Reading Excursions

MY REVIEW Hardcover:  352 pages Publisher:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (April 9, 2019) Language:  English ISBN-10:  1328663817 ISBN-13:  978-1328663818 Click Picture for Purchase Information “ Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has preve...

In my last blog, I talked about the library treasures I bought as a result of returning and picking up a few items. This is about the treasures borrowed. One book I had to request was one I’d used 28 years ago for a Sociology report in 10 th grade. I remember trying to track down a research book as I was doing a report on Jack the Ripper thanks to a MADE-FOR-TV movie I’d seen back in the mid 1980’s on NBC. [This is an OLD book, originally published 1988] [Came from Boulder City Library, which is part of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library system ] [Summary of the book  –  “ Jack The Ripper: The Complete Casebook ” ] My mom and I – God bless her – actually drove to Boulder City to get this book as it was one I needed for the report. The report was pretty darn successful, and one of the ones I am still very proud of (and still have some of my notes from). This book, and another one (that I can’t even remember), earned me a 92% on the repor...