The Old Man and the Sea is a quiet yet powerful story about dignity, endurance, and the human spirit. Ernest Hemingway tells the tale of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who battles the sea, a giant marlin, and his own failing strength with remarkable simplicity and depth.
pickA quiet book that weaves together the story of an historic hurricane in Cuba and the main character‘s experience growing up during Spain‘s invasion. Heartbreaking in many ways. The story unfolds as the main character recounts her experiences to a group of women waiting out the hurricane together. Past pain, current fears and lingering tensions among the women mingle together over the course of a night.
pickThe Old Man and the Sea is a powerful meditation on perseverance, pride, and dignity in struggle. Through Santiago‘s lonely battle with nature, Hemingway explores endurance, aging, heroism, and faith with striking simplicity. The balance between defeat and inner victory is moving, and the respect shown toward nature is profound. Though sparse and slow for some readers, its themes linger long after the final page. 4 ⭐️
pick“This is everything I love. It's all right here. We're our own country.”
HF that explores the adventurous, passionate and stormy marriage of journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway in Europe‘s pre- and post onset of WWII. #Bookspin
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pickThis book won both a Newbery Honor and was a Sydney Taylor Book Award Honor, which is how it got on our book club‘s radar. We all learned some new-to-us history and appreciated the scope of the book. It moves through several generations of a family, taking place in four different countries and with four different protagonists. Lots to take in!
This was my April #BookSpin pick.
pickI read and highly recommend the original middle grade chapter book Refugee by Alan Gratz frequently. This graphic novel version still brings a lot of the emotion but with using panels & speech bubbles paired with illustrations instead of descriptive paragraphs of text.
pickSerhii Plokhy is Professor of History at Harvard University and a leading authority on Eastern Europe. Published in 2021, this gripping book draws on then recently released KGB files to analyse the Cuban Missile Crisis from both the US and Russian perspective, drawing out how badly Kruschev and Kennedy misread and misunderstood each others positions and how nuclear war was averted by fear and accident more than negotiation and decision.
pickfound Janeta to be a more challenging character and not always easy to like or connect with, but I loved her journey and growth. I did connect more with Daniel‘s character and appreciated his point of view and how he reconciled what he‘d been through. As always, Alyssa Cole wrote strong characters and a great story line.
#arc
pickPretty good historical about holocaust survivors in Cuba who were let in when other family and friends were turned away on the ship St. Louis. Took awhile to get into it and then skimmed it at the end a little. If you like Sarah‘s Key it is sort of like that.
Up next…my September #bookspin pick! I bought this at Ernest Hemingway‘s house on a trip to Key West back in 2020. @TheAromaofBooks
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