I posted this the other day to my online group, and I'm posting it again. This was a VERY good book. OK, if you read at all, you should go and buy this book. Go to Amazon and buy it; have it sent to your house, and read it in stolen moments. Choices by Mary Lee Settle www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156003880/qid=1024384520/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/102-2605895-1328136 [Note: This description isn't all that great; I'm in a hurry. Suffice it to say that this book will make you think about everything a little differently.] It's about an American woman, a southern debutante, who overhears her father one night saying "I don't have one hundred dollars" to her mother. The next day, she sees him leave the house early and then hears that his car has stalled on the train tracks and he's dead. He has massive amounts of life insurance and she and her mother are left the money. That and the fact that she knows that her family's money comes from coal, makes an impression on her. When her mother tells her to volunteer, she signs up for the red cross in a town that's in trouble because the coal miners are unionizing. So this woman, as she puts it, runs away from something, and then she starts running her life based upon basic truths that stare her in the face at three in the morning. She goes through the unionization of coal miners, the spanish civil war, world war two and the london blitz (she marries a baronet), and finally, she ends up adopting an 18 year old black boy from whatever southern town she's from, so that he can get an education. She's feisty, personable, and has a lovely love affair with a driven doctor. It's a story about some of the very large social unrests and uprisings that happened before us, how people lived through it, and what made those people. It talks about the blitz in London in detail, through the eyes of characters, and you can get a feeling for the backbone and strength shown by the British people in their time of travail. (And some context for why queen Elizabeth was unimpressed by Diana's emotional miasma -- snicker.) It also juxtaposes four defining moments of social unrest in the 20th century, through the eyes of one woman, and relates them directly to how people WERE. It's well-written, captivating, and, unlike most modern fiction (I am making a face here), it doesn't once talk about incest among midwestern cornfields. It is my humble exhortation that you buy this book and make some room in your busy lives to read it.