The Cost of Hope
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August 25, 2012

Amanda Bennett’s memoir, The Cost of Hope: The Story of A Marriage, A Family and a Quest for Life, is one of the most intelligent memoirs I’ve read in years. Bennett takes her own personal experience fighting to save her husband’s life in his struggle against a rare form of kidney cancer and as an investigative reporter she uses his story to illustrate what all… [Read More]

Quiet: A case for solitude and the power of contemplation
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August 14, 2012

For authors it can be difficult, even shameful today, to be an introvert in a media culture where being social and outgoing are valued above all else. The reclusive literary artist who disdains self-promotion is silenced, even suppressed, in a system that rewards extraverts. Yet, when it comes to creativity and productivity among authors, we need more introverts. “There’s zero correlation between being the best… [Read More]

Reimagining Life after Loss: Jai Pausch’s Dream New Dreams
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July 31, 2012

Dream New Dreams: Reimagining My Life After Loss by Jai Pausch (Crown 2012) is one of the first memoirs to address the experiences of those who become full time caregivers to their terminally ill spouse. Imagine dealing with complicated medical care and even more complicated emotions. And then imagine having to tell your young children that their father is dead. You may have heard of… [Read More]

Strayed from expectations: Wild
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July 10, 2012

The buzz about Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir, Wild, couldn’t be ignored. If Oprah Winfrey brought back her Book Club just because of this manuscript, I knew I had to read it. Most everything Oprah recommended I’d read before she announced the selection. But Wild was a wild card thrown in my direction. The jacket described this book about the rough experiences on the Pacific Crest… [Read More]

The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler is a delightful apparition
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July 3, 2012

Anne Tyler’s novels are punctuation marks in my own lifeline. Her first novels I discovered in college — If Morning Ever Comes and The Tin Can Tree — but by the time I got to graduate school, Celestial Navigation, Searching for Caleb, and Earthly Possessions captured my fancy as a reader. As each of her novels came out, I found myself compelled to purchase the… [Read More]

Wild Fermentation: Feed your Rebellious Side
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June 9, 2012

That container gently bubbling in the kitchen, a jar of vegetables and spices and antiseptic salt, is an exercise in patience. It’s a testament of expectation. It’s going to be your sauerkraut in just a few weeks if you can just wait, and taste, and trust. Ellie Sandor Katz’s seminal work, Wild Fermentation, has been considered the gateway text into a world of natural fermented… [Read More]

Book Review: Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
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May 29, 2012

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (Simon & Schuster, 2012) is Deborah Feldman’s memoir of growing up in Brooklyn in the most insular of Chasidic sects, the Satmars. Fathered by the village idiot and abandoned by her mother, Feldman is raised by her grandparents, a bride at 17, a mother at 19, and a divorcee at 22—at which age she enrolls in Sarah… [Read More]

The Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
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May 22, 2012

Alexandra Fuller’s latest book, The Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (Penguin Press HC 2011) continues to roam around in my imagination more than a month after I finished reading it. She is a memoirist who transports the reader to a time and place you could never otherwise know and experience it with compassion and good humor. Even her title invites the reader to… [Read More]

Skirting the borders of madness in Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test
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May 8, 2012

Journalistic nonfiction makes an unspoken promise to readers: it doesn’t just tell a tremendous story, it forces readers to question and examine current cultural practices and societal values. A strong journalist knows how to write articles that do more than just expose the facts. Many call it an ethical code, but I call it a mark of skill, developed over the years by knowledge of… [Read More]

Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York
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May 1, 2012

Martin Sweeney from Homer, NY, has written a captivating account of three native sons who played pivotal roles in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the United States’ history. [Martin Sweeney, Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York: A Painter, an Editor and a Detective, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011.] The painter, Francis Carpenter, brushed “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation before the Cabinet”—the iconic image of… [Read More]