawn in excellence. It becomes clear that was is not noble; it is not glorious or heroic. War is the explosion of blood and the shattering of bone.
From Sea To Shining Sea tells the story of the tight-knit Clark family from birth to death. Each member of the family receives ample page space to create biographies for all.
Confessional: it took so long to get to the “Lewis and Clark” part of the story that I started to get impatient. William Clark does not meet Meriwether Lewis until page 573. The expedition does not start until another thirty or so pages. On page 616 Discovery finally departs from Camp Wood.

Personal connection: Thom mentions Captain John Smith in the early pages of From Sea to Shining Sea. Captain John Smith is credited with being the first white man to settle on my island. Of course, there were people already there, but the history books ignore that elephant-in-the-room detail.

Author fact: James Alexander Thom was a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, a freelance writer, and a professor.

Book trivia: From Sea to Shining Sea is over 900 pages long. I had to take this behemoth to work to read on my lunch break as well as before breakfast and at night. Phew!

Music: “Betsy Kiss My Lips,” “A Patriot Song,” “Barbara Allen,” “Hang on Till Morning,” “The Hog’s Heart,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Johnny Has Gone for A-Soldier,” “Katy Cruel,” “The Lawyer Outwitted,” “The Quaker’s Wooing,” “The Spoiling o’ Katy Morah,” “Yankee Doodle,”

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Lewis and Clark: Adventurers Extraordinaire” (p 136).

Among the White Moon Faces

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Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Among the White Moon Faces: an Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. The Feminist Press, 1996.

Reason read: Merdeka Day is in August. In 1957 the Federation of Malaya received its independence and became a sovereign state. Read in honor of that event.

Lim begins her memoir with the introspective commentary on her sense of self – the name with which she most identifies, but ends the introduction by saying she found her identity wrapped up in the women who shaped her entire life. She did not have an easy childhood. She lacked women role models to teach her how to be feminine. Her first time wearing a bra reminded me of my own foray into adult garments.
Confessional: I had a hard time reading Among the White Moon Faces. Lim had a tug of war with chronology; going back and forth in time. One minute Lim is making excuses for the Hokkien language, the next she is describing Ah Chan, their servant. Next, Lim has memories of her mother’s appearance but moves quickly to stories of her grandfather or the Tan Family. All along she interrupts herself to ask questions we as readers cannot answer.
Despite the leapfrogging of the timeline, I appreciated Lim’s honesty. Growing up, she was no angel. She admitted to changing grades on a report card and lying about where she was on Friday nights. As the story progressed I lost track of Lim’s age when her father and a nurse scrubbed her body clean. No one had ever taught her her to clean…anything.
Throughout Among the White Moon Faces Lim struggles with abandonment. Her mother left the family early on. Father would bring his dates home and ignore his children. Interspersed in this honest narrative Lim makes commentaries on British colonialism and American waste. She steps away from her memories to voice her opinions about corrupt cultures.
By the end of Among the White Moon Faces I admired Lim for her determination to make something of herself in a very competitive academic society.

Line I liked a lot, “Nurturing is a human act that overleaps categories, but is not free of history” (p 67), and “There were more ways to be a poet than sit still beneath his judgment” (p 144).

Author fact: Geok-Lin also wrote Joss and Gold which I am scheduled to read at some point.

Book trivia: there is a small collection of black and white photographs in Among the White Moon Faces. There are mostly of Shirley as a child.

Music, “A Summer Place,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, “Sixteen Candles,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” “Jolly Miller,” “O Susanna,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” “On Top of Old Smoky,” Beatles, “Oh Rosemarie, I Love You So, I’m Always Dreaming of You,” “Mockingbird’s Song,” Everly Brothers, Ali Akbar Khan, Hawaiian Wedding Song, Pat Boone’s “April Love,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonne Doon,” “The Minstrel Boy,” and Bill Haley and His Comets.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply, “Malaysia” (p 40).

Age of Napoleon

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Horne, Alistair. Age of Napoleon. Modern Library, 2004.

Reason read: Napoleon was born on August 15th. Read in his honor.

