The end of the semester means many things (red wine on a Tuesday night, gym four nights a week, breathing again), but primarily it means I can dive into a book uninterrupted. This semester I've been working my way through Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon by Charles Slack. Slack is a great writer, and Hetty's is a fascinating story. She's in the Guiness Book as the "greatest miser," and is described thus: She was so mean that her son had to have his leg amputated because of the delays in finding a free medical clinic. She herself lived off cold oatmeal because she was too mean to heat it, and died of apoplexy in an argument over the virtues of skimmed milk. As Slack clarifies: Like most legends, this description contains kernals of truth wrapped in myth, exaggeration, and caricature. Too mean to heat oatmeal? What? Anyway, she was a smart, independent, courageous women (if a little eccentric)who should be remembered as a female financial genius able to compete in the age of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, not as dowdy miser "too mean" to heat oatmeal.

I've got Hairstyles of the Damned and Lessons in Taxidermy up next on my list, but can't decide which one to tackle first...