Staff Reviews: Books, Films, Music, and More

Book Review: An Unfinished Love Story

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Director of Library Operations Pam Parker recommends An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Like many Gen X Americans, my knowledge of the political landscape of 1960s is spotty at best. Doris Kearns Goodwin, arguably the foremost living writer on the American presidency, has changed that entirely. Her recently published book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), dives into the deep end of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidencies, and the political upheaval that the Sixties ignited.  

Her experiences within the White House as a fellow combined with her late husband’s reflections as a presidential speechwriter of the Great Society era make this personal memoir of the 1960s a powerful insider story of twentieth century American political history. 

Doris begins the story with her husband’s odyssey into American politics. Richard ‘Dick’ Goodwin began his career in politics on John F. Kennedy’s 1959 campaign for presidency. He continued within President Kennedy’s White House as a speechwriter and carried forward with President Johnson after JFK’s assassination in 1963.  

The rumpled-suited, cigar-smoking young man from Brookline, Massachusetts, would work directly with these two American presidents. Dick is also credited with the “Great Society” concept that prompted the passage of civil and voting rights. Among his many achievements as speechwriter is President Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech delivered to urge the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 in the shadow of JFK’s assassination. 

By 1968, Doris was undergoing her own rise to prestige in Washington, DC. Having graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. focused on the Amercian presidency, she earned a White House Fellowship. She would serve under a somewhat beleaguered President Johnson, whose struggles included the Vietnam war. She assumed her White House role having recently authored an article for The New Republic titled, “How to Remove LBJ.”  We get the sense that her willingness to speak up is what led to her atypically close alliance with President Johnson. Like Dick, she was invited to the Johnson’s Texas ranch where she befriended the family, including Lady Bird, and swam in the pool as President Johnson reflected on political strategies.  

President Johnson was set on her working with him on his memoirs as well as his presidential library plans. She reluctancy agreed as she had hoped to return full-time to her academic position at Harvard. For one, he was not an easy person to work for, according to many who found themselves in his inner circle.  

Doris would later author a biography, Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream (1976), leveraging her uncanny ability to bring presidential history to life. During her career as an author, she has also penned biographical accounts of the Roosevelts and earned the Pulitzer Prize for Team of Rivals (2010) about Lincoln’s presidency. These works often reveal the personal struggles alongside legislative triumphs of these leaders. 

Worth noting is that Doris and Dick’s careers did not cross paths during the Sixties. They eventually met at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 1972. A lifetime of shared reflections on their political careers – and marriage – began there. Dick and Doris had reached different conclusions about Johnson, we learn. For Dick, the war in Vietnam had lured him toward the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy and in support of his close friend, Robert Kennedy, when he entered the race presidential race only to be assassinated late in 1968. The author’s account of this fateful year in our political history is particularly memorable, as she navigates the political undercurrents masterfully.  

Through the personal and professional stories of the Goodwins, we find ourselves looking at the Sixties as an insider to the ideological struggles of the Sixties, and we are reminded that strife is not unique to our present times. 

By 2015, the couple decided to undertake the project of a lifetime, sorting through some 300 boxes of Goodwin political memorabilia. Dick’s advancing age aside, they spent each Sunday making their way through papers and ephemera. These reflections, which involved a mix of professional tragedy and comedy, I found infinitely interesting. Sadly, Richard ‘Dick’ Goodwin was diagnosed with cancer during this time and passed away in 2018. Doris continued writing the book they imagined finishing together. The result is this unforgettable memoir that pays tribute to their shared legacy in American politics of the 1960s.  

When she speaks at Sun Valley Writers Conference this year, this librarian will be in the audience cheering her triumphs as author and witness to American presidential history. 

Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin will be featured at the Sun Valley Writers Conference on July 19. Her latest work, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2025), adds to her collection of award-winning work, which includes: Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018), The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013), Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2010), Wait Till Next Year (1997) and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (1994). The talk will be streamed at SVWC.org, and you can check out these titles at The Community Library.  

Book Review: Calling for a Blanket Dance

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Maintenance Manager Jerry McDonald recommends Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah.

