Mary Chitty

Hattie Freeman’s determination to find both love and meaningful work, her intrepid travels, writing and outdoor activities, as well as her struggles with limitations on women in society, education and science all resonate. This story of Hattie’s striving to create a life for herself at a time when women’s options were quite circumscribed, and Boston was undergoing rapid social and economic changes captures the drama, privileges and restrictions of her social class in Gilded Age Boston. The tales of Edward Everett Hale’s exuberant life and accomplishments, going well beyond his short story “The Man without a Country” add very human insights into this unconventional romance. Sara Day has written with truth, sensitivity and creativity about a complicated relationship. Her research reminds me of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Midwife’s Tale, revealing a previously unknown woman, with the added twist of deciphering the antique shorthand so crucial to revealing this love story. The glimpses of well known people such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Helen Keller help bridge the distance between history and today’s issues. Highly recommended, a real page turner.

The First Amendment – Freedom of Speech—seems to protect presidential lies now. This is hard to believe. But law professor Catherine Ross offers eloquent suggestions to challenge existing complicated obstacles. She explains why there are still unresolved Constitutional issues. Ross’s examination of the complex rules offers useful insights. Her account of Trump’s lies about COVID and 2020 election integrity make clear the damages resulting from them. Many people now wonder what they might do to help, and whether there will be any accountability in the long run. We all need to know more about the Constitution and the First Amendment these days. Important, and timely. Should appeal to anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the United States. Highly recommended.

Fresh and Accessible Anglo-Irish History As I read this book, I realized how little I knew about the specifics of Irish history but, perhaps more importantly, how limited the conventional wisdom about Irish history is. Sara Day’s unique and accessible approach to that history was initially inspired by the evocative stories her father told her about his eccentric relations and happy early childhood at Derrylahan Park in Northern Tipperary before its shocking and brutal nighttime burning by the IRA in July 1921 just days before the truce ending the Irish War of Independence. That last landowning branch of the Head family fled to England that summer one hundred years ago, but many relations and more distant kin remained, several of whom were among the owners of nearly two hundred more big houses burned during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Wanting to learn more than her grandfather’s published memoir and the few surviving family records revealed decades after her father’s early death, Day decided to search for the causes in events during his Protestant Anglo-Irish family’s three hundred tumultuous years in Ireland. Her compelling narrative and meticulous research sets the Head family’s experiences in the larger context of the seventeenth-century Civil War and unprecedented Cromwellian land reallocation in Ireland, covers the eighteenth century when the family and many others like them benefitted from the Protestant Ascendancy, paints a vivid picture of nineteenth-century events such as the tragic potato famine and the beginning of the dissolution of Protestant power through Catholic emancipation and dramatic legal challenges to land ownership, and concludes with the final push for independence. As her epilogue demonstrates, the story is highly relevant to the present day, as Brexit raises major new questions about partition and the Irish border. Impeccably researched, this book is highly recommended. Historic engravings, portraits, maps, and photographs add to its appeal.