Lauren John's Blog

• Reading Mum and Pup

  June 20, 2009

  • Novelist/social satirist Christopher Buckley 's new memoir Losing Mum and Pup--is my suggested read for Father's Day...and beyond. Here's what it's about. In the course of a year (2007-2008), only-child Christo (his family nickname) lost both of his charismatic, extraordinary parents, Pat and Bill Buckley.  If you read Vanity Fair and the New York Times and Washington Post society and/or ...
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• The Woman Who Wrote Liberty Valance

  May 25, 2009

  • Senator Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott? Reporter Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. The lines were delivered in the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which John Ford directed John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Jimmy Stewart.  I saw the film over Memorial Day Weekend at the magnificently restored ...
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• Reading Matriarchs

  May 5, 2009

  • My long gone grandmothers would never have written essays about being grandmothers. For one thing, Grandma Rose, a seamstress born in Shepetovker, Ukraine, could not read or write.  Thoroughly modern American-born Grandma Becky, a ballerina in her youth and Bloomingdales salesperson in an era when there was only the one store in Manhattan--rarely wrote more than a few lines on a greeting card. ...
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