Mailbox Monday - Oct 29

I love Mondays because I love Mailbox Monday--it's such fun to bop around the blog-o-sphere and see what everyone else is excited about reading.

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week and explore great book blogs. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.


Visit Mailbox Monday for a list of other bloggers who have posted about their latest acquisitions.

Here's a look at my new books, which fall neatly into the two primary reading fronts I'm currently working on.

Civil War

Love and War, by John Jakes - second book in his North and South trilogy.  I'm also watching the mini-series while I'm reading these bestsellers from the 1980s.  I'm impressed with how accurate the books are and how complete a picture they paint of the Civil War era. 

Civil War Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott.  Here's how the Amazon blurb described this slender book.

Before Little Women brought her wider fame, Alcott achieved recognition for her accounts of her work as a volunteer nurse in an army hospital. Written during the winter of 1862-63, her lively dispatches revealed the desperate realities of battlefield medicine as well as the tentative first steps of women in military service.

I would like to read more first-hand accounts of the war and this seemed like a great way to start, especially given my recent foray into Alcott's life and work.

Venice

Across the River and Into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway - it's been years since I read anything by Hemingway, but I always liked him, back in my high school and college days.  I had to get this book and put it on my Classics Challenge list for 2013 when I discovered it was set in Venice.  Here's part of the Amazon blurb about this book:  

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice,