AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY

The Transcendentalist writers and thinkers who lived around Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century affected each other as much as they influenced American culture. Louisa May Alcott loved Henry David Thoreau, for example, and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped support Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose wife, Sophia, was sister to Ralph's wife, Lydian, who was Nathaniel's first love. Does this sound like a soap opera? Well, in Susan Cheever's AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY it is, but for anyone interested in American history and letters, it is also enlightening. Kate Reading handles the complications expertly. Admittedly, her well-articulated contralto sounds a bit stiff and considered at first, but she soon warms to the plot and helps us navigate the story's many points of view beautifully. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/ SEP 07]