
My Antonia
Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.

Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.

Four Victorian idols go under Strachey's scalpel: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, the headmaster Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon at Khartoum. The malice is so elegant that English biography never went back to reverence.

Adams writes his own life as another man's, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, educated for a world that vanished. A Paris dynamo strikes him with the force medieval pilgrims felt from the Virgin.

Splintered stumps and shell craters under a cold sun, and Nash gave it that title on purpose, as an official British war artist.

Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine runs on and the love does not. Apollinaire brought the machine age and the trenches into French verse, and coined the word that named surrealism.

Cut for Victor in March 1918, over 136 versions by 1942, and New Orleans still argues over who wrote it.
Cut for Victor in July 1918 by the singer billed as Queen of the Blues; jazz kept it.