After already covering Napoleon’s military career in Master of Europe and How Far From Austerlitz, Alistair Horne felt he could concentrate on writing a book about Napoleon’s contributions to French society above and beyond his military career (although that is not left out of the story). Architecture (the construction of the Quai d’Orsay and rescuing Paris’s Sorbonne University), society (encouraging freedom of religion by restoring the relationship with the Vatican and restoring the sanctity of marriage after the Revolution), art, and even the renumbering of streets. Napoleon liked the finer things in life, but could turn on a dime and have little tolerance for those individuals making his beautiful things come to life. Even his wife Josephine was fired from the job of being his wife because she couldn’t produce an heir fast enough.
Horne simultaneously looks future forward as well as historically back to tell Napoleon’s story. He reminds his audience more than once that Napoleon was “no Hitler” and he makes multiple comparisons to World War II. Yet, for all of Napoleon’s military shortcomings, Horne is quick to point out, his legacy was that he was instrumental in creating important and lasting social equalities.

As an aside, I couldn’t help buy think of Dermot Kennedy’s line, “his eyes lit up with all the power” when reading Age of Napoleon. Napoleon was touted as being a hands-on leader. These days, I think his subjects would call him a micromanager or deranged. Just the fact he would ban plays if he didn’t care for them shows his ego.

Author fact: Is it any wonder that Alistair Horne is a British historian? Of course he is.

Book trivia: Age of Napoleon is a quick read, less that 200 pages.

Music: Beethoven’s Fidelo, Te Deum, Chopin, Edith Pilaf, and Le Triomphe de Tra Jan opera.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “The Complex Napoleon” (p 53).

Lightning Song

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Nordan, Lewis. Lightning Song. Algonquin Books, 1997.

Reason read: Nordan’s birth month is in August.

The crackling electricity of doing something sneaky can be thrilling to a boy coming of age. Lightning Song begins with twelve year old Leroy Dearman, lost in complete innocence while furtively studying naked woman in the pages of a glossy Playboy magazine. Nordan must have tapped into his own boyhood innocence, because he describes Leroy’s naive thoughts perfectly as he stares at the smiling women.
Leroy is a sheltered boy, growing up on an llama farm in rural Mississippi with his parents and two younger sisters. He confronts adult things: naked women, his mother’s coy and giddy behavior around his uncle, and the creepy death of his grandfather in the attic. Lightning Song only becomes more bizarre as you read on: to name a few: the New Couple’s oddity, Leroy’s mother’s obsession with a kidnapped prime minister, Leroy’s sister and her ferocious courage (confessional: my favorite act of bravery was when she was not afraid to take her father’s withered hand).
The lightning is another character in Lightning Song. It creates tension and an air of danger. It is witness to illicit behaviors and illuminates dark secrets.

Favorite line, “He longed to be his father’s son” (p 122).

Author fact: as there is a whole chapter for Lewis Nordan in Book Lust, I am reading a few. Eight to be exact. I have finished three so far.

Book trivia: this could have been a movie.

Music: Elvis Presley, “Dixie,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and “Are You From Dixie?”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter “Lewis Nordan: Too Good To Miss” (p 172).

Shattered Silk

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Michaels, Barbara. Shattered Silk. Atheneum, 1986.

Reason read: Michaels passed away in the month of August. Read in her memory.

Shattered Silk begins with such a benign plot I questioned the seriousness of including it in a More Book Lust chapter called “Girl Guides, Or It’s a Dark and Stormy Night…” (p 99). Karen Nevitt, soon to be divorced, has sought refuge at her aunt and uncle’s home in Georgetown, Washington D.C. under the auspicious of housesitting and dog watching. This is a return to her college roots, complete with old frienemies and an old boyfriend with whom a relationship ended badly. What originated as an escape from a bad marriage turns into a business venture when a family friend urges Karen to start a vintage clothing shop. That’s when the trouble starts. Karen experiences harassing behavior from an unknown person, but no one knows why. The sad thing is, I honestly did not really care to know the reason. Karen’s personality was such that I did not root for her either way. She wasn’t a likeable or believable character. She was just meh. All of the characters were just blah. I didn’t believe them. Why would a cop buy a house for a woman’s business before even asking her?
I will say this about reading Shattered Silk: I know more about taking care of various fabrics than I ever cared to. Even though Michaels introduces Karen as not knowing much about fine fabrics, Karen brings herself up to an expert in record time. Readers will learn about designers, textiles, and even receive fashion tips.

I am always curious about the relationships people have with one another. Exactly who is Karen to Jill and vice versa. What Michaels writes, “They parted with mutually insincere expressions of affection” (p 24), I had to wonder.

