The novel, Rules of Civility, starts off with an intriguing prolog narrated by the central character, Katey Kontent. Since the author’s name is Amor it’s possible to imagine a woman writing the book. But no. The author is not the female narrator in her 20s in the crucial year (1938) of the story; but Amor Towles does a good job of slipping into another gender and another time. The place is Manhattan; the setting is the city from New Year’s Eve 1937 through 1938.

The story involves the young and beautiful in the glamorous pre-war days; the rich and the aspiring rich. In that particular setting the author presents the wise-cracking, stylish and clever characters that most of us only know from black and white movies of the era.

Frankly, the setting in the distant past, works to the author’s advantage. Not many are still around who can challenge the verisimilitude of the world Towles constructs. Without that constraint, readers can sit back and enjoy the writing on its considerable merits, and it’s a good story.

The book is stylish and entertaining but two weeks after finishing it I realized I hadn’t given it a second thought. For me, that is unusual, and not in a good way. However, the book sparked an interesting discussion among book group members–so my reactions may not be typical!

I had a boyfriend in college with strong ties to a commune overlooking Puget Sound on a beautiful island mid- point between Seattle and Canada.  We spent long summer weekends there enjoying the quiet off-the-grid beauty of the natural world. I’ve often wondered what became of the community– especially two young children, Heron and Critter.

 Finally someone has addressed this intriguing part of American history. Arcadia is a novel that explores life for Bit (the oddball name sounds authentic), who was born and raised in the fictional commune.  Arcadia is founded by intelligent, well-meaning and committed people.  Then, as is often the case, success attracted a different crowd contributing to its demise. 

The first part of the novel is brilliantly told from Bit Stone’s childhood point of view.   Arcadia is a large commune with a lot of activity.  Sights, sounds and particularly smells are lavishly described—often in lyrical language.  Bit is a sensitive child who although he suffers from his mother’s depression, a lack of food, the cold, and a general lack of creature comforts, has no interest is leaving the only home he’s ever known.

This part of the book is packed with thought-provoking details.  Except for the author’s irritating decision not to use punctuation to indicate speech, the book has its strengths.  Lauren Groff did a great job on commune life. For example, the commune is led by a charismatic musician, Handy, who becomes predictably corrupt.  The powerful effect of popular music on the counter-culture of the time was accurate and believable.  However, 1) such a commune would have thrived slightly earlier in time, not after Jonestown, or Ronald Reagan’s election and 2) a raison d’êtrefor the commune (the draft for the war in Vietnam) would have been more prominent in everyone’s consciousness.   On the real-life commune I knew, people dodging the draft on their way to Canada were often drop-ins.  Their unexpected stays often depleted the resources of the generous community.

The last part of the novel was weak.  There is very little plot and what there is seems silly (a pandemic named ‘SARI’).  It’s as if Groff ran out of juice after her strong start.  I wanted to learn how Bit handled the transition to life beyond Arcadia, but that was skipped over.  As with the lives of Heron and Critter, I still wonder.

The air reeked of rotting bananas where we cut through the plantation.  There was also the faint salty scent of the ocean far below and an occassional burst of jasmin.  From where we stopped, we could see our boat, and the other sailboats, in the harbor.  But something was wrong with the beautiful picture; Gene’s boat, Paragrin, was not alongside Velela but was at an odd angle separate from the other boats, and headed out to sea.

We were too far away to see what was happening. 

Later, at the bar where people on the island met, we heard beer- infused sailors excitedly and loudly tell the tale.  Our captain, and the young blonde captain of another boat, had taken a dinghy out to the anchorless Paragrin, jumped aboard, and corralled her back to safety.  Charley donated our spare anchor to secure the boat in safe waters. 

All of us at the bar were certain Gene would be eternally grateful.  His boat, and that meant everything he owned, had been saved for him while he was away.

But when Gene arrived from his hike to the other side of the island and learned of the afternoon’s events, he seemed relaxed about it.  It was not at all what those at the bar expected.  That was just the first indication that Gene, who we would meet at other island on our way across the Pacific, was an unusual guy.

Math For Real Life for Dummies is the Swiss Army knife of reference books.  It’s useful, packed with the necessary and easy to find tools, and compact enough (at about 6” x 9”) to fit where needed.  You can take the book on an airline and no questions will be asked.

The author, Barry Schoenborn, has a remarkable gift for explaining, in a funny and light-hearted way, how to solve the quantitative problems of everyday life.   

