3 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read: July 2024

Katharine’s Remarkable Road Trip by Gail Ward Olmsted Another awesome one by Gail Olmsted! This one is about the woman she mentioned in her book Landscape of a Marriage, which was about Mary Olmsted, wife of the famous Frederick Olmsted. In that book, Mary mentioned a woman named Katharine Prescott Wormeley, who was a friend of Frederick Olmsted.  In the Landscape book, there was a bit of a question about whether something more went on between Frederick and Katherine.  In this book Katherine is in her 70s, it’s 1907, and she decides she’s going to drive from her home in Newport Rhode Island to her other home in Jackson New Hampshire. Over the course of this multi day drive, during which she traveled a torturous 10 miles per hour, she encountered some adventures, met some people along the way, but this was also a very creative way for her to reflect on her life and for the readers to learn more about her.  Which was awesome. 

 

Paris by Paris Hilton  I remember when she hit the scene in the early 2000s, she was famous for being famous and I was so annoyed by her.  But she was actually doing it right.  She was getting paid to attend parties and building her brand. But you didn’t see what was going on behind her smile at the cameras.  In this book she tells us how she was a victim of the troubled teen industry.  So in the late 90s early oughts parents were sending their “out of control” children to these behavior modification boarding schools.  The parents were presented with the pretty pictures of kids smiling and learning to adult. But really it was way worse than any state funded prison.  (Check out the docuseries The Program on Netflix.)  So, Paris Hilton got sent to one of these places when she was 15 and she was to stay there for 2 years. And it was an incredibly messed up place where kids had to “earn” the right to speak, put shoes on, walk into a room, etc. And of course tons of mental, physical and sexual abuse happened there.  She escaped 4 times, and was sent back every single time, and of course her parents were told not to believe her when she told them she was being abused. It was incredibly damaging and traumatic, and incredibly messed up.  And it messed her up.  A lot.  She’s become an activist against these “schools” (which still exist, somehow!) and she’s now very outspoken about how crazy this system is. And you know what, I kinda like her now!

 

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon  Whoa I LOVED this one. This is based upon a real woman named Martha Ballard. She was a midwife in Maine in the 1780s and delivered over 1,000 babies in her career. She was also the great aunt of Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross.  This book follows actual events of something that happened in her town in Maine. A woman was raped by two men who were the big men in town, and one of the men was murdered.  Martha Ballard was the only woman in town allowed to testify in court at the time because she was a medical professional.  And she testified that this woman had in fact been raped.  Over the course of the story the town is trying to figure out who killed one of the rapists. They didn't actually believe a rape even happened, but whatever.  The other rapist was the town judge, and sketchy as hell in his business dealings because he owns the whole town.  It’s an interesting look into the politics against women of the day, like women can be convicted of fornicating but they don’t seem to bother convicting the man who contributed to the act, for example. A super interesting look into a very interesting woman’s life and it’s all based upon her daily diary of the goings on in her town.