Personal connection: When Michaels was describing Karen’s relationship with her mother she could have been describing mine. A mother who asks what you did wrong when you share that a serious relationship is coming to an end. Failure is on you o matter what happened.

Author fact: Peter Mertz’s photograph of Barbara Michaels has her looking like a character straight out of a Victorian romance; big hat, fuzzy cat and all.

Book trivia: this could have been a movie.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter with the long title, “Girl Guides, Or It’s a Dark and Stormy Night, Good Thing You Have a Flashlight” (p 99). As an aside, Shattered Silk is the first book I am reading for this chapter. Believe it or not, after ten years of this Challenge there are still some chapters I haven’t touched.

In My Father’s Footsteps

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Matthews, Sebastian. In My Father’s Footsteps. W.W. Norton & Company, 2004

Reason read: Matthews was born in August. Read in his honor.

How do you pay homage to a person who repeatedly broke your heart and let you down as a child; a good guy with harmful tendencies in adulthood? Sebastian Matthews, by turns loved and looked to respect his father. From an early age, father and son had a complicated relationship. When William Matthews died of a heart attack at just 55 it was a shock, but no one was surprised. A womanizer, a drinker, and a smoker (and maybe a midnight toker), Matthews senior was a force to be reckoned with. In My Father’s Footsteps is aptly named for Sebastian followed closely behind his father: a lifelong jazz enthusiast, becoming a writer, and poet unable to commit to any relationship for more than a few dates. Deeply buried resentments over the divorce of his parents; standing in the shadow of his father’s brilliance as a poet and professor; trying to understand the complexity of his inheritance, Matthews carefully picks his way through the emotions to share a loving, yet brutally honest tribute to his father.

Confessional: there was a part of Matthews’s story when he was watching father and son bricklayers build a wall. It reminded me of an earlier story I read about a son following in his father’s footsteps as a bricklayer until he found science.

Author fact: I want to believe Sebastian has found happiness in marriage and fatherhood. As of the publication of In My Father’s Footsteps he still lived in Asheville.

Book trivia: both of Matthews’s parents were poets. At times Matthews would put poetry from each parent side by side.

As an aside, when the police were at Matthews’s father’s apartment they went from room to room turning on lights. Why don’t do they do that in the movies?

Personal connection: Dying alone requires the procurement of a court order before gaining permanent access to the deceased residence. If you die in public, even if it is of natural causes, your body is considered a crime scene and cannot be moved until fully investigated.

Setlist: James Taylor, Cowboy Junkies. Indigo Girls, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira album, Tommy Flanagan, Booker Erwin, John Handy, Carnell Jones, Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” Gerry Mulligan, Joe Henderson, Alfredo Kraus, Elton John’s “Your Song,” Bob Dylan’s “On a night Like This” “Idiot Wind,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Shelter From the Storm,” and “Blood on the Tracks,” Mozart, Ella Fitzgerald, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail,” “Amazing Grace,” Bach, Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches,” Tallest Trees album, “All Blues,” and “Kind of Blue,” Bob Marley’s Babylon By Bus album, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, John Coltrane, Stan Getz’s “Sweet Rain,” the Jazz Messengers, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Earl Hines, Mal Waldron, Billie Holiday’s “I Can’t Get Started,” and “Miss Brown to You,” John Bunch Trio, Charlie Mingus’ Alum, “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” and “Better Git It in Your Soul,” Thelonius Monk’s “Round Midnight,” Dexter Gordon, JJ Johnson, Bud Power, “Some Other Spring,” Getz and Gilberto’s “Girl from Ipanema,” Prince, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Grateful Dead, Anita O’Day, the Police’s Zenyatta Mondatta album, “Easy Living,” “Let’s Get It On,” and “John Wesley Harding.”

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Me, Me, Me: Autobiographies and Memoirs” (p 162).

At the Mercy of the Sea

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Kretschmer, John. At the Mercy of the Sea: the True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane. International Marine/McGraw Hill, 2007.

Reason read: August is the best time to be on the water. Read in honor of the perfect month for a sail.

