Our Quiet Growing Time

Englishman Stephen Wraysford is alone in the world. On a business trip to France, he stays with the family of the owner of a local textile mill and quickly becomes infatuated with his lovely and ethereal wife. Stephen and Isabelle begin a heated affair that marks Stephen's life forever, even to the bloody and muddied trenches of World War One. The book begins in 1910 with the adulterous affair between Stephen and Isabelle, but the majority of the book takes place in the trenches in France during the Great War. And this is NOT a love story, no matter what list this may be included on at Goodreads or what it might say in the blurb on the back cover. This is the story of war. Of the enduring toughness of the human spirit and of one man's quest to survive.  Birdsong was unlike any other book I've ever read. It was critically acclaimed when first published in 1993 and boasts many rabid fans, but here's the weird thing: the New York Times described it as "d...

I don't know much about World War I. This is what comes to mind: poison gas Ottoman empire Austro-Hungary Archduke Ferdinand That is the extent of the contents of the catalog in my brain under the heading "World War I." I bet a lot of people know that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was one of the events that led to WWI, but I bet most don't know why. Similarly, I think 99% of American schoolchildren can name Eli Whitney as the inventor of the cotton gin, but few can explain what a cotton gin is . All I know is that it was a machine that revolutionized the cotton industry. I'm envisioning a massive robotic machine with many metal arms, propelling itself through cotton fields plucking cotton bolls at breakneck speed. But that can't be right. And I can’t explain the significance that the death of Archduke Ferdinand had on the world, either. One of the most famous books to come out of World War I wa...