Memoir Monday...

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank... With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood in Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Sephardic Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium. Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays that they would spend in each other’s company as Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians won in 1912 as the Ottoman empire was disintegrating, began officially governing as a colonial possession in 1923, and transformed over the next two decades until the Germans seized control and deported the entire Juderia to Auschwitz in July of 1944.

Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors, drawn at nearly the last possible moment; it is also an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived.

In the vein of Tuesday with Morrie, Michael Frank spends 100 Saturdays, nearly 6 years, talking with Stella Levi in her Greenwich Village apartment. A chance meeting at a lecture turns into a wonderful friendship and of Stella sharing her story, her life.

One Hundred Saturdays was listed under the Indies Next selections as one the 6 Now in Paperback selections for September 2023. Originally this book was in the running for the Indie Next pick in September of 2022, but didn't win the #1 spot. But that's how I found this book... reading about Septembers' picks. And it intrigued me. I generally shy away from books about the Holocaust. They just depress me. But this book takes place in an area I'm unfamiliar with: Rhodes, Greece. But not only is this a story of survival, but it also is a coming of age story. I like how the author and Stella Levi meet and how the author takes the next 100 saturdays to listen to Stella recount her life to him. 

On my nightstand, published by Avid Reader Press, a division of Simon & Schuster last September, it is now available in paperback.

First Lines Friday...

The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. The bird chirps all the musical parts save the percussion, because the barn rabbits obligingly thump their back feet like bass drums, like snares. The lines for violin and cello are the most elaborately composed. Rich and liquid smooth, except when fear turns the notes gruff and choppy. 
                                                  ...The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner


I was lucky enough to receive a digital copy of The Yellow Bird Sings this month and just finished it. How can you say you enjoyed reading about a Mother and her young daughter desperately hiding in a barn from German soldiers? But the story is sensitive and I became so emotionally involved in this WWII story of persecution and survival that I was actually having nightmares. I'll be posting a review next week, but in the meantime I give it 4 stars!  Definitely for WWII readers. This will be released March 3, 2020 by Flatiron Books.

The Sunday Salon and Book picks for Veteran's Day

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....

That's what happens at the Sunday Salon, except it's all virtual. Every Sunday the bloggers participating in that week's Salon get together--at their separate desks, in their own particular time zones--and read. And blog about their reading. And comment on one another's blogs. Think of it as an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book.

And since tomorrow is Veteran's Day, I thought we'd take a look at a few great books written about war. I'm not a big fan of "war" books, but there are stories that take you beyond the horrors of the fighting and show the human quality, a kind of behind the scenes look at war....

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival by Mitchell Zuckoff... From the publisher: On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search and rescue missue became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. With the weather worsening, the U.S. military launched a daring rescue mission, sending a Grumman Duck amphibious plane to find them. After picking up one member of the B-17 crew, the Duck flew into a severe storm, and the plane and the three men aboard vanished. In this thrilling, true-life adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing crashes and the fate of the survivors and would-be saviors. He also recounts the efforts of a modern-day adventurer, Lou Sapienza, who worked for years with the Coast Guard and Commander Jim Blow to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew.

It amazes me sometimes the stories you never hear about until someone decides to write a book. I had never heard of this crash in this frozen wasteland, but I am so intrigued. That and the fact that the conditions were so harrowing that one rescue mission crashed and the other disappeared entirely makes this even more mysterious, and makes me want to read about what happened. This is on my TBR list! Published by Harper Collins this past April, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival is available in Hardcover, Kindle Edition and Nook Book.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand... From the publisher: On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood.  Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.  It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.  So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini.  In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails.  As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile.  But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater.  Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion.  His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

Laura Hillenbrand is a fabulous writer. I absolutely LOVED her book Seabiscuit, which told the story of the racehorse with a heart, Seabiscuit, and the behind the scenes look at horse racing, which I could have cared less about, but once I opened that book I could not put it down and it still remains one of my favorite books today. Her WWII story, Unbroken, has gotten rave reviews and again tells one story that may have remained unknown to us had not someone decided to share it. This is on my TBR list. It was published in 2010 by Random House and is available in Hardcover, Kindle Edition and Nook book.

Night by Elie Wiesel... from the publisher: A candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of Elie Wiesel's survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Elie Wiesel's Night is a slim 148 pages, but it's not the length of the book, but the impact that the words contained in this account of being in a Nazi death camp that have made this an important piece of literature. Originally published in 2006, there is now a new translation offered in the newest edition from Macmillan, available in Paperback , Kindle Edition and Nook Book.

