“Half memoir, half travel, A Yank Back to England...is an absolutely wonderful book, not only about going home again but also about love and family and tradition and the passage of the years.”
—Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic (Washington
Post)
To see the entire quote, click here.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Happy Birthday, Dad!

All children think their parents are old, but mine always were, exceptionally so. Obviously, they weren’t born old, but they were old when I was born. By the time I became conscious of age and generational differences, they were already in their fifties. That’s the way it was, only the future was always approached with a glance to past horizons that, despite hardship and deprivations, always glowed with the warmth of familiarity.
Because of my parents’ age, I missed several generations of popular culture: Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Eden, Ban the Bomb, Big Bands. Beatniks. My parents missed them, too. My points of reference were Fred Astaire, the Gershwins, Bette Davis, Charlie Chaplin, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby. Not a problem unless I ran into a parent of one of my school friends or a friend would meet my parents. That was always a shock for everyone. When my parents dressed up to go out for the evening, they always looked like Nick and Nora or any movie couple from the thirties. Mum wore lots of rabbit fur and hats with feathers and smelled of talc, and Lew always wore double-breasted suits with baggy trousers. He was always clean shaved, always had a short back and sides hair cut brilliantined like Ramon Navarro – whoever he was.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

And the winners are...

I confess, we were too lazy to pull out our lovely roulette wheel this time, so we used random.org to determine the winners of the Todd Charles books. We ended up with 32 valid entries, and the winning numbers were 8 and (surprisingly) 1. So that means our lucky winners are:
*my Goodreads buddy, Jersey Girl, who tagged, posted, voted, and more (thanks, darling!).
*Prodigal Wife's faithful friend Syl, who was the first to enter our giveaway.
We have emails, so getting info for HarperCollins should be easy.
Congratulations!

One little thing--I know we haven't posted as regularly as we might have over the summer. Hopefully that will change as the weather cools...
Cheers,
The Prodigals