REQUIRED READING
War Diaries 1939-1945 by Astrid Lindgren (Yale University Press)
The funny, fictional antics of Pippi Longstocking have offered generations of children comic relief. Author Lindgren concocted the Pippi tales in WWII Stockholm to cheer up her young daughter, Karyn. As Karyn puts it in the foreword to her mother’s memoir: “In the midst of the convulsive tensions of the time . . . [my mother] started coming out with her unbridled, freedom-loving Pippi Longstocking.” In this new translation, we follow the author as she prepares her husband to go to war, helps her daughter with homework, laments deportations, blackouts and the Soviet invasion of Finland — and invents Pippi.
The King is Dead The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII by Suzannah Lipscomb (Pagasus Books)
He’s famous for outliving five of his six wives. Now King Henry VIII’s own death gets a closer look. Just hours before the king passed away, he issued one of the most contested wills in history. While he specified his line of succession — his son Edward followed by daughters Mary and Elizabeth in turn — there was enough uncertainty in the will’s language that each child had to fight hard for the throne. Other bequests were also bitterly contested.
Sympathy Madness & Crime How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business by Karen Roggenkamp (The Kent State University Press)
Rough and tumble city newsrooms once were ruled unsuitable for women. They apparently were only good for “women’s pages.” But the quartet of 19th-century journalists Roggencamp covers turned that idea on its head. They wrote about insane asylums and prisons, gaining sympathy for those living under deplorable conditions — as well as readers for the highly competitive papers. Nellie Bly, for example, famously feigned insanity to sneak into the Blackwell’s Island insane asylum in New York City. Her 1889 exposé shook things up both in the field of public health and in the newsroom.
Plaid and Plagiarism by Molly MacRae (Pegasus Books)
They just wanted to open a quaint little bookshop in the Scottish Highlands! It’s an auspicious beginning in the debut of MacRae’s new mystery series. Soon enough the four partners — native Scotswoman Christine and American transplants Janet, Tallie and Summer — find local advice columnist Una Graham dead in Janet’s garden shed, a sickle through her neck. It’s enough to turn the female foursome into a gang of gung-ho gumshoes.
Music for Love or War by Martyn Burke (Tyrus Books)
Danny, a Canadian sharpshooter, wants to find Ariana, the woman he fell in love with in Toronto. US Army vet Hank is searching for Annie Boudreau — dubbed Annie of the Boo Too as one of a pair of twins linked to Hugh Hefner. The two guys were stationed together in Afghanistan and, as they seek help from a Hollywood psychic, we flash back to the war zone. Burke toggles back and forth between Afghanistan and Hollywood, skewering both the excesses of war and pop culture.