John Kretschmer begins his story on November 14th, 1999. His main focus begins with his friend, Carl Wake, captain of the 42′ sailboat La Vie en Rose. Carl was sailing from the Chesapeake Bay to the Caribbean in time to meet Kretschmer for Thanksgiving so this part of At Mercy of the Sea is heartbreakingly personal. [How could it have been Carl’s first and last at-sea voyage?] Tragically, Carl meets up with Hurricane Lenny and does not survive the storm’s wrath. In addition to Carl’s story, Kretschmer also follows the tragedies of Steve Rigby, sailing English Braids and Guillaume Llobregat, captain of Frederic-Anne, also victims of Hurricane Lenny.
Hurricane Lenny was an anomaly, a dangerous freak storm that defied logic. Understanding how a hurricane is supposed to behave plays a huge part of the drama. Part of At Mercy of the Sea is the biography of a hurricane from birth (African, Gulf of Mexico or other) to its landfall slow death. Kretschmer carefully outlines what typically happens from start to finish, beginning with the naming of each hurricane. In this way, he is able to illustrate just how unusual Lenny turned out to be.
Confessional: Like The Diary of Anne Frank, I had a hard time reading towards the end of At the Mercy of the Sea. As the pages turned, the story brought me closer and closer to the demise of the sailors. I knew it was coming, but dreaded the end all the same.

As an aside, last month I read a book about the Vendee Globe race. When Kretschmer mentioned it I was thankful I had more than a passing knowledge of what he was talking about. He also mentioned the book A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, which is on my Challenge list.

Line I adored, “Retreating into the past is one way to keep your sanity – or disturb it, depending on what you run into there” (p 10). Kretschmer is not wrong. He is able to make keen observations about the psyche of a sailor too long at sea, probably because he has been there himself.
Other lines I really liked, “My wife was weary of my dreams and, worse, downright sick of my realities” (p 70) and “The only way to savor the essence of life is to nearly lose it” (p 173).

Another confessional: reading about hurricanes brings me face to face with conflicting emotions. I got married in the middle of Hurricane Ivan. I was twelve miles out to sea. According to Kretschmer, Ivan produced the highest measured significant wave height, fifty feet.

Author fact: Kretschmer is a professional sailor in his own right.

Book trivia: I would have liked to see photographs of the sailors or, at the very least, their boats.

Music: Louis Armstrong’s “La Vie en Rose,” Edith Pilaf, Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps,” Pink Floyd, and Jimmy Buffett.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “See the Sea” (p 201).

Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done

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Van den Broeck, Vincent. Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done: How the Life You Build Becomes the Life That Saves You. Publish Nation, 2026.

Reason read: as a member of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing I get to read tragic yet inspirational books. This is one such story.

You get the sense that Vincent’s life was adrift in his younger years. Example: when considering higher education he chose a degree because it sounded impressive. Unbelievably, he did not actually having a clue what it was for. Losing his mother to cancer at a young age must have played a significant part in this drifting. Grief can untether you from reality. It wasn’t until he entered the world of hospitality did Vincent begin to shine and really find his focus. He became a workaholic, taking on too much too soon; opening one restaurant after another; drowning in debt. It took an accident that nearly killed him before he was forced to slow down, take stock of his life and find his future.
You will have to read for yourself, but there are some really beautiful sentences and phrases in Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done. So much so that I wanted more of the story. It was too short! I wanted to hear more. Imagine a bumblebee darting from one fragrant flower to another; never taking the time to linger on one bloom for very long. Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done is a bumblebee of a story. Vincent never digs into the details of his life more than he needs to…but I wish he did.
As an aside, Vincent called the accident inevitable. I want to know why was it inevitable? Instead, I argue that our system for dealing with reckless or illegal drivers is tragically flawed. If it wasn’t, the driver who struck Vincent would not have been driving at all. Think about it. The driver was dangerous enough before Vincent’s accident to have his license taken away. We can do better as a society.

Book trivia: in the advance copy I received Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done did not include photographs. I would have liked to see the restaurant or meet his amazing wife.

Lyndon: an Oral Biography

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Miller, Merle. Lyndon: an Oral Biography. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.

Reason read: Lyndon’s birth month was in August. Read in his honor.

