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Claudia Keenan

Claudia Keenan

Claudia Keenan is a historian of education and independent scholar who writes about American culture. She blogs at throughthehourglass.com.

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Claudia Keenan

Nonfiction

Modernism, Madness and the American Dream

During the early 1980s, when Tom Weidlinger, author of The Restless Hungarian: Modernism, Madness, and the American Dream (SparkPress), set out to plumb his father’s life, he already possessed a sheaf of astonishing stories. First and foremost, he knew that Paul Weidlinger counted among the towering figures in twentieth-century engineering,…
Claudia Keenan
April 16, 2019
Nonfiction

A DNA Revelation: Mystery & Turmoil in Dani Shapiro’s Latest

Often it is a shocking revelation: the discovery that one’s heredity is not what one assumed; not what was accepted as fact. Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, Inheritance (Knopf), illuminates the feelings and issues that come along with uncovering family secrets and upending settled truth. Shapiro was puzzled but didn’t give it much thought…
Claudia Keenan
February 4, 2019
Fiction

The Wartime Sisters in Need of a Peace Talk

It’s Brooklyn in the early thirties, and Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan have brought forth two daughters who could not possibly be more opposite from each other.  Ruth is studious, brittle and envious of her younger sister, Millie, whose beauty and charm captivate everyone around her. Even as a child, Millie…
Claudia Keenan
January 7, 2019
Fiction

A Gorgeous Distraction in Time of Turmoil

In 1947, the world set its weary eyes on a royal wedding when Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten. The war had ended just two years earlier, and the British were still living in hard times, with food and gas rationing and insufficient housing. And so, as winter approached, the prospect…
Claudia Keenan
December 19, 2018
Fiction

Cinderella Back by Popular Demand With a New Twist

Now here comes Slipper, Hester Velmans’ first adult novel, starring Lucinda as the luckless heroine who chases happiness through seventeenth-century England and Europe.  Born to a woman who had secretly wed an aristocrat and died in childbirth, Lucinda is an orphan who spends her childhood being batted back and forth…
Claudia Keenan
May 17, 2018