Graphic

Radium Girls:  The Dark Story of America's Shining Women was graphic and hard to read in many places.  These women, how they suffered.  But their deaths and pain were not in vain.  What a story.  So very tragic.  And greed.  The love of money truly is the root of all evil.  You can read more about them here.

You Learning Something New...

every day, so the saying goes.
I have an aunt who hates to read fiction because she says that she wants a good she can learn something from reading.  We get into debates about this all of the time!  I have learned so much from fiction.  I read some non-fiction, sure, but I am much more heavy on the fiction.
It is rare that I read any book and don't find myself going on, researching more information by something that struck me as new or interesting or horrifying or unbelievable.
Frances O'Roark Dowell's books are always, always teaching me. Life lessons, like kindness and discovery and forgiveness and also a lot of "fact" lessons, too.  Shooting the Moon, for example, sent me off into exploring more about Vietnam War, Chicken Boy taught me about, well, obviously, chickens!
Anybody Shining was a look into the life of those who lived in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina  in the 1920s.  More specifically, I had never heard of settlement schools.  There is a lot to learn and think about in Anybody Shining.  As usual, Dowell does an incredible job of getting right into the head of a tween, with the worries of friendship and acceptance that are universal and timeless.  But this book also deals with bigger issues, like the helpful outsiders who come to save those who are "less fortunate" while not realizing how much they can learn from those whom they are trying to help.  This is neat book, different and yet comfortably familiar in that it features a mountain girl from almost one hundred years ago and makes her instantly relatable to us in the here and now.
I really loved it, but I had a hard time with the Appalachian dialect, though that is my ignorance, not a fault of the author.

Witness

Witness took a little bit for me to get into, but once I did, I was hooked.  I think that listening to a book with twelve different POVs is hard.  For me anyway, but once I figured out the voices, the story came alive.  Karen Hesse wrote two books that I didn't really like at all, but I liked them well enough not to give up this one and I am so glad that I did.  This is an historical fiction one, set in 1923-24 in a small town in Vermont.  It details what happens to a group of folks when the Klan comes to town.  It is definitely a book that makes one very, very angry.  And angrier still that there is still so much racism and hate today.  The audio book has a great interview with Karen Hesse at the end which is really great as well.

Shame

Rereading Chiefs was not what I expected.  I read it when I was thirteen, shortly after the mini-series came out because I loved the movie.  After our county got OneClick Audio, which I LOVE, Chiefs was the first book I downloaded.
It's been a long time since I read an amazing Stuart Woods book.  Even though I still love him and will read everything I can about Stone, as I've admitted in the past, Woods just doesn't write real books anymore.  Chiefs surprised me because it is truly a classic.  Wonderfully drawn characters, historical content that is truly interesting, suspense like you wouldn't believe and the dialogue is excellent.  This is a fantastic book.
But it was a painful book.
The book spans more than forty years and tells a series of murders that spans that long, as well.  It is told in three books:  Will Henry Lee, Sonny Butts and Tucker Watts, three chiefs of the Delano, Georgia police department.  During those forty years someone in Delano is kidnapping, molesting and murdering young boys.  When the first two chiefs get close to exposing the murderer, they are killed.  The Sonny Butts book and the Tucker Watts books are the hardest to read.  I had to skip around and go backward because of the horrors that Sonny Butts put African American through and the racism present in general.  Tucker Watts' story is the same.  This is a shameful part of American history when it comes to the treatment of African Americans.  Personally I think present day is also a shameful part of American history as well.  We are not much better off.
Fantastic but very disturbing book.