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AUTHORBUZZ: Discover new books, "meet" the authors and enter to win: Goto: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader
Dear Reader,
I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, attending my granddaughter's high school graduation, so I've invited author Beatriz Williams to visit the book club. Beatriz has written two books, her first Overseas and her newest title, A Hundred Summers. Send her an email, say hello, and you'll be entered in a drawing for one of five Advanced Reading Copies of her latest book. You can read her book before anyone else. Email Ms. Williams at [email protected]
Take it away Beatriz Williams...
I first heard about the great New England hurricane of 1938 from Katherine Hepburn. Not personally, alas. Many years ago--while Hepburn was still alive and taking her morning swim in a brisk Long Island Sound, rain or shine--my in-laws pointed out her house to me. Its whitewashed bricks perched in tasteful order along the rarefied old WASP beachhead of Fenwick, Connecticut, and the place hadn't changed a bit, my mother-in-law said, since it was rebuilt from rubble after the 1938 storm.
In that instant, the hurricane owned me. What force of nature could possibly be so brash, so hectic, so almighty, it dared to take on the Great Kate...and win?
Well, this one did. Racing unseen up the Eastern seaboard at over sixty miles an hour, spinning with intrinsic winds of a hundred and forty miles per hour, the tempest found a rare alleyway between one wall of atmospheric pressure over Appalachia and another wall over Bermuda and shot north to an undreamt-of landfall in Long Island at about three o'clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, the twenty-first of September. It then screamed onward without a pause, crashing into the Connecticut-Rhode Island border and rampaging up the broad Connecticut River through Vermont and New Hampshire, where the Mount Moosilauke Ravine Lodge was later built from the old-growth timber felled that night.
You can track down all kinds of books about the 1938 hurricane within the shoreline towns it ravaged. You can view the astonishing photographs of destruction, you can toss around cosmic numbers like two billion trees down. You can visit Napatree Point, the sandy cape stretching into the Atlantic from Watch Hill, Rhode Island, where the wind and water swept forty-four substantial summer cottages into Little Narragansett Bay, leaving behind only the grass-swept dunes around which beachcombers scramble today.
But we are human beings, we are storytellers. We are struck hardest when we hear about Katherine Hepburn playing the best nine holes of golf in her life that Tuesday morning, before her house collapsed into the sea that afternoon. That's what grapples with your imagination. That's what strikes at the heart of human fear: that the outward serenity of your existence, the teeming optimism of your carefully-managed life, can be smashed into pieces with one swing of an unexpected fist. That you can play the best golf of your life one gusty morning, come inside for a gin and tonic, and witness a fog bank twenty feet high roll in toward your unassailable well-bred windows. Then you realize it's the sea.
And all you can do is rebuild.
Thanks to my publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons, I have 5 ARCs of A Hundred Summers to give away! Just email me at [email protected] and tell me what difference a storm has made in your life, and you'll be entered to win. I look forward to hearing from you!
--Beatriz Williams
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
AUTHORBUZZ: A MOST PECULIAR CIRCUMSTANCE (Fiction) by Jen Turano
I knew when I planned the Ladies of Distinction series that Mr. Theodore Wilder, private investigator extraordinaire, would demand a story of his own. The problem was creating a heroine strong enough to handle him. Enter Miss Arabella Beckett, an independent lady determined to help give women the right to vote. Placing these two characters into close proximity with one another allowed me to create a story of mayhem, adventure, laughter, and ultimately, love.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on A MOST PECULIAR CIRCUMSTANCE to read more and to email author Jen Turano, you'll get a reply.
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