I appreciate the research that went into this book. I wanted to know more about Gypsy Rose Lee because the only real knowledge I had about her was the 1960s musical. Abbott establishes from the introduction that the musical was not much more than a fable, so I was pretty excited to read the true ...
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy is the story of 4 female civil war assassins, two working for the union, two for the confederacy. My civil war history is rusty at best, and this book does a good job of putting these women into context of how they were unique for their time, and what the consequence...
In “Sin in the Second City” Karen Abbott tells us in her subtitle that the book is ultimately about “the Battle for America's Soul.” Pretty heady! I suppose that the battle still persists to this day, so I shouldn’t have expected a victor in the book itself, yet was left feeling unsatisfied at ...
These letters are extremely valuable “human documents” relating to persons of the class in question. The men seem to feel affection for their children; they talk tenderly with reference to the fortunes or misfortunes of their mothers or relatives; they send polite greetings to one another and to ...