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Posts from the ‘History’ Category

WOMEN AND WILD SAVAGES READERS GUIDE

Is jealousy learned? Would the ideal marriage have an expiration date? Are there good arguments for the legalization of prostitution? Whether you are a book club that drinks wine, a wine club that reads book, Oprah, a college class or just someone who likes to delve deeper, may this free Reader’s Guide to Women and Wild Savages bring you hours of thought-provoking discussion and enrich your reading experience.

WomenandWildSavages-ReadersGuide

The guide is five pages long and broken down into the following topic areas:
1. Love and Marriage
2. Sexuality
3. Women and their Social Role
4. Men and their Social Role
5. Literary Considerations
6. Vienna at the Turn of the Century (1900 – 1910) and Society Today
7. Story Ponderings

Don’t have a copy of the book yet? Get it now at one of your preferred outlets:

Women and Wild Savages Print Version at Amazon

E-books:

Women and Wild Savages at Amazon for Kindle

Women and Wild Savages at Barnes and Noble for Nook

Women and Wild Savages for Kobo

 

 

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A THOUGHT-PROVOKING NOVEL OF THE PLAGUE

A review of:

Brooks, Geraldine. Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague. New York: Viking, 2001. Print.

In her masterfully written novel, “Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague,” Wall Street Journal correspondent, Geraldine Brooks, transports readers to a remote miner village in Eyam, England in the midst of the 1666 plague outbreak. Through the eyes of a simple servant girl, Anna Firth, we witness first-hand the awesome power of a major catastrophe to unravel deeply rooted conventions and convictions. Social mores and values, class systems and moral codes, once so steadfast and omnipotent no longer matter when everyone from the butcher, to the baker, to the candlestick maker is hemorrhaging bulges of puss before succumbing to rosy ringed skin and finally, the Black Death.

How do you find meaning in life when death kills the innocent and allows the guilty to thrive? Who do you turn to when there is no one left to help you bury your loved ones? What good is wealth and social standing when there is nothing left to buy and no one left to acknowledge it?

Geraldine Brook’s novel is more than an account of a tight knit community that voluntarily agrees to quarantine itself during the plague in exchange for the delivery of goods and basic needs from outside towns. Her book is a thought-provoking examination of life’s existential questions on how society functions and the fragility and seeming futility of social laws, order and hierarchies when the Plague comes to town.

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NEW YORK CITY AND THE NATIONAL SEPTEMBER 11 MUSEUM

When you visit a city on a return visit, or after several return visits, you are free of the pressure to cross off site-seeing lists, making return visits almost always more rewarding because you can finally ease into a place and let the day take you where it wills without maps or guide books. Sometimes, however, the will of the day takes you where you are not eager to go, but definitely need to be.

On a (return) visit this past week to NYC, one of my days willed me to two gaping holes in the earth where two towers once stood that years ago had afforded me impressive views of the city. This time, however, instead of cruising in an elevator hundreds of storeys skyward, I descended into the depths of the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Steel beams displayed at the September 11 Memorial Museum

Steel beams displayed at the National September 11 Museum

Words are insufficient to describe what it is like to stand dwarfed next to naked steel beams once an integral part of a skeleton great enough to extend the whole way up to the “Windows of the World” and to be overwhelmed by the fragility of life reflecting in the smiling faces of portrait upon portrait of those who didn’t manage to make it home the evening of September 11. Volunteers in blue vests stand discreetly next to exhibits and politely answer questions as you navigate in stunned silence through bare concrete halls displaying poignant reminders of a day forever etched in all of our memories.

Having studied in DC and often visited the museums and memorials there that are free, I was struck, even before entering the National September 11 Memorial Museum, by the steep entrance ticket price of 24 USD per adult and 18 USD per student. If the funds were going to the families of victims and first responders, the fee seemed a small price to pay. But if not….

It just seems wrong that any company or individuals should make any profit from anything related to 9/11 or any such tragedy for that matter. Neither of the two volunteers I asked were able to say for sure where the money for the tickets went. Since then I’ve looked online. I was surprised to discover that according to Wikipedia’s National September 11 Memorial Museum page, the museum is not administered by the National Park Service like the Flight 93 National Memorial but rather a non-profit corporation?! After trying to figure it all out, I still don’t really get it. How much more costly can this museum be than all the museums in Washington DC that are free? I also don’t quite understand who owns the September 11 Museum, who runs the museum, the logic of a non-profit corporation as opposed to a national park service and where all the funding goes and for what but it would seem to me if the museum is a public museum, funded by public funds and sincere in its mission statement, any and all balance sheets related to the administration of the museum as well as meeting minutes, etc, should be publicly available online directly from the museum website at the click of a mouse button. Sadly, it didn’t seem from what I could find that steep ticket costs were being used for the health and well-being of any of the families at all but I could be wrong. I definitely hope that I’m wrong.

