Ethel Barrett's interpretation of Bunyan's classic needs no apology -- Bunyan would be proud! Barrett brings Bunyan's characters to life in the audio version. I remember listening to this on 33 1/3 RPM vinyl as a youngster, hardly able to breathe, the excitement was so palpable.

Barrett's interpretation is, itself, a timeless classic, as relevant today as it was decades ago.

This book is written directly to the point with intelligence and wit, yet it is a comprehensive and sophisticated treatment of the worrisome topic. There is obviously much thoughtful experience serving as the background for the practical advice offered to parents. The discussion of various types of homework problems and the inclusive approach for remediation are particularly good.

Such bleak times in our history. It brings it to life yet pulls you in and makes you feel like you are actually there.

Ethel Waxham is, beyond doubt, absolutely charming. The story of her courtship by John Love, a Wyoming sheep baron, is the focus of these collected journal entries and letters. Their correspondence betrays an endearing, down-home, extended Western romance heavily seasoned by John's devotion, Ethel's wry humor, and the quick intelligence of both.

The two of them met in Wyoming, in 1905, when Ethel accepted a teaching assignment there. After the school year was over, Ethel left to continue her education, and subsequently took teaching assignments elsewhere in the country, adventures documented by her letters to John Love. It is evident that Ethel felt keenly the conflict between a poorly-paid, but independent career, and a more comfortable but narrow married life.

Meanwhile, John Love was apparently building a sheep empire. His adventures were of a more dangerous variety: rounding up and taming wild horses, herding sheep in the middle of Wyoming snowstorms, travelling 80 miles through horrific weather to spend a day or two by Ethel's side.

The two principals in this play are engrossing enough. However, there is a whole extended cast of characters contributing sub-plots: Ethel's close circle of college friends and co-teachers, who write to her from the four corners of the US. Their letters provide a glimpse into the lives of young, educated, intelligent, ambitious, and surprisingly (to this reader) modern women. Among them were socialists, vegetarians (Ethel herself!), suffragettes, women pursuing graduate degrees and medical degrees, women teaching in Paris or Texas or California or Illinois. It is inspiring and encouraging to be reminded that women were doing such things long before the Baby Boom generation "invented" women's lib, slowly pushing out the social and political barriers to what women could be and do.

This is personal history, however, not political, and it has all the intimate appeal of narratives which are not varnished, interpreted, collated or generalized by the historian. Peek inside the classrooms, boarding-house bedrooms, and isolated ranches where Ethel and her contemporaries lived, taught, and wrote warm missives to distant friends under dim lamplight. They are our pioneers.

When John McPhee published his now-classic RISING FROM THE PLAINS, he introduced Ethel Waxham Love in the first paragraph. All through the rest of the book he interwove her story with that of her son, Wyoming geologist David Love and the geology of the Great Plains. When fan mail came rolling in, readers wanted to know more about the "slim young woman" who stepped down from a train in Rawlings, Wyoming one fall morning in 1905.
LADY'S CHOICE is Ethel Waxham Love's story. Her granddaughters, Barbara Love and Frances Love Froidevaux, have collected her writings -- journals, letters, poetry, essays, stories -- present them in combination with letters from her friends and classmates as well as from the man she would marry.

Her story begins in the Fall of 1905. She has graduated from Wellesley and spent the Summer working as an assistant to her doctor father in Denver. When she gets the opportunity to teach in a log cabin schoolhouse in Wyoming, she accepts the offer. Her first journal entry describes her journey into the wilds of Wyoming by train, stage coach and wagon. With a sure pen and a sympathetic eye she records her impressions of the land, the people and events. Her observations are those of a sharp mind (she had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Wellesley, specializing in Greek, Latin and French), her descriptions are those of a major literary talent.

Of one acquaintance she writes, "Mrs. Butler. . .is a little war-horse of a woman, with a long, thin husband. I'm telling you about her because she has been improving him for twenty years and it is beginning to tell on him."

Her year in this community is surprisingly eventful, considering the isolation and the seeming lack of resources. But Ethel is a resourceful person, full of imagination, the kind of person who makes things happen. She visits friends, attends church services and "sociables," and dines in local restaurants. There are dances and suppers and school entertainments. And there is John Love, the man she will marry after the five-year courtship that is recorded here.

She is enchanted by her surroundings. "The color of the white hills against the pale of the blue sky is most exquisite i the world. The cedars are gray with snow, the sagebrush white clumps of crystals. Where a long way off the sun touches the tops of the snow-covered hills there are shines a streak of silver. A whole white world was there, rising around us, as far as we could see; there did not appear to be such a thing as direction. Everywhere the whiteness, everywhere the hills. Where the stubble of the fields of the range rose above the snow,there was a shading of gold over the white. . .and when the full moon shines out of the deep dark night sky, the hills are like shining silver."

You, too, will find a lady to love in these pages. Her journal begins as she stands on the threshold of her life, emerging from the chrysalis of a protected girlhood toward the challenge of womanhood. Here she records a land, a people, a life, a love, welcoming them as unequivocably and eagerly as only the young do.

LADY'S CHOICE eclipses others of its type. It not only showcases the lady's life and the choices she made, it reveals a true literary talent and a rare human being. Wallace Stegner (ANGLE OF REPOSE, SPECTATOR BIRD, CROSSING TO SAFETY)once spoke of the "inextinguishable western hope" expressed by writers of history as they look at the world and at humanity's place in it. Ethel Waxham Love's letters and journals provide a major contribution to that hope as well as to the history and the the belles lettres of the American West.

(c)2002 Sunnye Tiedemann
(Ruth F. Tiedemann)

Excellent book covering the lifes and loves of the two major characters. Not only good reading, but a very good insight into the manners, culture and living conditions in the early 1900's.