This came strongly recommended by several friends. I liked it a lot, but wasn't completely blown away. Perhaps they built it up too much? Some stellar writing though, and it was a great airplane book.

--this book actually pissed me off. It's set in 1907, and throws in every convenient liberal historical twist possible. Now, I'm a liberal historian, but the confluence of coincidences just didn't ring true. Along with a few other things. The selling point was that it was set around Grace Brown's murder, a murder made famous in Dreiser's book An American Tragedy and the movie A Place in the Sun. The murder was such a minor part of the book that I felt gypped.

I've enjoyed some of Hiassen's other books, but this one really grossed me out

I really enjoyed this book--it's basically a racial history of Dallas. A bit heavy-handed in parts, but does offer a fresh perspective on local history.

I reviewed this for the Journal of the West. It's a great reference work, filled with some great stories, but not the best narrative.

At first, I really enjoyed it. He had chapter titles like "Typhoid Sucks" He was tellilng history with wit, humor, and personality. And then he made, what to me at least, was a glaring error. He started talking about the 1900 Chicago World's Fair. There was no World's Fair in Chicago in 1900. There was one in 1893 and 1933. In 1900 (and I looked it up, because I was pissed), the only World's Fair was in Paris. France, not Texas. And though this is a fairly minor error, it is the kind that's fairly easy to check. So, I became a little suspicious of the rest of the book. He didn't do a terrible job, but it wasn't fabulous either. Not a bad effort to get people interested in history (and I always enjoy efforts at popular history), and it had a good "further reading" list. But it's not getting promoted to my bookshelf and instead, is headed back to half price books.

A great compliation of fiction and non-fiction from, you guessed it, western women writers. I didn't read every single passage, but I read most of it, and a few writers intrigued me enought that I will have to pick up their works one of these days. The collection had a wonderful variety and breadth, despite the usual limitations for writers (poor minorities usually don't have time to write).
However, there were a ton of typos. A Ton! And it was annoying. I was tempted to get out my red pen and wondered what kind of grad student they got to proof the manuscript. These editiors should be way beyond these amateur mistakes (as should the publisher).

I love the story of Zorro--there's something about a man and his sword. And this book got pretty good reviews, and I've enjoyed some of Allende's other work. But I've found that Allende can be uneven--for instance, I liked Daugher of Fortune, but thought it's sequel, Portrait in Sepia was only okay. Parts of Zorro as brilliant--beautifully written and powerful. And parts of it were ridiculous crap. She would do this thing where instead of writing dialog, she would summarize the conversation in a long paragraph, which both simplified the action and moved the story along too fast. Where was the nuance? Despite all this, it was still pretty readable, it just won't have a spot on my bookshelf.

Cartwright is a journalist, not a historian. He tells a good story, but I missed the footnotes. And his chronology jumped around a bit. Not a bad book, but not a great book either. It will stay on my shelf though, because of the whole Texas thing.

Written by an educator at Orchard House (Alcott's home), I was instantly intrigued--after all, I'm a musuem educator! I'm always cautious of books that take very famous people and imagine the rest of the story. Occasionally, I am horrified (though I rarely stop reading--it's that whole accident on a freeway syndrome). However, this book was fabulous. A wonderful psychological study of a woman who marries late in life to a genius--and finds that marriage to Emerson is not at all what she or he expected. There's lot of name dropping, but it's not forced--since everyone who was anyone in the mid-19th century hung out in Concord in Emerson's house. I do wonder about one of the major twists in this book involving Thoreau (don't want to spoil it), but based on the little I know about the Concord people, the book rang true. Of course, an expert would probably have a heart attack. Read it for the stuff about marriage and sacrifices.