Gift Shopping
Balancing: A Mother and Farmer, Part of a National Archives Exhibit The Way We Worked
Jean Schnelle participated in all aspects of farming life — sorting cattle, driving tractors, and weeding — while also raising seven children. The 3,000 acre Schnelle farm has been owned by the family for five generations. Now almost 70 years old in 2005 and a grandmother of fifteen, Jean still helps out with farm work. more »
A Selection of Fiction for Children and Young Adult Readers Certain to Make Great Holiday Presents
Jill Norgren writes: Here is an opportunity for grandparents and special friends looking for children’s and young adult books to hear straight from the mouths of young readers. This year I asked about gift suggestions from my granddaughters, 17, 13, and 10, as well as young friends 4 to 15 who live in Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, and New York City. I asked each of them, "which books did you most enjoy reading this past year that you think others your age would also enjoy?" Some of their favorites are new, but many are classics. more »
Pretty Girl: Girl with a Pearl Earring makes a stop at The Frick in New York, the last leg of its American tour
Val Castronovo writes: Girl's head, shoulder, garments and accessories stand out against a dark, solid background, which is blackened now but once was translucent green. The effect is rather like the effect of looking at this painting in an otherwise empty room — just as everything is stripped away in the Oval Room so that our attention is laser-focused on Girl, so everything is stripped away in the background of the painting itself so that we zero in on the figure’s physiognomy and accoutrements, which signal mercantile wealth and prosperity. more »
Revisiting Favorite Books: The Forsytes and the Acquisitive Victorians
Joan L. Cannon writes:
John Galsworthy's descriptions of nature are ravishing, his limning of his characters clear enough for a crime sketch artist to draw them. This descriptive artistry and the revelatory dialogue show the reader within a hundred pages the contrasts and individuality of everyone who has anything to do with the advancing story of Soames and Irene, and also with the subplots enacted by other members of the Forsyte family. All are influenced by the motive principles of the Forsyte clan in general, Victorian society, and their admired Soames in particular.
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