BOOKPATHS

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007)

Loving Frank is Nancy Horan’s fictional account of the “shocking” love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Mamah Borthwick Cheney (1869-1914).  Although other places figure prominently in the novel, including Oak Park, Illinois, where visitors can still see the home Wright designed for Mamah, her husband, Edwin, and children; and Europe where the couple tries to escape the scandal of their affair; all seem to lead to Taliesin, the home Wright builds for the two of them in a Wisconsin valley he’d known since childhood.  Here, where the couple settles in 1911, scandal seems to ease slightly and a small measure of peace is found, but then a horrible tragedy strikes.

‘How different from the house on East Avenue,’ she thought.  In Oak Park, the kind of building Frank had put up, despite being called a ;prairie house,’ turned inward toward the hearth and family life and turned its back on the street, because there was no real prairie beyond the door, only other houses.

Here, Taliesin opened its arms to what was outside – the sun and sky and green hills and black earth.  Far more than the house on East Avenue, this house promised good times.  It was truly for her, with its terraces and courtyard and gardens so like the Italian villas she had loved.  Yet it wasn’t an Italian villa.  It had elements of the prairie house but it was not one.  Taliesin was original, unlike anything sles she had ever been in – a truly organic house that was ‘of’ the hill. – from Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website (Extensive information)

Taliesin Preservation, Inc., Spring Green, Wisconsin

Frank Lloyd Preservation Trust, Oak Park, Illinois

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Born on April 30th

David Thompson
1770 in London, England

Juhan Liiv
1864 in Alatskivi, Estonia

Jaroslav Hasek
1883 in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic)

Alice B. Toklas
1877 in San Francisco, California, USA

John Crowe Ransom
1888 in Pulaski, Tennessee, USA

Gerda Lerner
1920 in Vienna, Austria

Hugh Hood
1928 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Larry Niven
1938 in Los Angeles, California, USA

Known Space:  The Future Worlds of Larry Niven

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
1940 in Rochester, Minnesota

Explore the Natural World and More with Dorothy Hinshaw Patent

Annie Dillard
1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Annie Dillard – Official Website

John Boyne
1971 in Dublin, Ireland

The John Boyne Official Website

New York; United States

Narrative of Sojourner Truth, by Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998; and various editions; first published privately in 1850.)

Born Isabella Baumfree in 1797, Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843.  Her memoir, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave, dictated to her friend Olive Gardner, was first published privately in 1850.  The narrative describes her “experiences as a slave in upstate New York and her transformation into an extraordinary abolitionist, feminist, orator, and preacher.” One year after its publication, Sojourner Truth would stand before the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, and deliver her famous 'Ain’t I a Woman” speech.

At this memorable time, Isabella was struck off, for the sum of one hundred dollars, to one John Nealy, of Ulster County, New York; and she has an impression that in this sale she was connected with a lot of sheep.  She was now nine years of age, and her trials in life may be dated from this period.  She says, with emphasis, 'Now the war begun.'  – from The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Related Websites

Penguin Classics

Project Gutenberg Online Edition

Emancipation Hall at the Capitol Visitor Center, Washington, D.C.

A bust of Sojourner Truth was unveiled at the Capitol yesterday, 126 years after the death of “the fierce advocate who railed against slavery and for women’s rights”

The 60-minute ceremony, straddling the noon hour, was a feel-good celebration, capping a 10-year struggle to enshrine the 19th-century legend in the Capitol. There were gospel songs and tribute songs and hats worthy of Easter Sunday. – from “Truth’s Rightful Place on the Hill,” by Neely Tucker, The Washington Post

Dalkey, Ireland

Liza Foreman visits novelist Maeve Binchy and her husband, children’s book writer Gordon Snell at their “brick cottage” in Dalkey.

