Donald Delano Wright - To Die is Not Enough: A True Account of Murder and Retribution

75. To Die is Not Enough: A True Account of Murder and Retribution by Donald Delano Wright (1974)
Length: 238 pages
Genre: True Crime
Started: 3 September 2012
Finished: 6 September 2012
Where did it come from? From a Library Book Sale
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 10 October 2007
Why do I have it? I like true crime and had actually never heard of the Don Anthony White case.

On Christmas Eve, 1959, Don White, a 22-year-old mentally disturbed black man, brutally murdered two people - a white great-grandmother and a black longshoreman. At his trial, his lawyers introduced evidence of an intolerable childhood spent with an unbalanced foster mother and in various institutions, attempting to prove diminished responsibility for his acts. Don White was convicted of one count of First Degree Murder and one count of Second Degree Murder on May 27, 1960, and sentenced to death in Walla Walla Washington. By 1968, his conviction was commuted to life in prison.

Donald Delano Wright first learned of Don White's case as a court reporter for the Seattle Times. Through a series of newspaper articles that eventually resulted in To Die is Not Enough: A True Account of Murder and Retribution, the author became friends with Don White and would visit him consistently in the penitentiary. Donald Delano Wright passed away in November of 2007 at the age of 72.

I enjoyed this book although I thought it was rather dry in parts. It was also very sad and depressing to think about how Don White was so badly mistreated in his childhood. I give this book an A!

A! - (90-95%)

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight

Margaret Trudeau - Beyond Reason

74. Beyond Reason by Margaret Trudeau (1979)
Length: 241 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction
Started: 31 August 2012
Finished: 3 September 2012
Where did it come from? From a Library Book Sale
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 10 October 2007
Why do I have it? I like autobiographies and Margaret Trudeau's life has always interested me.

Margaret Trudeau is not known for living a cautious life. She blazed onto the national stage in 1971 as the ravishing 22-year-old bride of the 51-year-old Canadian Prime Minister. Their unlikely union, which produced three sons, ended in 1977 amid lurid headlines that Pierre Trudeau's erratic wife had gone off to photograph The Rolling Stones. In her 1979 autobiography, she fills in the details of her encounters with The Rolling Stones and other celebrities, her "long tunnel of darkness" experienced during her marriage and her affair with an unnamed man, later identified as senator Edward Kennedy.

I really enjoyed this book; this was the third time that I have read it and I will be keeping it on my bookshelf to read again some time. I give Beyond Reason an A+! and have put Margaret Trudeau's two other books, Consequences and Changing my Mind on my Wish List.

A+! - (96-100%)

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight

Reading Wrap-up for August at Moonshine and Rosefire

 

Hello everyone out there and I hope that you all had a terrific reading month for yourselves. I am known as Rosefire around the Internet and this is my new personal reading blog. I originally posted my reviews over at my daughter's blog, Emeraldfire's Bookmark but am now in the process of transferring them all over to my own blog. My daughter makes blogging look like so much fun that I thought that I would try it out for myself! :)

Anyway, I started out August with 681 unread books lying around the house and ended the month with 670 books unread. All the books that I acquired this month came from friends, Paperback Swap and Bookmooch.

Let me try to break down the influx for you:

Rereads
- Horror House by J. N. Williamson

Changes to the TBR pile

Read from my TBR pile (Yes! I am a reading machine :))
- Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy
- Unsolved Mysteries...Stranger Than Fiction by Clifford L. Linedecker
- Sea Glass by Anita Shreve  
- The Uncanny by Andrew Klavan
- Dancehall by Bernard F. Conners
- While I Was Gone by Sue Miller
- One Day at a Time by Danielle Steel  
- A Village Affair by Joanna Trollope
- All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve
- An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe

Added to my TBR pile (oh well, you win some and you lose some! Not too bad though, I suppose:))
- The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
- The Animal Hour by Andrew Klavan

Taken off my TBR pile and sent to a new home (Yay! Happy Dance! :))
- The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan
- The Devil's Hunt by P. C. Doherty
- True Crime by Andrew Klavan
- The Shadow Guest by Hillary Waugh
- Still Waters by Tami Hoag
- Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner

Well, there it is...the breakdown! All in all, a very good reading month for me. Here's a further breakdown:

Books Read: 11
Pages Read: 3,710
Grade Range: A+! to B+!

So, there you go! The reading month that was August. I hope that you all had an equally good reading month; if not a little better. :) See you all next month! :)

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight

Reading Wrap-up for August at Moonshine and Rosefire

 

Hello everyone out there and I hope that you all had a terrific reading month for yourselves. I am known as Rosefire around the Internet and this is my new personal reading blog. I originally posted my reviews over at my daughter's blog, Emeraldfire's Bookmark but am now in the process of transferring them all over to my own blog. My daughter makes blogging look like so much fun that I thought that I would try it out for myself! :)

Anyway, I started out August with 678 unread books lying around the house and ended the month with 667 books unread. All the books that I acquired this month came from friends, Paperback Swap and Bookmooch.

