The Women Books & More’s Podcast

Love Child: Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston

One of my favorites from the archives.

Huston was born in London, the love child of a widely adored ballerina and the 2nd Viscount Norwich. When she was four, she lost her mother in an auto accident and was sent to Ireland to live with her mother’s estranged husband, the acclaimed, eccentric and intimidating film director John Huston. (The African Queen, Casino Royale, Prizzi’s Honor….)

“I was a motherless girl who never quite felt like I really belonged, a younger sister trying to find sense of self in the shadow of beauty and fame.” FYI: Her older half-sister is the actor and director Anjelica Huston.

Salmon Rushdie calls the book: “An exceptional telling of an extraordinary life. I loved it.” 

Allegra Huston now lives in Taos, New Mexico, and is the co-founder of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. www.allegrahuston.com

Photo credit: Jeff Rayner

 

Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America

Here is one of my favorites from the archives.

So…you’ve probably heard of Abigail Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Annie Oakley and Eleanor Roosevelt. But what about the female mathematician who laid the groundwork for abstract algebra. Or the women of NASA who helped send John Glenn, the first American astronaut, into orbit.

From artists and writers to doctors, scientists and activists—Jill S. Tietjen’s Her Story is a beautifully illustrated book that spans more than four centuries and celebrates the many accomplishments of more than 900 unsung heroines of American history.

Tietjen is a sought-after speaker and has co-authored Duty Calls (along with Dr. Antonia Novello, the first female and the first Hispanic U.S. Surgeon General), and  Over, Under, Around and Through: How Hall of Famers Surmount Obstacles, co-authored with Elinor Miller Greenberg, EdD. 

https://jilltietjen.com

 

 

Rescued Recipes - U.S. Holocaust Museum

The Nazis were banging on the door. The Fenves family was about to be rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Their  gentile cook had the presence of mind to save the family recipe book by hiding it under her apron.

Chef Alon Shaya found the recipe book in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)  in Washington, D.C. and was reunited with 93-year-old Steven Fenves, the lone survivor of the family. During the pandemic—hundreds of miles apart—they worked to recreate some of the recipes from the precious book. Steven translated from Hungarian; Alon cooked and sent them to Steven over dry ice. Two (tested and tasted) recipes available here:Walnut Cream Cake and Crispy Semolina Sticks 

USNMM has about 80 collections that include recipes and cookbooks. Many are available online, others can be searched in person. To schedule a research visit: www.ushmm.org

See a CBS Sunday Morning segment with Steven and Alon here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/re-creating-the-taste-of-a-childhood-lost-in-the-holocaust/

For more about Chef Alon Shaya: www.eatwithsafta.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midnight Black by Mark Greaney

With his lover imprisoned in a Russian gulag, the Gray Man will stop at nothing to free her—in Midnight Black, Mark Greaney’s latest thriller in the NYT #1 bestselling Gray Man series. 

A winter sunrise over the great plains of Russia is no cause for celebration. The temperature barely rises above zero and the guards at penal colony IK22 take their misery out on the prisoners—mainly on Zoya Zakharova. Once an master spy for Russian foreign intelligence, then partner and lover of the Gray Man, she has information the Kremlin wants and they don’t care what they have to do to get it. 

But if they think a thousand miles of frozen wasteland and the combined power of the Russian police state is enough to protect them, they don’t know the Gray Man. He’s coming and no one can stop him. 

Greaney was the last author to work directly with Tom Clancy, the celebrated military-and-espionage thriller pioneer. Greaney, like Clancy, keeps a close watch on the geopolitical stage—what’s going on and what’s brewing—and his stories are rooted in real world events. 

Greaney has written 15 books in the Gray Man series and a number of books in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan series. With Lt. Col. Rip Rawlings, he wrote an unmissable war thriller—Red Metal—a New York Times best seller. By all accounts, they are working on a sequel.  

www.markgreaneybooks.com

 

 

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

This is one of my favorites from the archives.

It is 1921 and a forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio comes into a modest inheritance and uses it to escape her tyrannical mother by taking a trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. She stays at Cairos’ Semiramis Hotel (It’s still there, now an InterContinental) just as the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference convenes.

She meets Winston Churchill, T. E Lawrence (Laurence of Arabia) and Gertrude Bell who, in a few days, randomly redraw the map of the Middle East. Their decisions cause conflict in the region to this very day.

Russell’s prose captures the dusty, sweaty, noisy streets of Cairo and the slow-moving ceiling fans within the hot-and-sticky conference rooms. She has written several other bestsellers, including the science-fiction classics The Sparrow and Children of God.

https://marydoriarussell.net/  

Jan’s Story by Barry Petersen

A favorite from the archives

Barry Petersen is a CBS News correspondent. He has reported on wars, natural disasters and royal weddings but his most difficult assignment was writing Jan’s Story—a personal account of his wife’s diagnosis (in her mid-50s) of early-onset Alzheimer’s. 

It is a true story. It is a love story. Barry has put into words the daily struggle he had to face, caring for the love of his life and watching her fade away until she didn’t recognize him anymore. 

He says: “I couldn’t let this magnificent, vivacious, wonderful woman just get lost in the midst of Alzheimers. I couldn’t let her life end that way. And if there’s a way to honor her, then I deeply hope this is it."

www.alz.org

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jans-story-love-and-early-onset-alzheimers-20-06-2010/ 

The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron

Here’s one of my favorites from the archives.

On a grey day in March of 1941, acclaimed British writer Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the fast flowing River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later miles downstream. It was the tragic end of a brilliant novelist and essayist—one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. Or was it? 

Six decades after Woolf’s death, landscape designer Jo Bellamy comes to Sissinghurst Castle (one of England’s most famous castle-estates) to study the famed White Garden created by Woolf’s lover, poet and writer Vita Sackville-West.

In the castle’s shadow, Jo makes a truly shocking find: Woolf’s last diary and its first entry is dated the day after she allegedly killed herself.

When it is authenticated, the diary will shatter everything that historians now believe about Woolf’s suicide (and ruin many academic careers). But…the diary is suddenly stolen, adding to the riddle. 

Jo’s quest to find the truth puts her in peril as she examines the connection between Woolf and the seduction of her lover's White Garden—now one of the most iconic gardens in the world. 

Of course…let’s establish this: Barron sees mysteries literally everywhere. She also writes a popular series of Jane Austen mysteries and, under her real name (Francine Matthews) a very popular mystery series set in modern-day Nantucket.

https://francinematthews.com

 

 

 

 

Isabelle Allende talks about Ripper and her other books

One of my top favorites from the archive.

Isabelle Allende’s books are a seductive blend of magical realism, accurate historical details and exude the alluring scent of Chilean jasmine. She comes into my recording studio trailing the scent of sweet vanilla and something musky, perhaps sandalwood. We sit and talk like old friends—about books and life.

She revels that she puts on full make up, stockings and, shockingly, a girdle—plus other clothes, of course—just to walk down a path in her garden to her writing studio. 

Chilean-American author Allende has written more than 25 books—translated into 42 languages and selling more than 77 million copies. The first one I read was The House of the Spirits, published in 1982 and made into a film starring the incomparable Meryl Streep, Winona Rider and Antonio Banderas. Then I read Eva Luna and Of Love and Shadows. Then, I read all the rest. 

Tragedies, fortunes (made and lost), political careers, women in the kitchen and striving (and thriving) in the male-dominated world. 

Ripper is an atmospheric, fast-paced thriller involving a stunningly brilliant teenaged sleuth who must unmask a serial killer in Allende’s adopted city of San Francisco.

She has won a multitude of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

www.isabelleallende.com