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Pauline Finch

Biography

Pauline Finch


[email protected]

Pauline Finch is a longtime resident of Kitchener, Ontario (Canada), where she attended Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Waterloo. While doing graduate work, she accidentally landed part-time work with the local newspaper, which became full-time and lasted nearly 23 years.

Her one claim to fame is that in 1991 she became the first person in the history of that paper to electronically file a news story. Not long after, she was among a large contingent of reporters “fired with money” during the corporate downsizing waves of the late 1990s.

For the past 20 years, she has been a freelance writer and editor whose clients include novel and textbook authors, church publications, corporate executives, academics, theologians and non-profit groups.

Among her avocations, she is a serious amateur flutist who began playing in 1964 but by 2007 had figured out that lessons are a good idea. She plays in the Waterloo Flute Choir where she learned alto and bass flutes as well, the Waterloo Concert Band as lead piccolo, and in a permanent local flute quartet. She is also a lifelong recorder-player who enjoys every size of the instrument from bass to soprano, and plays in several small socially distanced ensembles. For the past decade, she has studied organ and enjoys keyboards and pedals in harmony.

Pauline was introduced to Bookreporter.com by the late Robert Finn, a fine reviewer from Cleveland, OH, who was a wonderful career mentor when she most needed one.

Pauline Finch

Reviews by Pauline Finch

by Beth Morrey - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Clover Hendry hasn’t said “No” a day in her life. Until today. Normally a woman who tips her hairdresser even when the cut is hideous, is endlessly patient with her horrendous mother, and says “yes” every time her boss asks her to work late. Today, things are going to be very different. Because Clover is taking the day off. Today, she’s going to do and say whatever she likes, even if it means her whole life unravels. What made Clover change her ways? Why doesn’t she care anymore? There’s more to this day than meets the eye.

by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green - Memoir, Nonfiction

In SLOW NOODLES, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone --- her home, her family, her country --- all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse and weaving silk.

by Robyn Davidson - Memoir, Nonfiction

In 1977, while she was in her 20s, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. A life of almost constant traveling followed --- from the Outback to Sydney's underworld; from ’60s street life to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in India and Tibet to marrying an Indian prince. The only territory she avoided was the past. In UNFINISHED WOMAN, she ventures into that unknown, unearthing an ache for a lost but barely remembered mother and an unmet desire to feel at home in her freedom. Adventurous but guarded, fearless yet broken, Davidson asks: How can we live with pain and uncertainty to find beauty in the strangeness of being?

by Michel Faber - Criticism, History, Music, Nonfiction

There are countless books on music with much analysis given to musicians, bands, eras and/or genres. But rarely does a book delve into what's going on inside us when we listen. Michel Faber explores two big questions: How do we listen to music, and why do we listen to music? To answer these questions, he considers a range of factors, which includes age, illness, the notion of "cool," commerce, the dichotomy between "good" and "bad" taste, and much more.

by Margaret Renkl - Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

In THE COMFORT OF CROWS, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: 52 chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons --- from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring --- what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life.

by Hannah Stowe - Memoir, Nonfiction

As a young girl, Hannah Stowe was raised at the tide’s edge on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, falling asleep to the sweep of the lighthouse beam. Now in her mid-20s, working as a marine biologist and sailor, Stowe draws on her professional experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea and the Caribbean to explore the human relationship with wild waters. Why is it, she asks, that she and so many others have been drawn to life at sea --- and what might the water around us be able to teach us? In MOVE LIKE WATER, Stowe invites readers to fall in love, as she has, with the sea and those that call it home, and to discover the majesty, wonder and vulnerability of the underwater world.

by Jill Lepore - Essays, Nonfiction

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in THE DEADLINE offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness and unprecedented --- but armed --- aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.”

by Pip Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

It is 1914, and as the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, women must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who live on a narrow boat in Oxford and work in the bindery at the university press. Peggy has been told for most of her life that her job is to bind the books, not read them. But as she folds and gathers pages, her mind wanders to the opposite side of Walton Street, where the female students of Oxford’s Somerville College have a whole library at their fingertips. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has: to spend her days folding the pages of books in the company of the other bindery girls. Then refugees arrive from the war-torn cities of Belgium, sending ripples through the Oxford community and the sisters’ lives.

by Tracy Borman - History, Nonfiction

The future Queen Elizabeth was not yet three when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded on May 19, 1536, on Henry’s order, incensed that she had not given him a son and tired of her contentious nature. Elizabeth had been raised away from court, rarely even seeing Anne. After her death, Henry tried in every way to erase Anne’s presence and memory. At that moment in history, few could have predicted that mother and daughter would each leave enduring, and interlocked, legacies. Yet as Tracy Borman reveals in this first-ever joint portrait, both women broke the mold for British queens and for women in general at the time.

by Alexander McCall Smith - Fiction, Humor, Short Stories

In this dual collection of short stories, Alexander McCall Smith brings his trademark humor and warmth to inventive tales of spying and vengeance. In one story, a spy dropped deep into enemy territory manages to disguise himself --- quite convincingly --- as a nun. In another, an invitation to join the Vatican Secret Service sends a prospective operative down a rabbit hole of controversy and confusion. A third story finds an author, on the brink of public ruin, seeing the error of his ways after an act of kindness saves the day. A keen observer of humanity imbued with a sparkling imagination, Smith illustrates throughout that transparency is paramount and forgiveness is restorative.