Merle Miller spent more than five years compiling Johnson’s oral history. The miles he put in, literally and figuratively, are astounding. Lyndon B. Johnson was a complicated man living in the time of the greatest society. Known for his aw-shucks attitude, he started out being a good ‘ole boy who voted against antilynching and antidiscrimination laws but ended his career as an instrumental advocate for federal aid to education, the creation of Medicare, changes in voter rights, and stronger civil rights. The death of Texas Congressman James P. Buchanan was a turning point in Johnson’s political trajectory. His campaigns were memorable – arriving by helicopter when running for senator. By the end of his political career Lyndon had weathered a tumultuous era: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the march in Selma, Alabama, the Vietnam War.
As with any oral history, the chronology jumps around a bit. Case in point: the birth of Lyndon’s first child came before the purchase of the radio station, KTBC.
Miller provides an intimate primer on the inner workings of the United States government. Probably the most fascinating section was the hour by hour, behind the scenes account of the Kennedy assassination and the transition of power to Lyndon B. Johnson. He also peeled back the curtain on Lady Bird Johnson’s life as well. Just as Lyndon was thrust into presidency, Lady Bird became the First Lady overnight. There was no time for preparation but she acclimated to her position with grace. As an aside, her note of encouragement to her husband was beautiful.

Author fact: Miller died when he was only 67 years old. My copy of Lyndon was signed by him.

Book trivia: Miller does not leave a detail unexplored. By default, readers get glimpses into the personality of President Roosevelt and a short biography of Lady Bird (Claudia)’s life leasing up to meeting her husband, to name a couple.

Music: Lena Horne, “I’ll Be with You When I’m Gone,” “Kate Smith on the South,” “God Bless America,” “San Antonio Rose,” “Dixie,” “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You,” Beethoven, “Hello, Dolly,” “The Eyes of Texas,” and “Ruffles and Flourishes.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Merle Miller: Too Good To Miss” (p 155). If Pearl wanted, she could have included Lyndon in the “Presidential Biographies” chapter as well.

Sunne in Splendour

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Penman, Sharon Kay. The Sunne in Splendour. St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

Reason read: King Richard III died in August. Read in his memory.

Fabulous. Glorious. Beautiful. Absorbing. Exceptional. Painstaking. Immersive. Captivating. These are the words critics used to describe Sunne in Splendour when it was first published. The only word I focused on the most? Painstaking. I was intimidated by all 900+ pages. I will be the first to admit that historical fiction is not my thing so I thought this would be a slog. And yet. Sunne in Splendour is a best seller. And. And! And I admit, very entertaining.
This is a time in history when boys of ten wed for political positioning. Brothers killed brothers for the throne. Beheadings were the entertainment of the hour. Backstabbing and betrayals of all kinds ruled the day. Christmas truces could be broken without warning. Penman delivers a glorious fifteenth century England that is bloody and brutal. Richard III is right smack in the middle of it; becoming king on a technicality of legitimacy.
Everything about Sunne in Splendour is detailed perfection. Everything from the food people ate, their choice of drink (spiced hippocras), where they lived and the clothes they wore.

Author fact: Penman died in 2021.

Book trivia: Sunne in Splendour contradicts the well known view of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Digging Up the Past Through Fiction” (p 80).

No Place Like Nome

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Engelhard, Michael. No Place Like Nome: the Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City. Corax Books, 2025.

Reason read: As a member of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing, I occasionally read interesting books. This one was fantastic!

Engelhard spent a “three year stint” in Nome, Alaska and took the time to write about his experiences. Confessional: I enjoy books that are well organized. No Place Like Nome is separated into four logical parts: first, geography of the place, then the characters and personalities within the place, the business and art of Nome, and finally, journeys around the region.
Engelhard is informative without resorting to didactic explanations. Linguistics (the use of the word Eskimo for example), anthropology, short biographies (Sally Carrighar, Edward Sherriff Curtis, James Kivitauraq Moses, Father Bernhard Rosecrans Hubbard, Roald Amundsen, and Lynn Cox), the importance of whales to the Nome culture (confessional: I did not know their bones were used as construction material), the history of jade, the advent of bicycles. The photography was amazing. My favorite was the one of Serum-Run racer Leonard Seppala.
What seem barbaric and strange in our culture is commonplace in the far reaches of civilizations like Greenland, Siberia and Alaska like hunting practices and diet.
Because I read this an an ebook, it would have been great to have footnotes that jumped to the corresponding image or text.

As an aside – was it a typo when Hrdlicka was later called “Hard Liquor”?

Personal complaint – here is a description that bugged me, “nude mermaid on a floe’s edge with her feet dangling in the water.” Hello? Does anyone remember Ariel? Mermaids have tails, not feet.

Author fact: Michael Engelhard won the National Outdoor Book Award for Arctic Traverse. The photo Engelhard used for Nome shows him drinking what looks like to be a beer. I’m dying to know what kind it is.

Book trivia: No Place Like Nome will be published in September 2025.

