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Category: Book Club

Book Club Monday

I had today’s book, Conversations with RGB:Ruth Bader Ginsberg on Love, Life, Liberty and Law scheduled for a while. However now that the whole country is mourning her death, it is an even more appropriate choice. This book is aviaalbe for pre-order and will be released in early November. It is sure to sell out….Here is the summary:

In her own words, Ruth Bader Ginsburg offers an intimate look at her life and career, through an extraordinary series of conversations with the head of the National Constitution Center.

This remarkable book presents a unique portrait of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, drawing on more than twenty years of conversations with Jeffrey Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president of the National Constitution Center, shares with us the justice’s observations on a variety of topics, and her intellect, compassion, sense of humor, and humanity shine through. The affection they have for each other as friends is apparent in their banter and in their shared love for the Constitution―and for opera.

In Conversations with RBG, Justice Ginsburg discusses the future of Roe v. Wade, her favorite dissents, the cases she would most like to see overruled, the #MeToo movement, how to be a good listener, how to lead a productive and compassionate life, and of course the future of the Supreme Court itself. These frank exchanges illuminate the steely determination, self-mastery, and wit that have inspired Americans of all ages to embrace the woman known to all as “Notorious RBG.”

Whatever the topic, Justice Ginsburg always has something interesting―and often surprising―to say. And while few of us will ever have the opportunity to chat with her face-to-face, Jeffrey Rosen brings us by her side as never before. Conversations with RBG is a deeply felt portrait of an American hero.– Amazon.com

For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.

Book Club Monday

Fall in New York City is my favorite time of year. Unfortunately this year, most of the fun fall city activities are put on hold right now. I found this book and added it to my pile right away. I thought a good old fashion NYC story would fill the void of not being able to spend a lot of time in the big apple right now. Here is the summary of this page-turning NYT’s best seller:

It’s 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn’t ask for more out of life – her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village’s new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club – a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women’s rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. But when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she’s forced to confront her shifting priorities head on…and may just lose everything in the process. 

Eighty years later, in 1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she’s wrangled her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the exhibit Sadie’s running begin disappearing from the library’s famous Berg Collection. Determined to save both the exhibit and her career, the typically risk-averse Sadie teams up with a private security expert to uncover the culprit. However, things unexpectedly become personal when the investigation leads Sadie to some unwelcome truths about her own family heritage – truths that shed new light on the biggest tragedy in the library’s history. – Amazon.com

For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE!!!!

Book Club Monday

You know how much I LOVE spending time in the Hamptons. I have spent many summers wandering in and out of the local shops, sitting on the beautiful beaches, visiting all the local farms, stalking Grey Gardens, and enjoying so much more that the Eastern End of LI has to offer. When I saw this book over the weekend, The Ladies Village Improvement Society Cookbook: Eating and Entertaining in East Hampton, I had to order it. This book is choc-full of such amazing recipes and beautiful photographs.

A delicious melding of traditional taste with the flavors of the Hamptons, this cookbook offers 100 recipes for entertaining as well as for everyday meals.

Gifted with waters brimming with local fish and with farmland that produces a bounty of fruit and vegetables, the Hamptons have long been a destination for food lovers. Now, one of the most historic organizations on the island pairs with legendary food writer Florence Fabricant to capture the local color through a collection of recipes from members of the Ladies’ Village Improvement Society, renowned chefs and celebrities who live or vacation in East Hampton (including Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, Hilaria Baldwin, Alex Guarnaschelli, and Eli Zabar), and favorite local figures like farmers and vintners.

Organized into twenty menus, including “Dinner After the Movies,” “Autumn Catch,” and “Lunch by the Pool,” the recipes encompass the uniquely broad range of gatherings, from special-occasion celebrations to casual family meals or big beach picnics for a crowd. Vibrant original photographs shine a light on the freshness and originality of the food and the local spots from beaches to farm stands, while historical photographs and anecdotes from the Ladies’ Village Improvement Society archives and local newspapers express the best of Hamptons eating. – Amazon.com

For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.

Book Club Monday

If you like the book/movie Crazy Rich Asians then you are going to LOVE this week’s Book Club choice….Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan. I am told that this is Kwan’s most decadent book yet..

image Amazon.com



The iconic author of the bestselling phenomenon Crazy Rich Asians returns with the glittering tale of a young woman who finds herself torn between two men: the WASPY fiancé of her family’s dreams and George Zao, the man she is desperately trying to avoid falling in love with.

On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao and she instantly can’t stand him. She can’t stand it when he gallantly offers to trade hotel rooms with her so that she can have a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she can’t stand that he knows more about Casa Malaparte than she does, and she really can’t stand it when he kisses her in the darkness of the ancient ruins of a Roman villa and they are caught by her snobbish, disapproving cousin Charlotte. “Your mother is Chinese so it’s no surprise you’d be attracted to someone like him,” Charlotte teases. The daughter of an American-born Chinese mother and a blue-blooded New York father, Lucie has always sublimated the Asian side of herself in favor of the white side, and she adamantly denies having feelings for George. But several years later, when George unexpectedly appears in East Hampton, where Lucie is weekending with her new fiancé, Lucie finds herself drawn to George again. Soon, Lucie is spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiancé, the co-op board of her Fifth Avenue apartment building, and ultimately herself as she tries mightily to deny George entry into her world–and her heart. Moving between summer playgrounds of privilege, peppered with decadent food and extravagant fashion, Sex and Vanity is a truly modern love story, a daring homage to A Room with a View, and a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures. – Amazon.com

For more information or to order this book, click HERE..

Book Club Monday

Boy, it’s sure been a wild ride….New York City is finally in phase 2….I’m really not 100% sure what each phase means but I do think that each one brings us so much hope and that is exactly why I picked this week’s book, All Adults Here: A Novel by Emma Straub. It is a page-turner filled with lots of love, forgiveness, kindness, and humor. Everything that we all need right now!!! Here is the story:

image Amazon.com

When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?

Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

In All Adults Here, Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not. – Amazon.com

For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.

Book Club Monday

I love anything having to do with the Kennedy’s…so when fashion maven Lauren Santo Domingo, “THE LSD” recommended Nemesis: The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle that Brought Down the Kennedys, by Peter Nevins, I knew I had to get it. I actually had a credit on Audible so I downloaded it. Starting tomorrow, I am going to listen to it on my walks this week!!!

Here is the story:

Peter Evans’s biography of Aristotle Onassis, Ari, met with great acclaim when it was published in 1986. Not long after the book appeared, however, Onassis’s daughter Christina and his longtime business partner Yannis Georgakis hinted to Evans that he had missed the “real story.” “I must begin”, Georgakis said, “with the premise that, for Onassis, Bobby Kennedy was unfinished business from way back . . . .” 

His words launched Evans into the heart of a story that tightly bound Onassis not to Jackie’s first husband, but to his ambitious younger brother Bobby. A bitter rivalry emerged between Bobby and Ari long before Onassis and Jackie had even met. Nemesis reveals the tangled thread of events that linked two of the world’s most powerful men and uncovers the surprising role played by the woman they both loved. 

Through extensive interviews with the closest friends, lovers, and relatives of Onassis and the Kennedys, longtime journalist Evans has uncovered the shocking culmination of the Kennedy-Onassis-Kennedy love triangle: Aristotle Onassis was at the heart of the plot to kill Bobby Kennedy. Meticulously tracing Onassis’s connections in the world of terrorism, Nemesis presents compelling evidence that he financed the assassination – including a startling confession that has gone unreported for nearly three decades. – Amazon.com

For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.