I was delightfully surprised by this novel. It’s not easily categorized because of Oskar’s writing style or presentation. A window into life in the Oklahoma small town, but not an autobiography or true story…

…his characters are so real, I felt it was truly his family’s sharing of a historical account of Cherokee and Kiowa tribes’ lives from the 1970s to the present.

Each chapter is a different family member’s thought and experiences. Telling in their own words, with some Cherokee mixed in, I had no difficulty in understanding their meaning. When you get to really know each character well by hearing their side of the story, it makes it much more interesting.

There are several different types of dances. Some are for the benefit of one family, some are for honoring ancestors, some for someone coming of age. Blankets usually have colors of a certain tribe. Blankets are usually handmade and made to help healing. There’s no doubt the misery the adults and children go through, day to day, captures your soul.

No sugar coating here, it’s a harsh life but enlightens the reader the way each family comes together through dancing and honoring their ancestors’ ways.

Have ah’day oosdi! I’m definitely going to read more Oscar Hokeah.

Find Calling for a Blanket Dance in our collection here.

Review: “Little House on the Prairie” Series

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Children’s Librarian Helen Morgus recommends the “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

My sweet dad read Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder to me when I could not have been more than five years old. We loved and identified with Laura—headstrong and creative—and her Pa, a paragon of manhood. Craving an escape into a story of American industriousness in the face of hardship, I returned to Laura Ingalls Wilder this past winter and was abundantly rewarded.

The pillars of Wilder’s writing are her meticulous descriptions of the technology of the 1880s, her passion for the land, her love of family, and the Wilders’ sense of duty and devotion to one another. Herein lie many lessons for young readers, and adults will pick up on the tenderness and mutual respect between Laura’s parents, Charles and Caroline.

But there is a troubling flip side.

Wilder wrote her books from the perspective of the late 19th century in which she was embedded. For example, she encounters people of other races, and with a sense of superiority, and adults discipline children with the rod and the whip. Notwithstanding spankings, a blackface minstrel show, Caroline’s visceral fear of Indians, and the unavoidable whiff of Manifest Destiny, there is more to admire about the Wilders than there is to condemn.

Wilder’s accounts (written in her 60s) deal with poverty, hunger, cold, disease, and other trials from a distance that takes the sting out of them. I had to ask myself: was all that self-reliance simply just that? What other forces could have been at work in the Wilders’ successes and failures?

Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, helped answer these questions. Fraser takes us through the period covered in Wilder’s children’s books and through her adult life with her husband Almanzo and their daughter, Rose. Using letters, diaries and the public record, she puts together a more complete historical portrait. I found Fraser’s dive into the U.S. government’s policies toward Indians, and her treatment of the economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially helpful.

The “Little House on the Prairie” series withstands the test of time. Perhaps most because it reminds readers of the grit that is baked into the character of people who call themselves Americans.

Book Review: The Women of Brewster Place

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Executive Director Jenny Emery Davidson recommends The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor.

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A young woman leaned at the windowsill of her sixth-floor apartment. She looked at the traffic and the crowds along the street just beyond the dead-end one where her apartment stood. A pigeon flew past her, and “[s]he placed her dreams on the back of the bird and fantasized that it would glide forever in transparent silver circles until it ascended to the center of the universe and was swallowed up.”

 It is language like this that makes me love Gloria Naylor’s work. In the span of a single sentence, she transforms a fleeting, forgettable moment into one that is transcendent.  Throughout the novel The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor uses language with breathtaking elasticity to evoke the friction between the mundane grittiness of an urban apartment building and the poignant qualities of the people who live there.

The architecture of the novel is framed by Brewster Place itself: a housing development born of messy political negotiations that resulted in a gray apartment building on a dead-end street. It is a place that the city has pushed out of sight. But Naylor begins and ends the novel with Brewster Place, and it becomes mythic in the telling.

The novel focuses on seven Black women of different ages and backgrounds who all find themselves, for different reasons and with different expectations, living at Brewster Place. Each chapter opens the door on another character’s life, and the vastness of their experiences strains the walls of their Brewster Place apartments. These women are in turn reckless and silly and stubborn and sexy and proud and brave and humble and fearful and strong. They are mothers and teachers and widows and activists and lovers and sisters.

