Magical Memoir Moments
An Old-Age Memoir: Somewhere Towards the End
Oddly enough, as a child I was enchanted by Grandma Moses. I loved the fact that she made art out of many of the same experiences I was having growing up on a farm–gardening, sledding, planting, and harvesting. When she died in 1960, I was 12. But when she was born, Abraham Lincoln had not…
Beach books? Memoirs Recommended by Readers
The CBC Canada Reads Book Club picked these ten memoirs as their top ten: 1. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls 2. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah 3. Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope by Shirin Ebadi 4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius…
Top 10 Memoirs: If You Show Me Yours, I'll Show You Mine!
Let me begin with an apology for slacking off on blogging this past week. I probably will continue a low profile until June 30th, after an important board meeting, and after I have finished a book review to send to Christian Century. But how lovely it would be if we together could make some progress…
Top 100 Memoirs: Which Ones are Essential?
Embarrassing story: When I was a newbie grad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I turned in a review of a book that my professor did not recognize. He asked me why I chose this book to review. I responded, “Because it was on my shelf.” He looked horrified. As Paul Newman might…
Beautiful Sentences Contest Winners: Toujours Bon Appetit!
The poet Keats, at the age of twenty-four, penned these immortal words, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ I thought of them often as readers and I struggled with how to evaluate the many different kinds of sentences entered into the contest to find…
Iran? Why Iran?
During the last month Iran has consistently shown up on the top of the list of readers of this blog outside the U.S. I am curious about the 13-20 readers who evidently come here regularly. To my knowledge I have no close friends living in Iran. I would love to hear from some readers in…
Beautiful Sentences Contest Entries: Please Vote for Your Favorite One
Well, what fun it has been to see the contest entries emerge in the last week. Eleven readers responded, some with one sentence, and some with several. I had great plans to find a polling widget and install it on this site to make tracking easier, but I think the numbers are small enough that…
Memoir as Potential Social Movement
Last Friday, The Kalamazoo Gazette published an op-ed I wrote. Its conclusion contains the revolutionary idea that if all of us finished the tasks (see below or click link above) we need to accomplish before a “good” death is possible, we would have years to live free of the fear of death and thus could…