Magical Memoir Moments
The Girls from Ames: A Group Biography/Collective Memoir
“Sociologists now have data showing that women who can maintain friendships through the decades are healthier and happier, with stronger marriages, ” says Jeffrey Zaslow in the introduction to The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship. If you are a woman, and if you have a group of life-long close…
Malcolm Gladwell's Memoir–Did You Know He Wrote One?
If you have read The Tipping Point or Blink, or if you watch talk shows or read The New Yorker, you don’t need an introduction to Malcolm Gladwell. Every book he writes becomes a bestseller. Gladwell claims he’s no genius. He’s not just lucky, either. He would tell you that he is the product of…
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…
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…
Love and Death: Forrest Church's Testimony and a Mini-Memoir
Forrest Church’s voice rings in my head today. I finished his memoir last night, and many of his themes are ones deeply embedded in my own life. His 2008 book, Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, published by Beacon Press, focuses on the two big ideas of the title, especially…
The Middle Place and How to Sleep Alone in a Twin-Sized Bed: Humor and Pathos Together
Remember when I met the woman from Wells Fargo bank on a plane going from Minneapolis to San Francisco? Remember that she told me about Kelly Corrigan and a must-read memoir called The Middle Place? Well, I finally read the book. I have to agree with my seatmate– Kelly Corrigan can write and she knows…
The One-Hundredth Name for God: A Foreword to A Hundred Camels
Now that Dr. Gerald L. Miller’s memoir, A Hundred Camels: A Mission Doctor’s Sojourn & Murder Trial in Somalia, has been published, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, I will share with you the foreword I contributed to the book which I hope can do double duty as a book review. This book contains…