The Women Books & More’s Podcast

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