Julia Sneden
Julia Sneden was a writer, friend, wife, mother, Grandmother, care-giver and Senior Women Web's Resident Observer. Her career included editorial work for Sunset Magazine, 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios as well as teaching. Julia was a passionate opponent of this country’s educational system, which she felt was floundering. She will be greatly missed as the heart of this website and this editor's friend of fifty years.
Julia Sneden's archive of articles.
Culture Watch, March 2010
Joan Cannon, Jill Norgren and Julia Sneden Review: Kristin Hannah's The Winter Gardenis a slightly flawed but enjoyable tale about people who fit the fiction, but some of them perhaps not quite to the life; Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Won… more »
February's CultureWatch
Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale published by Vintage is an early non-fiction work by the noted Indian novelist (whose work The Glass Palace is a favorite of mine). Ghosh wrote In an Antique Land after living in 1980 as a graduate student in an Egyptian farming village. He excavates a little known aspect of Middle Eastern history in a book that moves back and forth from the 12th century to the 20th, detecting and describing the interactions, real and imagined, of an Indian slave and local Egyptian merchants, holy men, and sorcerers.Gardeners and lovers of mysteries will be pleased to learn that several of the books of British born (John) Beverley Nichols have been re-issued by Timber Press. In Down the Garden Path, I chortled at lines such as "I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl." I expect the same witty, high-spirited writing in Merry Hall. And if I wish my flowers served up with a bit of murder and sleuthing, Nichols' detective novel, *The Moonflower, praised by novelists Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen, also rests on my to-read pile. more »
In Pursuit of Happiness
Mr. Thomas Jefferson was a clever man. He recognized that what makes one person happy may not be the same as what makes another person happy. All that his declaration advocated was allowing citizens to pursue whatever they thought might make them happy. Even then, there are obvious limits on how we may pursue our happiness. Murdering your mother-in-law might make you happy, but if you pursue it to completion you won’t be happy when the cops show up. more »
Mirror Mirror: Self-portraits By Women Artists & On The Nature of Women: Tudor and Jacobean Portraits of Women
Maggi Hambling: 'She works all the hours she can, waiting, working, until the muse arrives, as she puts it. If the muse doesn't show up, Hambling destroys the canvas she's working on' ". more »