Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked." Now, in this offbeat history, Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its "balloon diagram" predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers’ sentences reveal about them. Along the way Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. Charming, fun, and instructive, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog will be treasured by all kinds of readers, from grumpy grammarians and crossword-puzzle aficionados to students of literature and lovers of language.

Reference

Florey, Kitty Burns

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Harper-perennial

A family's history lovingly unfolds when Margaret Neal, a junior at Harvard, drops out of school--pregnant and disgraced--and makes her way to Aunt Nell, the family matriarch, a no-nonsense former schoolteacher who holds the key to her family's long and haunting history. Reprint.

Souvenir of Cold Springs

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Berkley Trade

Thirty-something photographer and word aficionado Emily Lime is happy with her Brooklyn neighborhood and its eccentric inhabitants, until her life is complicated by the arrival of Marcus Mead, the charming twenty-year-old son of her paranoid, unsavory ex-husband, a man who wants Marcus to kill Emily. Reader's Guide included. Original.

Solos

Real Life

BERKLEY

United States

William Morrow & Co.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn’t own a television so he can watch the soap opera he’s devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying truths about real life.

Real Life: A Novel

Open Road Distribution

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters’ lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging woman looking back on her turbulent life, the story encompasses a panorama of events set against the changing social backdrop of the middle years of the 20th century.

Souvenir of Cold Springs: A Novel

One family's secrets, betrayals, and hopes, woven together through four generations into a tapestry of memory and love. A humorous novel of power and grace.

Counterpoint

"A witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting." —The Wall Street Journal
Let a self-confessed "penmanship nut" take you on a tour of the strange and beautiful world of handwriting. Since her Catholic school days learning the Palmer Method, Kitty Burns Florey has been in love with handwriting, and can't imagine a world where schools forego handwriting drills in favor of teaching something called keyboarding. In this "winsome mix of memoir and call to arms" (Chicago Tribune), Florey weaves together the evolution of writing implements and scripts, pen-collecting societies, the golden age of American penmanship, and the growth in popularity of handwriting analysis, and asks the question: Is writing by hand really no longer necessary in today's busy world? "Charmingly composed and handsomely presented," Script &amp; Scribble traces the history of penmanship to the importance of writing by hand in an increasingly digital age (The Boston Globe).

Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting

Humor & Entertainment

Trivia & Fun Facts

Melville House

A HIGHLY UNUSUAL APPROACH TO A GENEALOGICAL MYSTERY In April 1910, a young woman named Inez Willick gave birth to a baby girl, put her up for adoption, and disappeared. When Inez's granddaughter began the search for her mother's mother, she didn't have much more than a name. But, as happens so often in genealogical research, she stumbled into an overwhelming bounty of information. Among her discoveries were another secret child, a close tie to one of America's titans of industry, and a second cousin in California with a cache of family photos. What remained elusive was a definitive answer to the question that lay at the heart of the story: if Inez was her grandmother, who was her grandfather? There were a few clues, including a mysterious marriage (and annulment) and a scandalous rumor with no one left alive to verify it, but every road led to a dead end. Kitty Burns Florey, the author of nine novels, did what a fictionwriter does: she took the facts she unearthed and turned them into a plausible tale of not only a grandmother but a grandfather, a quiet turn-of-the-century Ohio town that is less serene than it appears, and an intriguing love story. This is family history with a new twist. Here are two stories: the verifiable facts - fascinating in themselves - and alongside them an alternative universe that takes the research and flies with it in an attempt to come close to the truth. And, in the process of writing her grandmother's story, Florey delves into her mother's life and her own and finds some surprising parallels - and some revelations she was not expecting.n

The Quest for Inez: Two Ways to Find a Grandmother

Literary

Genealogy House

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Florey, Kitty Burns. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Florey, Kitty Burns

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Florey, Kitty Burns. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

Souvenir of Cold Springs

Solos

Real Life

Real Life

Real Life: A Novel

Souvenir of Cold Springs: A Novel

Souvenir of Cold Springs

Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting

The Quest for Inez: Two Ways to Find a Grandmother