All in Memoirs/Biographies
If you loved Half Broke Horses, you're going to love The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls’ memoir about growing up all over the American Southwest. Walls captures with humor and a sense of adventure what could have been quite a traumatic childhood, and allows the reader to see the events through her childhood eyes and not judge.
What I find most interesting about All You Can Ever Know is the author’s ability to make me feel like we were sitting down to share a cup of coffee. Occasionally that feels like a deficit, when her descriptions or narration of events feel basic. But for the most part, the book feels like a fascinating look inside Chung’s life and mind.
I recently heard Erin French being interviewed on NPR and my ears perked up. I realized that she is the chef/owner of The Lost Kitchen, a tiny, impossible-to-get-into restaurant in Freedom, Maine. Ranked among the best restaurants in the United States, we live close enough to go there for dinner – if only we could get a reservation. But the restaurant’s immense success isn’t the only reason French was being interviewed. She recently released Finding Freedom in which she tells the back story to her success: how she worked long years at her father’s diner; broke away to go to college; and returned home after her second year, pregnant and determined to raise the child on her own.
I had wanted to read Christie Tate’s Group for a while. Reviewers compared it to Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, a book about a psychotherapist’s experience being in therapy herself, that I enjoyed immensely and recommended to you in a previous L & L Review. (And my co-editor praised in a Second Helping.) Reese Witherspoon selected Group for her book club. Although I was nervous that the book couldn’t possibly live up to its hype, I can happily recommend Group with the highest praise.
In this powerful novel, Ayad Akhtar tells the story of what it was like growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in America’s heartland the Muslim son of Pakistani immigrant physician parents. His father, a successful cardiologist, embraced the American dream, thrilled with his seemingly unlimited opportunity and all that his money could buy. Even while feeling a part of the U.S., however, father and son experienced discrimination because they were Black. Those experiences were magnified after the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, when being Muslim became another reason for discrimination.
October seems to be my month for memoirs. Without realizing it, I chose to review two memoirs in this edition of L&L. They are two of the best books I’ve read recently. Inheritance has been on my radar for a while having appeared on many “must read” lists. I am so glad that I finally opened it up and read it!
When my book club chose The Truths We Hold as this month’s read, I figured it would be about just who the Democratic vice presidential candidate is and how she got to where she is today. This memoir delivers so much more than that though. From Senator Harris’ description of her childhood in Oakland, California, we understand how her parents’ activism in the civil rights movement shaped the person she would become.
I will admit I was nervous to start this book, which I added to my reading list at the suggestion of smart people who offered resources to educate and spread anti-racism. In my vague understanding of who Malcolm X was, I pictured him as an angry, violent version of Martin Luther King Jr.
I would also like to recommend I Am Malala. Quite by chance I read this book less than a month after finishing Daugher of Destiny. The two books make excellent companions.
I honestly don’t remember how this book got on my reading list, except I think it was mentioned in another book. Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s most recent? However it came to me, I picked it up knowing almost nothing about Bhutto, her family or Pakistani history. My only understanding going in was that she was the first female prime minister in the Muslim world.
I’m not usually a big biography gal, probably because I have read more than a few boring ones, often of playwrights I admire. So this book sat on my shelf for a while, despite my dad’s hearty recommendation. Lesson learned: listen to dad.
It was exactly one year ago that I had my breakthrough and realized that there are well-written, non-fiction books about history that even I could enjoy reading. It was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals that opened my eyes. After Goodwin, I solicited ideas from friends and tried Jill Lepore’s These Truths and realized that not all popular history books would be to my liking. Therefore, when I read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I was thrilled to find it so accessible and entertaining.
This is not the kind of book I would normally pick out for myself, but my husband Dan saw Hadfield speak and brought his memoir home. His high praise of the man’s message and the book itself put it at the top of my list, and I wasn’t disappointed.
My co-editor and I so enjoy receiving book recommendations from our readers that we both read Born A Crime this month after our friend Jane Amara endorsed it. I was aware of the book, but unsure of its appeal. Thanks to Jane, I read it and recommend it highly.
I could not put this book down once I started reading it. At the same time, I didn’t want to read too much at one sitting because I wanted to absorb what I’d read and I didn’t want the book to end.
I don’t know why WWII stories keep showing up so often on my reading list, but immediately after reading The Alice Network, I picked up this book with no expectations at all. Beneath A Scarlet Sky is the novelized true story of Pino Lella, who as a teenager helped Jews escape Italy, worked as a spy within the Nazi organization in Milan and assisted the Americans in removing the partisans once the war ended. It is an unbelievable tale, made all the more thrilling by the fact that it is true.
I don’t read a ton of memoirs, but this one is GREAT! I devoured it, staying up way too late several nights in a row. Not only is the story completely hypnotic, the book is structured to keep you turning pages.
Caroline Fraser has written a fascinating biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Using precious little autobiographical information left by Wilder and supplementing it with a similarly small amount left by her daughter, Fraser adroitly weaves a compelling tale of Wilder’s life. She explains how Wilder came to write her beloved Little House on the Prairie series in the midst of the Great Depression when she herself was in her mid-sixties.
There is no doubt about it: I am a huge Anna Quindlen fan. She occupies a spot on my “must read” list. Every time I see that she’s published a new book, I scoop it up. (See reviews of Miller’s Valley, May 2017 and Alternate Side, June 2018.) Quindlen won the Pulitzer Prize and for a long time wrote a column for the New York Times.
H Is for Hawk appeared on many “best books of the year” lists for 2015 and it’s been on my “must read” list since then. I want to spare all of you any further delay: pick up this book today and read it. It is an absolute treasure! I can honestly state that I’ve never read anything quite like it.
