*ARC copy obtained in 2010* So, when I sat down to FINALLY read this the other day, I had just finished reading a family crime drama and, for some reason, was expecting the same from this. Turns out, "Every Last One" is NOT a crime drama but instead an exploration of a mother's love for her fam...
At 29 years old, I wondered if this book would hold much meaning for me since Quindlen analyzes her life at 60 and contemplates how her age has shaped her perspective on topics such as friends, children, solitude, and death. What I discovered is that Quindlen is full of incredible advice--whethe...
This was one of those books that I really wanted to read (let's face it--it's Quindlen) and one of those books I really needed to read. Funny, sad, and liberating, this book seemed to give me license to be myself, even in the midst of the place where I live and stand out like a sore thumb, and e...
I really enjoyed seeing how the main character kept growing as a person throughout this story. A good novel for when you need some easy reading. Predictable, but still enjoyable.
It is an unspoken rule of mine that self-help books are to be avoided at all costs. It just seems to me that there are just some things that cannot be helped with a book, and people presuming they can change or improve my life in 300 hundred pages or less is a bit disconcerting. Of course, that i...
This book teaches that we are always in a phase of learning and discovery about ourselves, our relationships, and our environment. I would like to say it is mainly a coming of age story, but the mother and father are also learning lessons. Quindlen has a marvelous way of expressing feelings tha...
I finished "Blessings" today and I my reaction to it is mediocre at best. Nothing great, nothing terrible. I guess I found it pretty bland, boring, and constricted.....like the main character Lydia Blessing. I liked Skip and thought his personality was very likeable and easy to identify with. ...
A recurring theme throughout Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is the comforting premise that readers are never alone. "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a uni...
Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother's throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets--and his heart--for the answers, and shares them in this powerf...
Is it pure coincidence that I just finished reading Anna Quindlen’s Rise and Shine on the heels of Jack London’s Martin Eden? And would I expect Quindlen’s principal character, Meghan Fitzmaurice, to meet the same unhappy conclusion that London’s principal character, Martin Eden, inevitably me...
I suppose that if I owned a bra, now I would burn it? Truth be told, the tone and even the message of this book were unexpectedly a tad bit tamer than I had presumed. That is, in building the bandwagon to rescue hordes of imagined "captive wives" still enthralled by that evil "mystique" that cann...
Anna Quindlen è una giornalista e scrittrice americana che fin dalla più tenera età è un'appassionata lettrice e che diventa ben presto un'anglofila in absentia, come dice lei stessa, cioè senza mai essere stata fisicamente in Inghilterra. Evitare un viaggio a Londra sembra per molti anni una mis...
"A splendid collection...Eloquent, powerful, compassionate and droll. There is considerable variety in the subjects she addresses....Compelling." THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER Thinking out loud is what Anna Quindlen does best. A syndicated columnist with her finger on the pulse of women's lives, and...
My lab partner, Laura, who looked like the kind of person who would someday be a Girl Scout troop leader, who someday would actually turn out to be a Girl Scout troop leader, always went to the ladies’ room right after class was over because she had a long drive to the hospital where her mother w...
It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage-managed by grown-ups and life privately held. Past thirteen, shy of twenty, our children seem to fire off from time to time like a barrel full of Roman candles. Prom p...
Those who prefer Paris or Rome complain that the English capital has no precise center, that there is no spot in the city that could be considered the hub around which the wheel revolves. There is some truth to that. St. Paul’s is an enormous visual marker from above, like a stern presence lookin...
I can’t figure it. Here you have someone (I prefer to think that it’s a woman) who has come up with an invention that takes literally hundreds of thousands of people who have lost the use of their hands and gives them a new lease on life. They can pick up oranges in the supermarket, they can flip...
A letter came informing me that Robert was enrolled at the local elementary school, that he would be in class 5-C and that he needed No. 2 pencils and a three-ring binder on the first day.Together we walked through the flat, stifling streets of Lake Plata to stand and look at the school building....
That was where we went after the dinner dishes were done, Jonathan and Jeff and I, to a bar called Sammy’s, named in honor of Samuel Langhorne, who was about as much a Sammy as Thomas Jefferson was a Tommy or John Adams a Jack. The place was one of those dark English-pub imitations, with cheap, m...