The Big Read @ Kansas City Public Library

Kansas City Public Library, Park University and Liberty Memorial will be celebrating Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, A Farewell to Arms during October and November.The Big Read aims to encourage Kansas Citians to read, enjoy, contemplate, and discuss Hemingway's landmark novel of love and war on the Italian Front during the First World War.

The program period coincides with the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Caporetto, a devastating Italian defeat that served as a climactic moment in A Farewell to Arms.

More than 500 free paperback copies of A Farewell to Arms will be distributed to interested participants. In addition, there will be special events, panel discussions, book groups and movie screenings revolving around Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and Hemingway's influential ties to Kansas City. Register for an event, book group or free copy of the book here.

Contribute comments and insights at the Kansas City Public Library's The Big Read blog.

From the Dough Boys

From a little known piece of American history, Michael Lowenthal has crafted a heartbreaking, yet inspiring story of love betrayed and courage discovered. Frieda is just another working Jewish girl in New York City during World War I. She is a bundle wrapper at Jordan march in ladies' undergarments and very happy with her job and her life. She and her Friend, Lou visit the weekly dances with soldiers and are popular dance partners. One evening Frieda meets a handsome young dough boy and impulsively spends the evening with him. Weeks later she is visited by a stern woman who accuses Frieda of giving the soldier a venereal disease. Frieda is sent to a medical institution where she is quarantined with other "fallen women" who has passed diseases onto soldiers. She is a Charity Girl, accused of unpatriotic behavior and must be rehabilitated before being let out into society again. The fellow inmates and one sympathetic social worker are the only support system Frieda has as she faces numerous indignities in the detention center. Fans of One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus will appreciate the same strong central female character and the straightforward tone. This little known historical period and the brutally unfair treatment of teenage girls will pique interest among readers of American historical fiction. Readers will also rally around Frieda and her feisty, but not anachronistic, attitude toward the medical sciences and her own future. Very readable and entertaining. Characters are like able and believable; plot is swift; enough historic detail to create a strong sense of time, place and social tone, but not too much to slow down the story. A satisfactory ending should please all readers.

Heartland on the Homefront

Sandra Dallas is one of the best kept literary secrets in the Midwest. Her books cleverly disguise themselves as historical women's fiction but then pack a wallop at the end to jolt even the most jaded reader.

Dallas' strengths are her realistic and likeable characters, their unique observations about their sometimes ordinary and sometimes extreme situations, and her deft mixture of easy pacing with page-turning pockets of action.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Persian Pickle Club. It's a Midwest historical mystery and I defy anyone to know "whodunit" before the last page of the book (TomA says he figured it out and his theory works for me. But he's a literary genius, so he doesn't get to play in the same sandbox as all us lesser reader-mortals.:))

Dallas' latest novel, Tallgrass, is set in a time period she has not yet explored, but in a place she knows and loves well, wartime Eastern Colorado. Rennie Stroud is the youngest child in her family, living happily on her parents' sugar beet farm during World War II. Her brother has enlisted in the service; her sister has moved to Denver, and an internment camp for Japanese-American citizens has been constructed next to her father's farm. The townspeople are suspicious, frightened and prejudiced, but Rennie's father exhibits tolerance and wisdom beyond his years and the time period. Everyone is living warily, yet peacefully, until the violent murder of a young girl on another farm bordering the camp.

Fans of Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson will find something to enjoy in this novel.

This book was discussed on The Walt Bodine Show 's Book Doctors program May 17, 2007. KCUR 89.3