Setlist: Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” “Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Paganini, “Float Coat” (to encourage water safety), and Madonna.

Mystical Paths

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Howatch, Susan. Mystical Paths. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Reason read: to continue the series started in recognition of Easter back in April.

As with every other Starbridge novel, Mystical Paths is designed to be read independently of others in the series, but it is recommended to read them in order. Characters who were in the background in previous novels jump to the forefront in later ones. This time, Jonathan Darrow’s son, Nicholas, narrates the story. Nicholas and his father are modeled after the work of Christopher Bryant and are both psychics. Nicholas is now twenty-five years old and has a “sex-mess” in the middle of the 1960s. He believes he is one half of his father and suffers from somnambulism. Every night he has to tether himself to something before falling asleep for fear of wandering off somewhere. He leads a double life in order to protect his father, his other half. Yet at eighty-eight years old, Jonathan Darrow is still sharp as a tack and can run circles around his son. Like the other Howatch books, psychological situations are examined through a spiritual and theological lens with the help of a spiritual advisor or religious mentor. Mystical Paths is one of my favorites due to the plots many twists and turns.
I think I have said this before, but the benefit of reading the Starbridge series in order, one right after the other is that besides character development the reader gets the varying perspectives of the same history. Each character recalls the same point in time with different feelings and memories. It reminded me of Michael Dorris’s Yellow Raft in Blue Water.

Every Howatch book (so far) has a character with sexual hang-ups or has trouble with alcohol. Nicholas Darrow is no different. Lines I liked, “As I mooched around, bored out of my mind, I wondered how the Church could survive the 20th century when one of its most famous training-grounds had been so wholly smothered by the dead hand of an irrelevant past” (p 19), “Funny how the vast majority of the human race has to generate a repulsive amount of noise before it can convince itself it’s having a good time” (p 55),

Author fact: Beyond the Starbridge series I have two more Howatch books to read for the Challenge.

Book trivia: According to the author’s note, Mystical Paths is the penultimate book in the Starbridge series. However, Pearl lists a seventh book, Wonder Worker, to round out the series. Wonder Worker is actually the first book in a different series.

Setlist: Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Beethoven, Rolling Stones, “River Deep, Mountain High” by Tina Turner, John Lennon’s “Money,” Mick Jagger, “It’s All Over Now” by the Rolling Stones,” Ella Fitzgerald, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Berlioz, Dead March,

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers: the Family of Clergy” (p 86).

Maine Woods

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Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. Decorations by Clare Leighton. Ticknor and Fields, 1864.

Reason read: the Maine Lobster Festival is always the first weekend in August.

Henry D. Thoreau made three separate trips to Maine. Most of the Maine Woods is a descriptive narration about the journey and the nature witnessed along the way. From navigating rapids and hunting moose to observing flowers, trees, and small animals. From a cultural perspective, The Maine Woods paints a picture of Thoreau’s interactions with the natives in Maine: especially their canoe building and cooking skills and their hunting and fishing practices. Thoreau wanted to learn from the natives (“I would tell him all I knew, and he should tell me all he knew” p 221).
Thoreau could not help but insert a little politics into his narrative from time to time, “The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances” (p 309).
While the narrative just ends abruptly, the appendix includes a list of trees, flowers, shrubs, and birds seen along the excursions. It also includes how to outfit and excursion with tents, tools, etc. There is also a glossary of Indian words and their meanings.
I did not know this about Maine: in 1837 there were 230 sawmills on the Penobscot river.

Thoreau had a sense of humor, “We saw a pair of moose horns on the shore; and I asked Joe if a moose had shed them; but he said that there was a head attached to them, and I knew that they did not shed their heads more than once in their lives” (p 127).

As an aside, I thought of my papas when Thoreau was explaining how to steer a boat into waves to avoid capsizing or taking on water.
As another aside, Thoreau mentioned John Smith from 1614. That is the same year Captain Smith landed on Monhegan. Interestingly enough, Thoreau mentions a “Manhegan Island.” I’m not sure it’s the same one.
I’m glad to know some things never change. The nuisance of mosquitoes was just as bad then as it is now, “We were considerably molested by mosquitoes at this camp” (p 253).

Author fact: beyond being a naturalist and an essayist, Thoreau was a philosopher.

Book trivia: If only there were photographs! Or a map. I swear Thoreau mentions Monhegan (spelled Manhegan).

Music: “O Susanna!”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “The Maine Chance” (p 135).