September 11 Memorial Museum

September 11 Memorial Museum

When you visit NY, you immediately recognize that there is no place in the world with as much pulse, edge and grit as NYC. There just isn’t. At the same time, beneath all the chaos, glitz, glamour and lights, you have what really makes the city great – the New Yorkers themselves – the brash, no-nonsense, genuine New Yorker who didn’t hesitate that morning on 9/11 to rush down to the eye of the hurricane and sacrifice his/her life to help another or spend weeks in the ruble searching debris and now dedicates retirement days to discreetly standing next to exhibits patiently answering visitor questions.

Lots of my fellow Americans – particularly those of us who grew up more in the burbs and countryside like I did, often don’t get the gushing, outpouring of enthusiasm for New York that many Europeans seem automatically prone to. But I do. I get it. And it has nothing to do with the neon lights so bright on Broadway.

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BOOK RELEASE – WOMEN AND WILD SAVAGES

Women and Wild Savages

Women and Wild Savages is the first book in the Vienna Muses series and currently available on amazon.com as ebook

No woman knows, or ever has known, or ever will know, what she does when she enters into association with a man.

Women and Wild Savages is out! Very excited to share some big news for me personally – a book I have been working on for several years was released this past week on amazon.com. The print version will follow soon and all versions will be available at other outlets by February. The book is the first in a series entitled “The Vienna Muses” which takes place in Vienna at the beginning of the 1900s.

Writing has always been a part of me and with the publication of this book, a lifelong dream has come true. I am grateful to a great many people – obvious and not so apparent – who have supported this dream and this particular project along the way.

I have spent so many years with the characters in this book that they have – in a strange way – become a part of my life. I have held their postcards in the Vienna City archives, their letters of desperation — perhaps their very last letters – in the Austrian National Archives. I have studied their poetry, their books, the book of those they loved and those that loved them and tried my best, over 100 years after the events, to recreate a story that conveys not only the characters, and the city, but an entire Zeitgeist. I can only humbly hope that those who read Women and Wild Savages will hear the clings of silver spoons on porcelain and smell the tantalizing scent of freshly roasted coffee beans while they delve into the private salons, grand cathedrals, buzzing coffeehouses and cobble-stoned lanes of Vienna of the early 1900s.

Maybe It's Time for A Catnap

Two not-so-obvious supporters of my writing

Research and writing can be frustrating at times, but every now and then fate seems to throw you a bone. While working on the book, through some miracle of miracles after hours of google procrastination, at about 2 am one morning, I came across a 1904 newspaper clipping from a New Zealand online archive with a copy of a tragic last letter from one of the characters to another. What are the chances?

After years of work on the manuscript, I had finished nearly everything, had spent days painstakingly going through all the final edits from my copy editor and just as the finish line appeared upon the horizon, I found myself faced with evil incarnate. I logged into my computer to find all my files locked. A window popped up demanding that I pay an ungodly amount in Bitcoins or I’d never see my files again.  Do hackers from the darkside have any idea what writers earn? Back your character up against a wall and see how they react – a demand of writers to up the tension in their books. Was someone in the book of life playing a bad joke and testing me?

A friend once wrote when his book was published that he had expected the joy that would come on release day but not the sorrow. After spending so many years alone together with these characters, I can definitely relate to this. Publication feels like a time to say good-bye and I nervously stand by the door as I release my version of my characters, my words, my work into the world.

As I watch Lina Loos, Adolf Loos, Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Marie Lang and all the others waltz from my safe-keeping to yours, I can only hope that I have been true to them, to Vienna, the Zeitgeist, and that you, dear readers, will find as much pleasure in your time together with them as I have over the years.

Women and Wild Savages at Amazon for Kindle

Women and Wild Savages at Barnes and Noble for Nook

Women and Wild Savages for Kobo

Women and Wild Savages Readers Guide

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