Before the book came along, I tried to explain how to calculate miles/per gallon to an intelligent person with limited math skills. I thought it was obvious—didn’t everyone’s father drill that as a requirement for driving?  Well, no, it turns out.  It was frustrating to discover my false assumptions and to fail in my task.   That’s when the hours spent so long ago by my teachers and parents requiring me to memorize the multiplication tables finally made sense.   Mr. Schoenborn kindly starts with the basics and calmly shows how to solve problems for everyone—even those not blessed with a strong math foundation. 

Although the title says for Dummies, don’t let that turn you off.  Even if you think you know how to calculate gambling odds, for example, it’s enlightening and entertaining to see what the author reveals.  There are so many things you may have known once (like how to calculate how much paint to buy), but Mr. Schoenborn takes you through it. 

For generations who’ve grown up with calculators everywhere it must seem unnecessary to learn basic math skills (including memorizing those multiplication tables), but as the author points out, it allows for mental math and quick estimates, and it’s the basis for many kinds of calculations.  The book also shows how to analyze and simplify everyday problems. In our market based economy real life math skill are survival skills.

This book is a must-have for any home and every car’s glove compartment.

Over dinner in a private room of the fragrant restaurant, we gathered to discuss Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Finest Hour by Lynne Olson.  The eight of us sat around a long rectangular wooden table agreeing how little we had known about the topic prior to reading the book. We were all born in the 1940s or 1950s, so that war was important to our parents and grandparents.  Not so much to our generation.  Someone sagely suggested we each say a bit about how our parents experienced the war.

This meeting took place in northern California but several of us had been raised elsewhere.  The experiences were not just geographically diverse our parents had wildly different war experiences. 

A couple of fathers stayed at home in civil defense capacities, due to their age or family responsibilities. 

One of our fathers was unlucky enough to be shot down over France early in the war and endured near starvation in German prisoner-of-war camps only to be almost killed during a Soviet liberation. 

Another father had the inverse war story.  He managed to arrive in North Africa and Italy after the fighting, when dancing, drinking, and having a good time was all he reported doing for the duration. 

One set of grandparents had the misfortune of being Jewish in Eastern Europe (but the blonde looks to pass as gentile).  Many of their friends and family were unable to escape and lost their lives not just everything they owned. 

My dad sailed across the Pacific on a cheaply made naval vessel dodging cyclones, torpedoes, and bombs, mostly successfully.  Only recently have I learned about this war experience and his survivor guilt, as it just wasn’t discussed when I was a kid.

Whatever family’s war time experiences, few Americans fully comprehended what was happening in London prior to the U. S. entering the war.  The book gives a vivid, sometimes intimate look at the key players in London prior to and during World War 2.  Many of the important ones (Gil Winant, being the most important), I’d never heard of.  The secret lives and loves of all are revealed, along with the mind numbing geo-political escapades of the great powers.

The book is a treasury of information and it is guaranteed to get you thinking about a very important time in history.

Smashwords.com distributes an eBook edition of Right Now Is Perfect (as well as thousands of other titles) in all major eBook formats.  During the week of March 3^rd through March 9^th, a special ‘read an eBook’ celebration is underway.  To support this effort I’m making my book free (use the coupon RW100 during checkout).  If you’d like a copy, or know someone who might, this is an opportunity to get it free.  Just go to

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/29559

It’s an adventure in paradise when a mid-life divorcee ditches her IT career to sail across the Pacific with a new lover but then the unexpected happens.

Even if you’ve already got your copy of my book, there are many other books for free this week at Smashwords.com.

While sailing through the islands of the South Pacific a few years ago, I had a recurring question, ‘How did these isolated islands get populated?’  There are many unknowns but our knowledge is expanding thanks to fields of science providing tantalizing clues about the genetic, linguistic, and physical culture of the people of the South Pacific.

But, until more is known, you can be thoroughly entertained by the excellent new book  by Kathleen Flanagan Rollins, ‘Past the Last Island’ a speculative prehistory of the area circa 14000 years ago.

A group of islanders face a variety of problems forcing some to sail past the last known island in search of a new home.  In this quest, they develop new boat designs as well as many other inventions that allow for long distance ocean travel. 

Rollins creates a robust universe populated by individuals who engage in complex games and intricate life skills.  Difficult problems are solved by imaginative and creative solutions undertaken by cooperating groups of people.  Not everyone is good or positive and not everything goes perfectly, but it’s always interesting to see how the characters will react and what will happen.

