GREAT EXPECTATIONS : THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS
by Robert Gottlieb

Charles Dickens was the "father" of ten children. I placed quotes around father because he really wasn't much of one. He loved them when they were young but as they got older, his interest dissipated. Dickens was an even worse husband to his long-suffering wife leaving her for a much younger woman.
Great Expectations is set up in two parts. The first section describes the lives of the children (in chronological order) while Dickens was alive while the second part is after Dickens died.
I never got to the second part because I became very annoyed with one of the chapters talking about Henry Fielding Dickens who was the eighth child and the sixth son. What bothered me was the ricocheting of the names Henry and Harry. The first paragraph said Henry and the next said Harry. When I first read the name Harry, I didn't know who it referred to. I thought perhaps that it was another son or a friend. Nowhere in the entire chapter does the author explain Harry. If he was known as Harry and it was said so early on, no problem, but it wasn't. I found it to be very poor editing which is very surprising since Robert Gottlieb was the editor of The New York Review of Books for many years. There were other problems with the book and I just lost interest.
A much better biography on Charles Dickens and his family written by Claire Tomalin is the one to read.
Not recommended.

MARIE CURIE AND HER DAUGHTERS : THE PRIVATE LIVES OF SCIENCE'S FIRST FAMILY
by Shelley Emling

Marie Curie is probably the most famous female scientist that ever lived. She received two Nobel Prizes: one for physics and the other for chemistry. Her discovery of radium and how it could be used was an enormous breakthrough. Ironically, it started out curing people of cancer and in ten years, it was making people sick. Radium eventually killed Marie along with many others.
She had two daughters: Irene and Eve. Irene would follow in her parents' footsteps and become a physicist herself. Not so with Eve. She loved the arts and was an accomplished pianist and then became a writer.
Unfortunately, I didn't finish the book because I struggled with the prose. It's very dry and plodding. Don't believe any of the reviews. It's certainly not page-turning, exhilarating, nor riveting. 
Not recommended.

CAVEAT EMPTOR : THE SECRET LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FORGER
by Ken Perenyi

In Latin the phrase caveat emptor means "let the buyer beware." I would say the definition for this book is "let the reader beware."
Ken Perenyi was an art forger for over forty years and was never caught. This is his story. Alas, I didn't get any further than page sixteen. The writing is horrible and juvenile. It probably would have been much better if somebody else had written about him and had the writer's touch.
It's pretty dismal.
Not recommended.

THE STRANGER IN OUR HOUSE : GROWING UP WITH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS : A MEMOIR
by Kathy Hoffstadter-Thal

I waited an awfully long time to get this book from the library and it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. The author is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors from Hungary. Her father is quite the narcissist and psychotic. He doesn't give a damn about his family including his wife and treats them all miserably. Most of the time, he doesn't talk to any of them except with demands. He lives his life as if he is still in the army with regulations and rules that they all must abide by. It's a very disturbing read made worse by the fat that it's riddled with misspellings and punctuation errors. 
Not recommended.

JASMINE AND FIRE : A BITTERSWEET YEAR IN BEIRUT
by Salma Abdelnour

This is a nothing book. The author (who currently lives and works in New York) moves back to Beirut where her family is from to write about the country and the food. She is a blogger and it's like you're reading it. Every chapter is a different month (like a diary) and it's boring. She gives incessant details about the cuisine and what she does every minute of each day. Who cares?
Not recommended. 

THE RECEPTIONIST : AN EDUCATION AT THE NEW YORKER
by Janet Groth

When she was nineteen, Janet Groth landed at job at The New Yorker as a receptionist. She stayed for two decades. Groth always wanted to become a writer, but that never came to  fruition at the magazine.
I feel as if it took two decades for me to just get through two chapters. The book was very disappointing and needless to say, I didn't finish it because I couldn't stand Groth's writing. It was very boring and dry. She's also extremely full of herself and that was annoying.
Not recommended.

Babel No More : The Search For The World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
by Michael Erard

Author, Michael Erard, has a quest to find people who speak multiple languages and coins a new word "hyperpolyglot." He starts off with an Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (from the nineteenth-century) who supposedly was able to speak seventy-two languages. Some linguists, though, think that Mezzofanti was a myth and could only really speak a few languages. Erard sends out a massive e-mail looking for present-day hyperpolyglots and many write back.
I was really looking forward to reading this book but got three-quarters of the way through it and stopped. Some parts of it are really interesting but most of it is boring. His style of writing is plodding and I can't see too many people wanting or having an interest in what he wrote.
I am a language nut myself (I was a triple language major in college: German, French, Spanish) so I thought this book would be right up my alley. No such luck. It was a big disappointment.
Not recommended.