Claudia Keenan

Romance, Mystery & Art Behind a Tranquil Fifth Avenue Façade in Fiona Davis’ Latest

The stories embedded in the architectural masterpieces of New York City have long intrigued Fiona Davis, whose new novel, The Magnolia Palace (Dutton), is set in a Fifth Avenue mansion that happens to house one of the finest art collections in the world. The industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who made…

Claudia KeenanJanuary 25, 2022

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

The Flamboyant Life and Lasting Legacy of the Portrait Photographer to the Art World

Born in 1907, George Platt Lynes was a sickly boy who grew up during the era of Muscular Christianity, a social movement that promoted manliness and vigor. Fortunately, no one stifled the child’s poetic sensibility and love of beauty. George, while lacking in self-awareness, was destined for flamboyance, passion and…

Claudia KeenanJanuary 3, 2022

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

In Pursuit of a Crown: The Untold Story of the Miss America Pageant

Amid the centennial of the Miss America pageant, here comes a detailed history of the competition that arrived one year after American women were granted the right to vote. That seems like an appropriate coincidence, since the pageant is all about votes, right? Not so fast, argues author Amy Argetsinger,…

Claudia KeenanDecember 16, 2021

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

Visit a Far Flung Empire of Macaroni Eaters Who Invented Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce

Ranging from the 9th to the 20th century, all around the Mediterranean world and across the sea to Latin America, Mexico and the United States, A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce (Europa Compass) is so much more than the chronicle of a familiar, beloved dish. The book is…

Claudia KeenanNovember 16, 2021

Thrillers Thrillers - Featured

Join the Rapid Pursuit of a Painting, a Killer and a Hint of Romance in “An Exhibit of Madness”

The intrepid Dulcinea Chambers, winsome director of the Maine Museum of Art, encounters the bright light of summer and the darkness of murder in the first installment of Kerry J. Charles’ Dulcie Chambers Museum Mysteries series, An Exhibit of Madness (Edmund+Octavia Publishing). Dr. Chambers, a Portland native, has just presided…

Claudia KeenanSeptember 10, 2021

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

Race Over Pillaged Ground in Adin Dobkin’s Depiction of the Tour de France After the Great War

It comes as a shock to learn that the world’s most famous bicycle race carried on through mud and ruins less than one year after the end of World War I. Yet soon after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, 54-year-old Henry Desgrange, the founder of the Tour…

Claudia KeenanJuly 6, 2021

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

“To Poison a Nation” is an Eye-Opening New Historical Offering

Written history that starts with a seemingly insignificant incident is often more enlightening than a sweeping narrative. Such is the case with To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America (The New Press), a stunning new book by Andrew Baker,…

Claudia KeenanJune 15, 2021

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

Documenting More Than a Century of Relentless Change at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

It may well be New York City’s most famous hotel, but the Waldorf-Astoria began life modestly if exclusively, with a small entrance on Thirty-Third Street so that Fifth Avenue passersby wouldn’t give it a second thought. The brainchild of William Waldorf Astor, once the wealthiest man in America, the Hotel…

Claudia KeenanMay 14, 2021

Fiction Thrillers Thrillers - Featured

A Murder Mystery Full of Art and Intrigue in 1960s Manhattan

Once upon a time, Thomas Hart Benton was a household name, known widely as America’s foremost Regionalist painter. A prolific chronicler of the nation during the good and bad times of the 1920s through World War II, the Kansas City native studied art in Paris and New York City and…

Claudia KeenanMarch 1, 2021

Fiction

“Our Darkest Night:” Terror and Faith in Wartime Italy

Novelist Jennifer Robson does not spare readers a bit of horror in her new book, Our Darkest Night: A Novel of Italy and the Second World War (William Morrow). As she has demonstrated in Somewhere in France, Goodnight From London and The Gown, Robson has a predilection for placing indomitable…

Claudia KeenanJanuary 5, 2021

Book Club Network

Two Sisters Face One Life-Changing Secret in “A Palm Beach Scandal”

“For readers who appreciate modern and sensitively written stories about family, especially sisters." –Library Journal “Marren’s follow-up to A Palm Beach Wife is fun and flirty, alluding to all the Palm Beach landmarks we know and love: The Breakers, Worth Avenue and grandiose mansions are the perfect backdrop for the…

Claudia KeenanSeptember 15, 2020

Book Club Network Nonfiction

“Pioneering the Vote:” The Plural Histories of Women’s Suffrage

Five years ago, looking ahead to the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States, Neylan McBaine embarked on a story that has been largely neglected. In her new book, Pioneering the Vote, The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West (Shadow Mountain), she examines the tangled history…

Claudia KeenanAugust 4, 2020

Book Club Network Book Club Network - Featured2 Fiction

Fiona Davis’s “The Lions of Fifth Avenue:” A New York City Mystery of History

In the world’s fastest growing city, where well over a dozen daily newspapers were read by more than five million people, the year 1914 burst forth with the Great War and battles over modernism and women’s rights. While immigrants lived in stifling squalor on the Lower East Side, the lingering…

Claudia KeenanJuly 21, 2020

Fiction

The Night Watchman: A Mid-Century Tale of Native American Determination

The granddaughter of a Chippewa leader who challenged the U.S. Government’s policies toward Native Americans, Louise Erdrich has long written about the bitter history of twentieth-century American Indian culture. In The Night Watchman (Harper Collins Publishers), she returns to the themes of love and death that have haunted her work.…

Claudia KeenanMarch 2, 2020

Fiction

In Alice Hoffman’s New Novel, a Girl and a Golem Run From Nazis

On page one of her terrific new novel, The World That We Knew (Simon and Schuster), Alice Hoffman sets a chilling scene: It is Berlin in the spring of 1941, where the clear-eyed Hanni Kohn is focused solely on saving her twelve-year old daughter Lea from the Nazis. While the…

Claudia KeenanSeptember 24, 2019

Fiction

Pursuing the Dragon Lady in Italy, London and Rhodesia

Louisa Treger's The Dragon Lady (Bloomsbury) offers a nuanced perspective on British and African cultures during precarious times, the 1920s through the 1950s. It’s a wonderful mystery, love story and odyssey, all rolled into one. What's even more incredible is that this story is based on a real person. Yes,…

Claudia KeenanAugust 13, 2019

Claudia Keenan

Romance, Mystery & Art Behind a Tranquil Fifth Avenue Façade in Fiona Davis’ Latest

The Flamboyant Life and Lasting Legacy of the Portrait Photographer to the Art World

In Pursuit of a Crown: The Untold Story of the Miss America Pageant

Visit a Far Flung Empire of Macaroni Eaters Who Invented Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce

Join the Rapid Pursuit of a Painting, a Killer and a Hint of Romance in “An Exhibit of Madness”

Race Over Pillaged Ground in Adin Dobkin’s Depiction of the Tour de France After the Great War

“To Poison a Nation” is an Eye-Opening New Historical Offering

Documenting More Than a Century of Relentless Change at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

A Murder Mystery Full of Art and Intrigue in 1960s Manhattan

“Our Darkest Night:” Terror and Faith in Wartime Italy

Two Sisters Face One Life-Changing Secret in “A Palm Beach Scandal”

“Pioneering the Vote:” The Plural Histories of Women’s Suffrage

Fiona Davis’s “The Lions of Fifth Avenue:” A New York City Mystery of History

The Night Watchman: A Mid-Century Tale of Native American Determination

In Alice Hoffman’s New Novel, a Girl and a Golem Run From Nazis

Pursuing the Dragon Lady in Italy, London and Rhodesia

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