Marianne Monson

This spellbinding, page turner tells the story, based on a true story, of two working class British women, sisters Ida and Louise Cook, who scrimped and saved their money to attend operas in England and throughout Europe and ultimately became heroes.

Eventually, through the people they met in the opera business, they learned about the dangers facing Jews in Germany and smuggled furs and jewelry out of Germany and into England and personally escorted Jewish refugees to England. Ultimately, members of 29 families were saved by these brave women.

As an opera buff, I especially loved the portions early in the book dealing with opera but I think this book would appeal to non-opera buffs as well. This would be an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn about what ordinary people were able to accomplish during World War 2.

Well-written, well-researched and a book I would highly recommend.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via Net Galley, in exchange for a fair and honest review.)… (plus d'informations)

You don't have to know anything about opera or even like it to read this book. It's mostly about Ida and Louisa Cook's work to get the Jewish people out of Germany and Austria. I found out somewhere in reading it that they were real people. Also, I didn't know there were notes about certain passages in the back until I was about a third of the way through. I still forgot to read them as there was no notation for when we should flip to the back. I think this was one of the best books I've read on the subject.… (plus d'informations)

This was another buddy read with my dad. I found this book fascinating for covering so many stories that I had never heard (considering the Civil War reading group I was in for a while), but at the same time there were a number of things that bothered me about this book:

1. Some moral equivalency between the North and South that felt a little gross.

2. Given how recent this book is, the lack of acknowledgement of transgender people was pointedly painful in a few places.

3. The author's tendency to over-reach when tying things together in each chapter conclusion.

That said, I REALLY ENJOYED many of the stories, and I love the way the book was formatted, with further reading sections right in the body text at the end of each chapter, encouraging you to read further about some of these remarkable people.… (plus d'informations)

This book contains a number of minibiographies of women who settled in the American west in the 19th century. The author has done a good job of selecting women of diverse backgrounds. She encourages today’s woman to take inspiration from history.

The women include:
- Nellie Cashman – nurse, businesswoman, miner, and dog musher in the Yukon Gold Rush
- Clara Brown – born in slavery whose family was sold, eventually bought her freedom to search for her children
- Abigail Scott Duniway – a pioneer of the Oregon trail who became a news editor and early suffragette
- Maria Ruiz de Burton – writer of social satire on issues of Mexican-US land disputes
- Luzena Stanley Wilson – traveled from Missouri to California during the Gold Rush with her husband and two small children
- Mother Jones – social activist and agitator for coal mining safety and against child labor
- Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Ša) – musician and writer on Native American issues
- Mary Hallock Foote – author and illustrator (and part of the Angle of Repose controversy)
- Martha Hughes Cannon – frontier doctor, polygamist wife, and first female state senator
- Donaldina Cameron – crusader against sex trafficking in Chinatown in San Francisco
- Charley Parkhurst – stagecoach driver, farmer, and rancher, living as a man
- Makaopiopio – Hawaiian immigrant to Utah

Each woman could be (and some have been) the subject of an entire book. Monson inserts her observations about their lives in a somewhat didactic fashion, which may appeal to younger readers, but I found unnecessary. It whets the appetite to learn more about these women and this time period.

3.5… (plus d'informations)