If you're looking for fiction, don't forget Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally, a novel based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industralist who saved more than 1000 Jews from the Nazi death camps.

**UPDATE...Fellow book blogger Booksync, who has a wonderful blog called Books in The City, shared You Know When The Men are Gone by Siobhan Fallon as a recommendation for Veteran's Day reads. She writes,  "it is a collection of short stories each about life on the base when men are away fighting or just after they return. It was a really interesting perspective on the sacrifices military families make in addition to the soldier." Thank you Booksync for the recommendation! On Amazon it has earned 4 1/2 stars from over 100 reviews! Here are the links for the Paperback , Kindle Edition , and the Nook book.

Weekly Recap... This week on Chick with Books, for Memoir Monday we highlighted An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler. The harrowing true account of falling in love and being whisked off to a foreign country, and suffering from the cultural differences. If you missed it, Here is the Link to read all about it.

And then on Thursday I put up the video made by about three dozen authors attending the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show in New Orleans. the authors all read from Lane Smith's children's book, It's a Book, and then through the magic of editing, they put it all together so that each author was reading parts of the book as we followed along. Lane Smith's book is wonderful. It's a simple book about the beauty of an actual book with three friends, a Jackass, a mouse and a monkey. Jackass is internet savvy and can't quite understand how a book works, but eventually Monkey straightens him out. To watch the video, click on this link.

Book News... If you haven't heard, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is coming to the big screen! Keep your eyes open for the release in your area this month! The previews look wonderful! And the book? Well, the book was great! Here's the synopsis from School Library Journal...

"Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves." –Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA

*KINDLE BARGAIN BOOK ALERT... If you haven't read the The Book Thief yet, you should! Right now, it's available on Kindle for just $2.90! Here is the link to The Book Thief to grab that bargain price! 

Do you enjoy books on war? Fiction or nonfiction? Hope you enjoy the book selections this week! And to all of our Veterans... Thank you for your service!

Happy Reading... Suzanne

Memoir Monday, Banned Books Week and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

Why was it banned? From the American Library Association... Challenged at the Culpeper County, Va. public school (2010) by a parent requesting that her daughter not be required to read the book aloud. Initially, it was reported that officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank’s diary,one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, due to the complaint that the book includes sexual material and homosexual themes. The director of instruction announced the edition, published on the fi ftieth anniversary of Frank’s death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future despite the fact the school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints. The remarks set off a hailstorm of criticism online and brought international attention to the 7,600-student school system in rural Virginia. The superintendent said, however, that the book will remain a part of the English classes, although it may be taught at a different grade level.

You can learn more about Anne Frank at the Anne Frank Museum Amsterdam. While you're there you can read about the final fate of the chestnut tree that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary, and take a virtual tour of the hiding place where Anne and her family lived.

*P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready! AND it's a bargain at $5.69 right now!

The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva... A TLC Book Tour Stop

Two families, one terrible secret, and a painting to die for…

Determined to sever his ties with the Office, Gabriel Allon has retreated to the windswept cliffs of Cornwall with his beautiful Venetian-born wife Chiara. But once again his seclusion is interrupted by a visitor from his tangled past: the endearingly eccentric London art dealer, Julian Isherwood. As usual, Isherwood has a problem. And it is one only Gabriel can solve.

In the ancient English city of Glastonbury, an art restorer has been brutally murdered and a long-lost portrait by Rembrandt mysteriously stolen. Despite his reluctance, Gabriel is persuaded to use his unique skills to search for the painting and those responsible for the crime. But as he painstakingly follows a trail of clues leading from Amsterdam to Buenos Aires and, finally, to a villa on the graceful shores of Lake Geneva, Gabriel discovers there are deadly secrets connected to the painting. And evil men behind them.