There is a loneliness to each of the characters, even as they are crowded among so many people in tight city quarters – and there are quiet but profound moments when they see each other’s loneliness, brush against it, and recognize the dreams that lie within it.   

There is so much I love about this novel: how each woman’s story unfolds; how Brewster Place frames the novel as well as their lives; how the language changes how I see the world.

In some ways, The Women of Brewster Place reminds me of one of my other favorite novels, My Antonia by Willa Cather, though it is set decades later and in a city rather than the western plains. Both novels are anchored in a strong sense of place and tell the stories of female characters who are largely overlooked by the societies around them. Both novels show communities that teeter between being made and unmade, and they invite us to think of the individuals whose dreams are embroidered on those unraveling edges.

Note: The Women of Brewster Place is the pick for the Library’s Book Club to be held at 5:30 p.m. on August 6. More/register here.

Find The Women of Brewster Place in our collection here.

Book Review: The Paris Novel

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Director of Philanthropy Carter Hedberg recommends The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl. 

Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel is an absolute delight! I found it to be a sumptuous, transportive journey through the City of Light and France, told through the eyes of Stella, a reserved and tightly-wound young woman.  Her life begins to unfold after an unexpected inheritance from her mother: a one-way plane ticket to Paris and a note that simply reads, “Go to Paris.” What follows is a tender, layered story of self-discovery, sparked by the mystery of the model in Manet’s iconic painting, Olympia, and deepened through the new friendships Stella forms.

As I read, I found myself irresistibly drawn back to my own memories of Paris, savoring a café crème under the arcades of Place des Vosges, standing before Olympia for the first time in the Jeu de Paume, and becoming gleefully lost in the stacks of Shakespeare and Company. And, of course, discovering extraordinary food at every turn. Reichl captures the city’s essence with such richness and clarity that I often felt I was walking in step with Stella, experiencing Paris as she does, tentatively at first, then with increasing energy and appetite.

Reichl’s reverence for food, art, and the intoxicating thrill of adventure is found on every page.

The Paris Novel is not simply about unlocking a painting’s secret, it’s about embracing a more expansive, more flavorful life…something that seems to unfold when visiting Paris.

Ruth Reichl will appear at The Community Library on Tuesday, July 22, in conversation with Jenny Emery Davidson, as part of the Community Speaker Series, presented in partnership with the Sun Valley Writers Conference. While in-person seating is full, the program will be livestreamed. More/register for the livestream link here.

Find The Paris Novel in our collection here.

Book Review: Walking with Peety

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Children’s Library Assistant Polly Hopkins recommends Walking with Peety: The Dog Who Saved my Life by Eric O’Grey.

There are few things that intrigue me more than dogs. I am just indelibly fascinated with them. I’m also fortunate enough to work with them almost daily. When my colleague, Kyla, recommended the book Walking with Peety in her recent newsletter article about dogs, I checked it out.  I was not disappointed.

The story is an autobiographical account of the author’s remarkable transformation from being a severely obese and despondent man to a fit and flourishing individual.

O’Grey tells the story of how Peety, a sweet middle-aged mutt he was encouraged to adopt, sets him on a new path to freedom. Peety was also in poor physical and emotional health, and together they transitioned from merely existing to thriving by walking and altering their diets. The results unfolded gradually but were totally evident and worthwhile to O’Grey and those around him. He details his experiences with career swaps, relationships, the development of his cooking skills, home renovations, drug abuse …

… and Peety stands by, supports, and inspires him through it all.

This book resonated with me in multiple profound ways. I too grapple with addictive tendencies and was enthralled with the author’s commitment to change. It is an amazing testament to the notion that we can absolutely accomplish just about anything we set our minds to. It’s a genuinely captivating and heartwarming tale, and pretty easy reading. I’m also convinced it could potentially turn a non-dog lover into someone like me. Shout out to Kyla for the awesome recommendation!

Find Walking with Peety in our collection here.

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