Mrs. Binchy, 68, and her husband, the children’s book writer Gordon Snell, 76, live in a brick cottage built in 1847, on a winding road near the train station, several trendy restaurants and a traditional Irish pub that is often more convenient for meals than their diminutive kitchen. 'If we are in the hallway next to the front door, I will often say to Gordon, ‘Come on, let’s go to the pub. It’s closer,’ Mrs. Binchy said. – from “Iriah Cottage Becomes Authors’ Home,” by Liza Foreman, The New York Times

The Nebula Awards

2008 Nebula and Andre Norton Award Winners

Best Novel
Powers, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Best Novella
The Spacetime Pool, by Catherine Asaro

Best Novelette
Pride and Prometheus, by John Kessel

Best Short Story
“Trophy Wives,” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Best Script
WALL-E, Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon; Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

Andre Norton Award
Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room), by Usabeau S. Wilce

2009 Award Honorees

Solstice Award
A. J. Budrys

Author Emerita
M. J. Engh

Solstice Award
Marty Greenberg

Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master
Harry Harrison

Ray Bradbury Award
Joss Wheldon

Solstice Award
Kate Wilhelm

For additional information, visit The Nebula Awards website.

Berkeley, California; United States

Edible Schoolyard: a Universal Idea, by Alice Waters (San Francisco, CA:  Chronicle Books, 2008)

The incomparable Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, describes how “she and a small group of teachers and volunteers turned over long-abandoned soil at an urban middle school in Berkeley and planted the Edible Schoolyard,” creating at once a unique opportunity for Berkeley students and “a visionary model for sustainable farming and childhood nutrition and a call to action for schools across the country.”

I’m going to tell a positive story, here, shaped from my own memories of the next several years – about how a public school principal and a British gardener, a cook named Esther, and a lot of teachers, students, and parents made something beautiful happen in a blighted place.  It became many things at once, the Edible Schoolyard, including a garden where children join their science teachers in growing and harvesting Brandywine tomatoes and golden raspberries along the way to learning about biology, ecology, and chemistry.  Inside its working kitchen, a teacher might explain ancient history through the hand grinding of wheat berries into flour and the baking of bread.  And it has a communal dining table where many of our students eat the only shared meal of the day, and where the civilizing rituals of the table have become part of the larger curriculum.  – from Edible Schoolyard: a Universal Idea, by Alice Waters

Related Websites

The Edible Schoolyard

Publisher’s Website

Chez Panisse

American Masters

Edinburgh, Scotland

Visit Ian Rankin’s website for a tour of Rebus’s Edinburgh.

Edinburgh plays an important role throughout the Rebus novels; a character itself, as brooding and as volatile as Rebus.  The Edinburgh depicted in the novels is far short of the beautiful city which tourists in their thousands flood to visit.  Hidden behind the historic buildings and elegant facades is the world that Rebus inhabits. – from Ian Rankin Website

Sag Harbor, New York, U.S.

Charles McGrath talks with Colson Whitehead, whose new novel, Sag Harbor, is “an autobiographical, first-person, adolescent-coming-of-age story.”

What distinguishes ‘Sag Harbor’ from all those first novels that Mr. Whitehead spurned back in the ’90s is that it deliberately avoids a climax or big revelation. ‘I wanted to make it true to people’s experience of summer,’ he said. ‘You have all these big dreams about how you’re going to become a new person, and at the end you’re only .001 percent smarter.’ And ‘Sag Harbor’ is set not in the moneyed, Hamptonish part of town but in the mostly African-American section of Azurest, where Mr. Whitehead’s family has summered since the 1940s. – from “Coming of Age in Sag Harbor Amid Privilege and Paradox,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times

Alice Walker Exhibition, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

“The first public exhibition of papers and other memorabilia from the extraordinary archives of Georgia-born Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker” opened on April 23.  Located in The Schatten Gallery of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, ‘A Keeping of Records: the Art and Life of Alice Walker’ “features 200 items drawn from one of the most complete archives in existence.  The exhibition continues through September 27, 2009.