I commented recently on the book The Strange Case of Dr. Couney — How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel. At that point I hadn’t read it, but now, through a generous gift, I have. Read. This. Book. Dr. Martin Couney was mysterious because he changed his name several [...]
Category: books
Three doctors and a book
I was strolling through Caroline Furlong’s blog archives (https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/) and came across a review she had written in May of 2023. It’s about a book written in 2018 by Dawn Raffel, an author I had never heard of (I haven’t heard of lots of people …) titled The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a [...]
Saint Willibald, writer
Saint Willibald came to my attention the other day when I was teaching Religion to some 8th graders. His feast day coincided with someone’s birthday. Saint Willibald is absolutely fascinating, for someone I never heard of before. And, though he was not himself a writer, he gave (at least one and probably many) talk(s) about [...]
Catholic fiction?
If you want to write well, you have to read a lot. That’s been the advice to aspiring writers, for well over fifty years. Especially, they say, read in the area where you want to write. “What you want to write” is a complicated concept. I just finished writing a book that I thought was [...]
Paradise Lost, first impressions
Last week I flew from Santa Fe to Denver, and towards the middle of the trip I looked down. Below were mountains with sharp crests, outlined by a sprinkling of snow. The white line appeared on the eastern edge of range after range. I’m not familiar with the local area, but assume that the wind [...]
Janey's blog 