Tag: book reveiws

This is the third and final installment in the “Helen” trilogy which answers a few questions but raises a lot more about the intriguing main character, special agent Pendergast.

For years, FBI special agent Pendergast had believed that his wife, Helen, was dead, killed by a lion in Africa. After he found evidence that she had been murdered, his investigation into who might have killer her, raised tantalizing suggestions that she might actually be alive.

Pendergast’s quest for the truth takes him on a suicide mission to Brazil where he discovers that horrific Nazi medical experiments, especially on twins, have continued. He also learns that his beloved wife had been a victim of these atrocities, and that Helen and her twin sister are both now dead. There’s more to discover here, but I don’t want to give anything away.

Meanwhile, his ward Constance Green, who had been committed to an asylum for the criminally insane for killing her child has found a friend in the doctor who had her put away. That doctor, Dr. Felder risks his life to help her prove her sanity.

This is another gripping installment in the FBI special agent Pendergast series. There are complicated plots, interesting characters, lots of action, and these are extremely hard to put down.

As I continue my quest to read something from each of the Dewey decimal system classes, this non-fiction book is from the 300 series referring to the social sciences.  I’d picked it up at a bookstore years ago and never read it, but when I read The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis, I thought reading it now might make for an interesting comparison.

This residential hotel for women was built during the roaring 1920s, when women, intent on being more than just daughter, wife or mother, began to stretch their wings towards independence. They poured into New York City and other cities, and a certain class of women, especially white, college graduates, needed a respectable place to stay. Residential hotels were already a thing in the cities, for men, and even for families, so the Barbizon Hotel was built.

Over the years, the hotel has hosted many notable, and many unknown women with ambitions. It provided a safe space for each of them, a room of their own to plot and plan the rest of their lives. Some of those residents included models from the new modeling agencies, including Powers or Ford. The number of these beautiful women living there gave the hotel its nickname, “the dollhouse,” and men loitered nearby hoping to meet the beautiful girl of their dreams. Secretarial students from the Katherine Gibbs secretarial school took up a block of rooms in the hotel for many years. And even the guest editors, also known as summer interns, for Mademoiselle magazine stayed at the hotel during their time in New York.

The list of notables who stayed at the hotel includes women like Grace, Kelly, and the unsinkable Molly Brown, Ali McGraw, Phylicia Rashad, and Liza Minnelli, whose mother, Judy Garland, apparently called the hotel at all hours of the day and night for staff to check on her daughter. Author Sylvia Plath whose semi-autobiographical account of her own life, The Bell Jar, was a thinly disguised account of her time as Madmoiselle Guest Editor and residency at the hotel, and the conflict she felt between her ambition and societal pressure to accept life as wife and mother.

The book is a fascinating history not just of a New York City landmark and the famous people who have passed through its doors, but it’s a compelling story of women, women’s ambition and how women cope with societal pressures. I could probably write a lot more about this book, but it’s an easy to read, non-fiction account of a building, a city, and women’s ambition beyond traditional societal roles.