FTWBooks2024

Author Hal Borland and his wife live in a home on a 100 acre farm in Connecticut.  One night in the 1950s, during a blizzard they hear a dog howl at their door.  When they open the door there are two dogs, an adult and a puppy, both black and white.  The Borlands don't want a dog. . Their careers involve their leaving for trips from time to time, but they can't leave the dogs out in the storm, so take them in.  They advertise in the newspaper, but nobody comes forward to keep the dogs. They keep the dogs, but don't consider them "theirs."  But they name the dogs Pat and Mike.  Hal and the dogs go hunting with the dogs for rabbits (I always wondered what they did with the rabbits...do they bury them, as they do the woodchucks they catch). When there is some danger of dogs chasing deer, which is against  the law, though neither Pat nor Mike is responsible, Borland ends up giving Mike  to a kid who has just lost his dog and the house becomes a one-d...

This David Baldacci book is actually two books.  The date is 1968.  It tells the story of Jack Lee, a white lawyer in Southern Virginia, who is talked into representing  Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with brutally killing an elderly, wealthy white couple for whom he worked .    Desiree DuBose is a Black lawyer from Chicago who has devoted her life to furthering the causes of justice and equality for everyone. She comes to Freeman County and enters a partnership with Lee in a legal battle against the best prosecutor in the Commonwealth and a judge who is a former member of the KKK. In addition to the actual story of investigating the murder charges, this book shows how terrible life is for Black residents in the area.  At one point, DuBose goes into a Catholic church to pray and is ordered out by the monsignor because no n_____ can enter his church.  Both attorneys face threats to their lives, Jack's office is burned down.  If you thi...

 I have been a fan of Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, pretty much since she started her TV show on The Food Network.  I love watching her make food, so simple and easy and, apparently, delicious. Now she has written a memoir and it's delightful.  I got it as soon as it was released and read it pretty much non stop until I finished it. My goodness, what a life she has led!  Coming from a family with a rate-a-holic father who would pull her around the floor by her hair when he was angry with her, and a mother who was incapable of showing any affection whatsoever, from a childhood where she was told she was worthless, that nobody would like her, that she would never find anyone who wanted to marry her, she has accomplished such an amazing number of things and has the marriage that everyone would dream of. After working at many jobs in many fields, she was working at a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, DC and hating it, when she saw a tiny ad for the sale of a sp...