Ten Years of Bookish Babe

As of December I have had my blog for a decade. I can’t believe how much time has passed. The past ten years have seen some extreme lows and some incredible highs. I started this blog in the midst of the financial crisis; I had just been laid off, and effectively kissed a finance career […]

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Imagine yourself as a young girl from an obscure German family.  You are asked to move eastward, to the mighty state of Russia.  There you are to marry the future czar who unfortunately turns out to be an insufferable dolt, too inept for his position.  You take matters into your own hands after years of […]

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It is always important to recognize forgotten American heroes.  Especially during this anti-heroic period we are living in.  One such hero played a pivotal role in post-antebellum southern society.  Booker T. Washington was that figure.  Born into slavery in Virginia, Washington was able to reach the highest levels of American society.  His autobiography Up From […]

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We all remember the day when US Airways flight 1549 landed on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009.  That was not a good time for me or for the whole country.  I had just been laid off from my banking job, and was very fearful of the future.  This was at the height of […]

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I am a big fan of the Brontë sisters novels.  However I had no idea Emily Brontë wrote poetry.  It wasn’t until after watching an excellent PBS movie about the sisters called To Walk Invisible that I was introduced to her poetry.  I was able to find an old edition of her poems at my local […]

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As much as we bemoan the state of the world today with Muslim terrorism, economic turmoil, and leadership that only cares about maintaining its own power as an end in itself.  It’s easy to fall into the mindset of the world being a hellish place.  I am guilty of it as well.  Yet, some of […]

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I just finished reading an intriguing memoir about a segment of American society that is virtually ignored.  Writer J.D. Vance chronicles his life story in Hillbilly Elegy.  Vance highlights the terrible consequences of bad ideas passed from generation to generation.  These bad ideas include eschewing education, using violence as a means to settle disagreements, drug […]

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“What would you have me do?  Seek for the patronage of some great man and like a creeping vine on a tall tree crawl upward where I cannot stand alone?  No thank you!  Dedicate as others do, poems to pawnbrokers?  Be a buffoon in the vile hope of teasing out a smile.  On some cold […]

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Have you ever wondered why the United States has had 14 banking crises since the country’s inception, whereas Canada has had none?  Or why Mexico and Brazil has some of the riches natural resources on the planet yet the majority of its populations live in poverty.  I just finished reading an interesting book that answers […]

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I always look to the ancient Greeks for wisdom.  Since they were the inventors of literature and philosophy, I decided to read the tragedy Antigone.  A tyrant named Creon commands a woman, Antigone to not give her brother the dignity of a burial.  Or she will be executed.  Not only does Antigone not follow Creon’s […]

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