Eleanor grew up in the Dukedom of Aquitaine at a time when most of France was ruled by England. In northern Europe, and England, women had little social standing. Aquitaine, in the south, named "land of waters" by the Romans, was a rich land, filled with orchards and vineyards; life was good for ...
I love historical fiction that is actually based on history and not just a thinly veiled romance novel. So I was really happy to read this since the author actually set out to write a biography of Heloise, but wrote a novel since she wasn't able find enough historical documents to support a compl...
This book reminds me of several others I've read about famous women - they're really good with the history, the details, the research, and well written - but because of the detail you know that this woman was NOT an easy person to really know, to befriend, or to be in the same room with. It's not...
Bright as he was, or perhaps because he was so intelligent, Woody (born Allan Konigsberg) was a difficult child at school, often playing hooky, his mother making numerous trips to school to explain his behavior. He was a reluctant reader, although he would devour as many as fifty comic books per ...
An important mesmerizing saga of a woman both magnificently a part ofand gloriously at odds withher own times. Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, was the granddaughter of a White Russian princess. She became the first internationally famous professional psychic and she was also ...
This is the first book by Marion Meade- and hopefully not my last. Full of (interesting!) details and background, Victoria Meade paints Victoria's world in vivid colors. Usually when reading biographies about (in)famous people, the content reads like an overused textbook. Meade breathes life i...
It was an afternoon she would never forget. Wearing an embroidered sheath, strappy high heels, and white gloves, a Hattie Carnegie cloche framing her face, she looked less like a protester than a Fifth Avenue shopper on her way to Henri Bendel. When police yanked her arms on Beacon Street she ref...
"It's a wonderful, wonderful thing," he told Siskel. For the first time he could "see the joy of it" himself because he was "in on it from the very beginning. I was there when she got off the plane from Texas with the baby." Most days Mia brought six-month-old Dylan to the set, usually accompanie...
A loud, quarrelsome bunch, they were obsessed by status and money, probably because they had so little of either. They moved a lot, sometimes at the request of their neighbors, because the father, Buck Claflin, was not above pulling a shady business deal now and then. The fifth of his seven child...
Although the Young King and Queen Marguerite were in Normandy, the king and queen, the chroniclers tell us, quarreled furiously over their absent cub. Their son, nearly eighteen years old, was now demanding his heritage. He wanted someplace in the world that he could call his own—England, he sugg...