Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher in her "prime" who teaches what she thinks is important. She picks six girls as her favorites (know to everyone as "The Brodie set") to teach art, love, and how to be a proper woman. She encourages the girls to become sexually active and tells them stories of the love of her life. The book details the lives of the girls until they are older and no longer talk to Miss Brodie.
Unfortunately, didn't write my thoughts down at the time of reading, so I'm logging on now to give you the scoop from the Library Journal:
"Cities are good. Suburbs are bad. Paris is good. Las Vegas is bad. Boston? Stay tuned. Kunstler, a vociferous, highly opinionated critic of the urban landscape, takes an uncompromisingly hard look at how eight cities (Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London), either through inspired ideas or chaotic greed, became sublime expressions of the human spirit or of gigantic monstrosities and perversion. The subtitle is appropriate, for the author makes little attempt to be systematic or comprehensive in his discussions. Although he never raises the analysis above the level of a popular magazine article, his writing is admittedly bold and thought-provoking throughout. One can learn a great deal about Louis Napoleon's renovation of Paris, Hitler's and Albert Speer's megalomaniac architectural plans for Berlin, Bugsy Segal's "setting the tone" for Las Vegas, and more. The real charm of the book, however, is not Kunstler's rambles through each city's historical and geographical spaces but his plea for a more human-focused urban landscape."
--Glenn Masuchika
Molly Lane is dead. Clive and Vernon were Molly's lovers long ago, and meet at her funeral. Clive is a successful composer and Vernon is a newspaper editor. Other lovers include Julian Garmony, the foreign secretary. After the funeral, Clive and Vernon make a euthanasia pact; compromising pics of Molly & Julian find their way into the press.
Bland, boring, obvious.
