This Cursed House by Del Sandeen

 Hello my lovely readers! I've been reading like there's no tomorrow! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
In the fall of 1962, twenty-seven-year-old Jemma Barker is desperate to escape her life in Chicago—and the spirits she has always been able to see. When she receives an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, she accepts, thinking it is her chance to start over.

But Jemma discovers that the Duchon family isn’t what it seems. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma. Their tenuous hold on reality extends to all the members of their eccentric clan, from haughty grandmother Honorine to beautiful yet inscrutable cousin Fosette. And soon the shocking truth comes The Duchons are under a curse. And they think Jemma has the power to break it.

As Jemma wrestles with the gift she’s run from all her life, she unravels deeper and more disturbing secrets about the mysterious Duchons. Secrets that stretch back over a century. Secrets that bind her to their fate if she fails.

Scrublands by Chris Hammer

Hello my lovely readers! 

When I tell you I DEVOURED this book....I DEVOURED this book! I bought this book at Potts Point Bookshop in Sydney, Australia five years ago. So let's get into it!

BACKGROUND
It was January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. I was with my bestie, Laiza to celebrate her birthday and we went to Australia and New Zealand. I later did a four day solo trip to Fiji.

On our way to the Sydney Opera House, we decide to take the scenic route and passed by this bookshop.

The synopsis intrigued me, so of course I purchased it and got a bookmark. Aside from books that I buy when traveling, I love getting bookmarks from local bookstores.

Laiza and I were only in Australia for a week and in Sydney for three days before we headed to Cairns for the rest of the week to go snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. I thoroughly enjoyed Australia and would definitely visit again. Here's a few photos from my time there...for your viewing pleasure!

    

The Sydney skyline

Snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef

Bondi Beach

Hanging out with aboriginals at the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Center

"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself": The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945 by Florian Huber

Hello my lovely readers!

If you can't tell...I'm in my death and dying era. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was inevitable. As the Russian army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of Red Army soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but shame, guilt, and fear. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death for themselves, and for their children. Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself recounts this little known mass event.
Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian and film-maker Florian Huber traces the euphoria of many ordinary Germans as Hitler restored national pride; their indifference as the Führer's political enemies, Jews, and other minorities began to suffer; and the descent into despair as the war took its terrible toll, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Above all, he investigates how suicide became a contagious epidemic as the country collapsed.
Drawing on eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself presents a riveting portrait of a nation in crisis, and sheds light on a dramatic yet largely unknown episode of postwar Germany.

The Race Beat by Gene Roberts

 Hello my lovely readers!

A journalist reading a book on journalism? Groundbreaking. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times , Newsweek , NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941, I, Too Sing America by Arnold Rampersad

Hello my lovely readers!

Boy, this book took me...I'm ashamed to say, MORE THAN A YEAR to read! Again, I blame the pregnancy, the birth and being a new mom. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
In young adulthood Hughes possessed a nomadic but dedicated spirit that led him from Mexico to Africa and the Soviet Union to Japan, and countless other stops around the globe. Associating with political activists, patrons, and fellow artists, and drawing inspiration from both Walt Whitman and the vibrant Afro-American culture, Hughes soon became the most original and revered of black poets.

Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

Hello my lovely readers!

Wow...this book. It was a tough read, but I could not put it down. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

Death in the Theatre and Famous Last Words by Chris Wood

 Hello my lovely readers! 

We have a double header today as I recently finished these two books by the same author. Let's get into it.

SYNPOSIS
Britain’s theatrical wonderland has been a cornerstone of culture for centuries, delighting and thrilling audiences with an assemblage of exhilarating spectacles. Beyond the trodden boards, and tucked neatly behind the curtain however, lies a catalogue of real life destruction and grisly murder that our greatest tragedians would surely be proud to have presided over. Tread the bloodied boards of Britain’s theaters and witness the deathly dramas that have played out so dramatically within them.

Death in the Theatre collects an astonishing selection of startling tragedies from Britain’s throng of theaters. There is something especially staggering when the player exits life on their adorned stage, and yet, with this by no means an infrequent occurrence, death has made many a fearful cameo appearance – stalking the stalls and grimly reaping the galleries in its macabre and relentless fashion.