Waiting more than two months to download Heather O’Neill’s new book, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night from the library was worth the wait. I have a soft spot for Canadian authors and I enjoyed O’Neill’s debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals enormously. She writes about the grittier side of life in Montreal, Quebec through the eyes of a young teenager in her first book…
Building what we want
As you may have noticed, I have strong opinions on the type of accommodation currently being offered to Baby Boomers as retirement living (read my earlier post Build it and Boomers will come). With this in mind, there’s a program running on HBO Canada on Monday night, July 28th called Still Mine which we Boomers might find interesting. It starts at 6:15 p.m. which is…
Revealing secrets of the Paris Ritz Hotel
When I originally downloaded the book Hotel on Place Vendome I thought it was historical fiction but once I started reading I discovered it was non-fiction which pleased me even more. Written and thoroughly researched by Tilar J. Mazzeo, the book describes the opening of the world-famous hotel in Paris and its evolution from a modest, beautiful boutique hotel to the internationally-recognized institution it is…
Imagine . . . if women ran the world
I’ve always maintained that if women ran the world there would be no war. I cannot imagine a woman possessing the surge of testosterone required to push the button that brought down the airliner over the Ukraine or firing missiles at our neighbours. We would never send our husbands, sons, brothers and lovers off to kill other people to gain a bit of dirt. We’d…
The joy of menopause . . . the honest-to-goodness truth
Last week as I was watching Bill Maher on HBO, he invited author, speaker and performance artist Sandra Tsing Loh to join the panel at the half-way point in the show. This is usually when the new guest often has a book to promote. More than once I’ve enjoyed this part of the show so much I’ve gone on-line and ordered the book immediately and…
I’m not OK. Are you OK?
Could the once-brilliant minds of our entire Boomer generation be slowly slip-sliding away? Was it too much wine and other mood-enhancers? Do we have late-onset brain damage from all those years of sleeping on brush rollers in high school? Or are we retiring too early and “losing it”? Perhaps the sins and excesses of our youth are coming home to haunt us. In a short…