Before he is done, Gabriel will once again be drawn into a world he thought he had left behind forever, and will come face to face with a remarkable cast of characters: a glamorous London journalist who is determined to undo the worst mistake of her career, an elusive master art thief who is burdened by a conscience, and a powerful Swiss billionaire who is known for his good deeds but may just be behind one of the greatest threats facing the world. Filled with remarkable twists and turns of plot, and told with seductive prose, The Rembrandt Affair is more than just summer entertainment of the highest order. It is a timely reminder that there are men in the world who will do anything for money... From the Publisher

Gabriel Allon and I have met before. I had picked up Daniel Silva's The English Assassin a long time ago because I was intrigued with the idea of an art restorer who was trying to leave his illustrious past behind, but couldn't quite put it all behind him. I didn't consider myself a "spy novel" reader, but with the opening of those pages of The English Assassin, Daniel Silva hooked me. With his great writing I was immediately drawn into the story, and all my illusions of what a "spy novel" was all about faded away. I was smitten with Gabriel Allon and loved what I was reading. So, when Lisa of TLC Book Tours asked me if I'd like to host Daniel Silva and The Rembrandt Affair, I jumped at the chance! I hadn't seen Gabriel in a while... Hey, he's undercover quite a bit! This Book Tour is a little different, because instead of the "normal" review, all the tour hosts are completing a fun 10 questions related to the book. So let's get to those questions...

1. If you were to write a blurb in fewer than three sentences for THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR, what would it be? The Rembrandt Affair is a fast-paced thriller that will put you deep in the world of art, assassins and family secrets long thought hidden away. Great writing, a story with amazing depth that touches on the horrors of the Holocaust and its lasting effects, and a hero that will hold your attention long after the sun sets.

2. Gabriel Allon is a talented spy and assassin, but also a master art restorer. If you could have two careers that sem to be complete opposites, what would they be? I would be a Art Historian for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a special agent with the FBI. Reading about what was happening behind the scenes in The Rembrandt Affair will make you want to be "007" too!

3. What three words would you use to describe the character of Gabriel Allon? Determined, Honorable, Highly intelligent.

4. THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR takes the reader all over the world. Of all the locations mentioned, which would be your ideal vacation spot? There are so many wonderful locations in the book, but I would love to visit Israel. Beautiful and rich in history I think it would make for a very special vacation.

5. Art theft plays a major role in the novel. If no crime were involved, what piece of art would you like to have in your home? Renoir, Picasso, or any painting by the French Impressionists would be welcome on my walls. A beautiful pastel by Mary Cassatt?! Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh or A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat ?! But I think I would love to have The Dream by Henri Rousseau most of all. Henri Rousseau was a self taught artists and his jungle scenes are beautiful. The Dream was his last painting.

6. Zoe Reed is a powerful female character in the novel. Tell us about an influential woman in your life. My mother has been a powerful force in my life, giving me the tools and knowledge to be the creative woman I am today.

7.Who was your favorite "good guy" in THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR and why? Of course my favorite good guy would have to be Gabriel Allon, he is just the most honorable character with such a strong force within him to fight for what's right. But, I would also like to add Mikhail Abramov aka Mikhail Danilov to my "favorite guy" answer. Mikhail goes undercover in a very dangerous mission with Zoe Reed, and even in the face of death, Mikhail forsakes his own life to protect Zoe. That is dedication and makes Mikhail one amazing man.

8. All of the technology discussed in the novel is real. Does any of it surprise you? We are so bombarded with amazing technology every day that no, none of the technology in the novel surprised me, but I did enjoy learning the fact that when a cell phone or lap top, for example, was "bugged", that the agents referred to it as "owning" that piece of equipment.

9. What celebrity would play Gabriel Allon if THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR were on the big screen. I have always thought that Gabriel Byrne would make a perfect Gabriel Allon. I just loved him in Point of No Return, and in that movie he played a top secret government agent that recruited and trained assassins.

10. Which fellow book-loving friend do you think would enjoy THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR? Tag them here and we will mail a finished copy of the novel! My first thought of who would enjoy this was fellow blogger, Cym Lowell, because not only is he an author in his own right, but he has also written an international thriller. Enjoy Cym!

About the Author... Daniel Silva is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Price of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules and The Defector. He is married to NBC News Today correspondent Jamie Gangel. They have two children, Lily and Nicholas. In 2009 Silva was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council.

Learn more about the author & his books at Daniel Silva's website! I want to thank Lisa of TLC Book Tours for inviting me to be part of Daniel Silva's book tour for The Rembrandt Affair! I really enjoyed the book. It was quite a page turner and I got to visit with my old friend Gabriel Allon again! And BTW, you can enjoy reading The Rembrandt Affair without reading any of the other previous Daniel Silva books, they are stand alone stories. Daniel Silva's Book Tour for The Rembrandt Affair is winding down, but you can check out the other Tour Hosts at TLC Book Tours. *P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready!