MADreads

What you wear can tell a story
A review of Costume Design by Deborah Landis

 Do you watch movies? How much are you affected by the clothing in the film? Or do you not even notice it unless something about it strikes the wrong note? Or are the costumes so gorgeous that you really don't notice the story or anything else? Landis’s beautiful book, part of the Film Craft series, is a wonderful book if you have answers to any of these questions. It includes brief biographies of award winning costume designers and in-depth interviews with them along with photographs and ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on October 23, 2012 | 0 comments

Unshakable family bonds
A review of Little Night by Luanne Rice

 Clare and Anne are two sisters who grow up extremely close, used to protecting each other in the middle of their dysfunctional family. Rice opens the story with the younger sister, Clare, under arrest for the attempted homicide of her sister’s husband. The lies that send Clare to prison and separate the two sisters for the next twenty years mix with the lies and demands Anne and her husband place on their two children, shaping all of their lives.  Released from prison, Clare slowly regains ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on October 17, 2012 | 0 comments

Strange fate
First World War mysteries by Elizabeth Speller

 In The Return of Captain John Emmett author Elizabeth Speller introduces former infantry soldier Laurence Bartram. Like most of the men returning from the trenches and battlefields of Europe, Laurence has his own memories and past to deal with, including the death of his wife and unborn ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on September 25, 2012 | 0 comments

Fannie’s last supper

A review of Fannie’s Last Supper: Recreating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook by Chris Kimball

 Chris Kimball is the founder of Cook’s Illustrated and host of America’s Test Kitchen. In Fannie's Last Supper he details a re-creation of a multi-course dinner based on the Fannie Farmer cookbook of 1896. The result is an interesting amalgram of cooking history, a walking tour of Boston, the complexities of making recipes from over a hundred years ago palatable to modern taste, and transferring the whole to ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on September 18, 2012 | 0 comments

Baseball gone wild in Milwaukee
A review of Bushville Wins! The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves… by John Klima

 OK, OK, I admit to being a longtime Braves fan thanks to my dad being a native of Milwaukee and distant memories of attending games in the early 1960’s as a child. And yes, I did follow the Brewers especially in the Yount years. But until the 1990’s and the rise of Glavine, Maddox, and Smoltz, the glory days were those early years in Milwaukee. With Bushville Klima has done a wonderfully entertaining book about those days with a focus on the players such as Eddie Matthews, Warren ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on September 10, 2012 | 0 comments

Parisian legacy
A review of Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends by Mary McAuliffe

 It was a time of upheaval: political, economic, social, artistic, scientific.  Tension between the normal, historically common way of thinking and a radically new way of looking at and reacting to everyday things seemed to be everywhere. America in the 1960’s? No, it's actually Paris, France, 1870-1901, but both eras were eerily similar in many ways. Mary McAuliffe’s book Dawn of the Belle Époque: The ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on June 4, 2012 | 1 comment

Staging a life
A review of Best Staged Plans by Claire Cook

 Professional home stager Sandy Sullivan has reached a turn in the road. The kids are grown and have their own lives (except Luke who has come back from college to live downstairs in the “bat cave”). She and her husband Greg have this beautiful old house they spent their married life renovating but Sandy thinks now that Greg is retired it is time they downsize and do some of the other things they had always talked about. But no one else seems to think that there is any urgency in ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on September 14, 2011 | 0 comments

So happy together
A review of So Happy Together by Maryann McFadden

 Claire Noble feels that finally it is her turn to live the life that until now she had only dreamed of.  Long the responsible one: raising her only daughter without any help from her irresponsible ex- husband, staying close to home in order to help her aging parents, being a sounding board for her friend with the alcoholic husband and special needs child.  But now she will be shortly married to Rick, leaving her job of teaching history at the local high school, and moving to Arizona ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on March 25, 2010 | 0 comments

Grave secret
A review of Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris

 I know that Charlaine Harris’s series featuring Sookie Stackhouse is garnering a lot of attention, helped along by the HBO series ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on February 9, 2010 | 0 comments

She done me right
A review of Always Been There by Michael Streissguth

 I admit to having a love/hate relationship with country music. This dates back to my parents playing 24/7 what was then known as country/western music and there is a limit to how much I can listen to he/she/it has done me wrong and I am going to cry/get my revenge/move on.  However, I have to admit to liking some members of the fraternity, determined by vocals and an their ability to either write or interpret good songs or at least find someone who can—for example, ...read more

Reviewed by Liz - Alicia Ashman on January 29, 2010 | 0 comments

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