This novel will allow you to escape into a fully formed world, with plenty of interesting things to consider.  It’s hard not to wonder if people from our culture could ever manage such feats.

Memory, history, and demographics all play a role in a person’s understanding of the world.  For the first years of the baby boomer generation, only a few years separate history from memory in the case of World War II.   I am such an early baby boomer.  Although born in California and raised during the 1950s in the greater Washington      D. C. area, I never heard my dad or any of his peers (virtually all the males were veterans) talk about the then- recent war. 

As a child, even as a young adult, World War II seemed ancient history to me: not something having an influence on my life.  That is a fluke of my childhood memory.  To get a very different perspective on memory and history of the war, you can’t do better than to read, A Tale of Survival: From War-Ravaged Europe To The Promise of America by Tom Kando.

Tom was born in Hungary in 1941.  As such his earliest memories occurred right in the middle of the conflict.  He and his family experienced German and Russian invasions before fleeing to France.  Thus Tom spent the 1950s in post-war-torn France (a far cry from my suburban D.C. world).  Tom later moved to Holland before coming alone to this country as a Fulbright Scholar.

Kando has had an amazing life according to his book which straddles the line between memoir and historical fiction.  Whether true or imagined, the first portion of the book does an amazing job of bringing to light the sensibilities of a bright child in that time and place.  Kando shows how a young boy idealized his beautiful and talented parents, how he resented his younger siblings, and how a child experienced the reality of foreign soldiers occupying his home (not just his country).  I’d never thought about the difficulties of growing up in Europe right after the war.  Kando does a wonderful job of revealing events though the eyes of a gifted and insightful child. 

The story continues in America during the 1960s nearly to the present.  Perhaps because some of that time and place is familiar territory, I found it less compelling.  But, for me, the insight into Europe during and after the war seen by someone fairly close to my age was priceless.

Dirty dishes in the sink, half-read books tossed aside, favorite TV programs languishing unwatched on the DVR: evidence of how far I’d surrendered blissfully and completely to ‘A Woman in White.’  The book was first written as a serial magazine story (in 1859) by Wilkie Collins a sometime collaborator with Charles Dickens. The pacing and plot architecture are superb.  For a Victorian novel it seems modern—perhaps because the author, someone I’d never heard of, lived a very flamboyant life which started out in Italy where his father had been an artist.

Collins first experienced Victorian England as a teen sent there to school, which seems to have allowed him to view the society as a keen participant/observer.  His characters are well-drawn and often laugh-out-loud funny.  One of the most interesting female characters in Victorian literature, Marian,  as well as one of the most cunning villains of all time, Count Fosco,  are to be found in this story.  The author shows us in various interesting ways how people of different sensibilities and class react to problems.  Mysteries are solved; rich villains are defeated by the cleverness and persistence of middle class heroes.  It’s a great story full of vivid almost cinematic scenes and engaging characters.  All of this exists in a story about stolen identity, and inheritance issues — run of the mill themes of Victorian novels– and yet I couldn’t put the book down.

I recently spent an evening listening to one of the great speakers of our time.  One of the things he spoke about was how his upbringing helped him.  Until the age of ten, his family had no television so entertainment consisted of tales told around the dinner table.  The rule before speaking was that you had to first retell the previous person’s story.  In other words, before speaking it was necessary to master the art of listening. 

Actually sharing a meal around a table of conversationalists might be just as rare as finding a family without a TV today.  But, learning to listen well enough to retell someone else’s story is a valuable tool. 

Another tip from former President Clinton about influences from his childhood was the importance of showing children possibilities.  When Bill was about twelve, the then Governor of Arkansas allowed school children to visit the Governor’s office.  During a school field trip, Bill sat at the Governor’s desk and imagined for the first time a future course of his life. Sometimes a small thing can be a huge thing in the life of a child.  Whatever else we do in our lives, taking an opportunity to encourage a child is always a good thing.

Clinton also encouraged me to listen to those I disagree with.  First, because none of us are always right.  There will be times when adversaries have good ideas.  Also, by listening and appreciating good ideas of others, there is a better chance for success in getting my own ideas to succeed.  I found this advice hardest to accept.

He also reminded me to allow my adversaries to save public face—even if I have to be tough behind closed-doors.

Bill Clinton looked almost frail.  He is now an older man who has become a vegan and has dropped weight since his time as President.   However, he never paused or stumbled for a word during his fascinating, fact-filled two hour talk.  He was charming, eloquent and direct.  It only seemed like he was talking to me.  There were thousands equally enthralled in the auditorium.