Let me try to break down the influx for you:

Rereads
- Horror House by J. N. Williamson

Changes to the TBR pile

Read from my TBR pile (Yes! I am a reading machine :))
- Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy
- Unsolved Mysteries...Stranger Than Fiction by Clifford L. Linedecker
- Sea Glass by Anita Shreve  
- The Uncanny by Andrew Klavan
- Dancehall by Bernard F. Conners
- While I Was Gone by Sue Miller
- One Day at a Time by Danielle Steel  
- A Village Affair by Joanna Trollope
- All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve
- An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe

Added to my TBR pile (oh well, you win some and you lose some! Not too bad though, I suppose:))
- The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
- The Animal Hour by Andrew Klavan

Taken off my TBR pile and sent to a new home (Yay! Happy Dance! :))
- The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan
- The Devil's Hunt by P. C. Doherty
- True Crime by Andrew Klavan
- The Shadow Guest by Hillary Waugh
- Still Waters by Tami Hoag
- Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner

Well, there it is...the breakdown! All in all, a very good reading month for me. Here's a further breakdown:

Books Read: 11
Pages Read: 3,710
Grade Range: A+! to B+!

So, there you go! The reading month that was August. I hope that you all had an equally good reading month; if not a little better. :) See you all next month! :)

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight

August's Book of the Month

Hello Everyone! I chose the picture posted above because it reminds me of reading to my daughter Mareena when she was little. Every afternoon until she was about eight or nine years old, we would take one of her books that she wanted to read or that she was reading and we would curl up together on my big bed. 

We would spend an hour or so reading a chapter of her book, and then take a nap together. Her absolutely favorite author at that time was an English author named Enid Blyton. Ahh, nice memories...

My picks for 'Books of the Month' will be decidedly more adult these days, but they will be from almost any genre. August's Book of the Month is: 

   An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe

Published as: An American Love Story  in April 1990

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Birth Name: Rona Jaffe

Born: 12 June 1931 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Died: 30 December 2005 in London, England

Canonical Name: Rona Jaffe

Pseudonyms: None

An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe was the seventy-third book that I read in 2012. I had had this book on my TBR bookshelf since April 1, 2009 although I didn't actually read it until August of 2012. It took me three days to read this book and it is definitely a keeper for me.

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight

Rona Jaffe - An American Love Story

73. An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe (1990)
Length: 423 pages
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Started: 28 August 2012
Finished: 31 August 2012
Where did it come from? From a Library Book Sale
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 1 April 2009
Why do I have it? I had read and enjoyed Mazes and Monsters several years ago by the same author.

Clay Bowen is a successful Hollywood television producer with several cleverly disguised rehashes of established hits to his credit. He is also a self-centered, womanizing schemer who has been married to former prima ballerina, Laura Hays, for almost twenty years - although they have been separated for most of that time. Laura had retired from the dance world to have her daughter - the elusive and secretive Nina - then turned to drugs and developed an eating disorder. Clay, having been totally alienated by his wife's clinginess and drug addiction, begins a relationship with best-selling author, Susan Josephs, writer of a book on spousal abuse.

Throughout their 17 years together, Clay constantly demeans Susan - stealing the rights to her New York magazine cover stories, and eventually ousting her from his Beverly Hills bungalow in favor of Bambi Green, a young, hopeful television ingenue searching for her big break.

This book is the story of how the lives of these four women - Laura, Nina, Susan and Bambi - with all their dreams of love and success, are totally intertwined with a charismatic womanizer whom they all mistakenly believe they need in their lives. I really loved this book because it showed just how Clay's separate relationships with all his women worked, or were dysfunctional to them all. I give this book an A+! and look forward to reading another book by Rona Jaffe very soon.

A+! - (96-100%)

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight

Anita Shreve - All He Ever Wanted

72. All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve (2003)
Length: 372 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Started: 24 August 2012
Finished: 27 August 2012
Where did it come from? From Paperback Swap
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 17 August 2012
Why do I have it? I like Anita Shreve as an author and have read and enjoyed several of her books in the past.

Etna Bliss has just moved to the New Hampshire town where her uncle is a college professor. In one single moment, her life is totally transformed: she is dining in a hotel downtown when a fire forces her outside into the snowy streets. Amid the smoke and chaos of that night she is glimpsed, standing under a street lamp, by a man who had been dining in the same room - a man who is so overwhelmed by the sight of her that he immediately rebuilds his life around a single goal: to marry Etna Bliss.

Nicholas Van Tassel is a proud and orderly man, ill equipped to deal with the ferocity of his love for Etna Bliss. But he is determined to have her, no matter what the cost. Riding a train south many years later, Nicholas reflects on the night of his first meeting with Etna, the drama that followed and struggles to comprehend the mystery his life became on that night.

I have to say that I really enjoyed this book and didn't want it to end. There were times during my reading that I almost felt sorry for Nicholas Van Tassel, stalker-type tendencies and all. To my mind, he was so wrapped up in his 'love at first sight' mentality that he was completely blinded to how unhappy Etna truly was in her life with him. I give this book an A+! and look forward to reading my next Anita Shreve book.

A+! - (96-100%)

Till we Meet Again, Glow Brightly as Moonlight