An Order of Spies With My Historical Romance, Please

Posted Dec 12, 2005 by Kevin Walker

Updated Dec 12, 2005 at 04:31 PM

In a way, as a writer, I sort of hate Lauren Willig. After all, she’s young (still getting her PhD at Harvard), ambitious, goal-oriented and a finisher. That’s like everything most writers aren’t. At any rate, there’s also respect for this student/author, who has just released her second novel, The Masque of the Black Tulip, in which a young woman researching her dissertion comes across information that the Pink Carnation (the spy from Willig’s first book) is being pursued by The Black Tulip, a nasty French spy. The first novel got rave reviews for combining page-turning reading with historically accurate tidbits, expect more of the same here.

In The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, author Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, delves into why the movies hold such a grip on people around the world. He posits that our connection and perception of movies alows us to better understand our own nature. Does this mean I probably shouldn’t watch Pulp Fiction again?

If you consider yourself a fan of the Spanish Colonial revival in architecture (I do), then Gibbs Smith books has released the perfect book for you (I know, I know. That sounds like a commercial. But this book is very cool). In George Washington Smith, author Patricia Gebhard explores the life and work of Smith, an architect who, in the early part of the 20th Century, sparked the Spanish Colonial revival in California. Of course the knock off versions of the style are depressingly bad (I can think of a few strip malls in our area, for example), but the real deal is wonderful. The book is full of the sort of photos that, if you like this style of architecture, will dazzle you.  Actually one of the worst photos it the cover, but here it is: