What to Read Next: February 7, 2025
Issue #365, featuring a Pulitzer winner, upcoming February titles, and more
Happy Friday, readers!
I was so glad to hear your positive response last week to this experimental newsletter format. Let’s roll with it for a while and see what happens!
What’s on tap this week:
A review of the perfect complement to The Frozen River
A reading rec for your Super Bowl weekend
February new releases I’m excited about
5 Things: Links and Opinions
Read More Books is a reader-supported publication. Paid subscribers get full access to every issue and the archives. Subscribe today for just $5/month or $45/year.
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River has been a bestseller since hitting shelves just over a year ago. It’s shown up on tons of “Best Of” lists, including multiple discussion threads here on Read More Books. That great novel tells a fictionalized version of the life of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who delivered hundreds of babies from her home base of Hallowell, Maine. In the end notes, I was thrilled to see that Lawhon cited A Midwife’s Tale, a 1990 Pulitzer-winning history, as her inspiration.
Given my own Pulitzer Project, I knew moving A Midwife’s Tale to the top of my list would make for the perfect pairing.
Using Ballard’s diary, which had previously been given scant attention by historians, Ulrich paints a picture of day-to-day domestic life during the Revolutionary Era. As a midwife, Ballard actually performed a number of functions basically amounting to being a general practitioner and counselor in addition to her gynecological role.
Each chapter features an excerpt from the journal, setting up an exploration of a specific facet of daily life — medicine, religion, politics, crime, love, sex. It may sound dry, but I promise it’s not. I was fascinated from start to finish.
If you enjoyed The Frozen River and want to learn about the real story — which is nearly as dramatic at times — Laurel Thatcher Ulrich A Midwife’s Tale is an accessible, enjoyable book that very much deserves wider awareness.