Magical Memoir Moments

The Blind Side and Invictus: Two Movies Worth Watching

I have always been a sucker for a good sports story–even though as a Mennonite farm girl I was not allowed to play competitive sports myself. One Saturday afternoon in the mid 1960’s, while I was performing one of my weekly chores–vacuuming my parents’ bedroom–I tuned the radio dial to the local station hoping to…

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The Amazon Kindle v. Barnes & Noble's Nook and iPhone App: Five Things the Kindle Gets Right and Five It Gets Wrong

Last August, The New Yorker published Nicholson Baker’s extensive, very mixed, review of my brand-new birthday present–an Amazon Kindle 2. The article mentions a YouTube of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laughing freakishly hard. I thought it appropriate to find and share the freakish laughter video with you on Halloween, just after Barnes & Noble has announced their competing…

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Roger Ebert: His Drinking/Recovery Memoir

You know Roger Ebert as a film critic, one of the best in the business. But on August 25, Roger Ebert came out to the world as a recovering alcoholic in his blog in the Chicago Sun-Times called “Roger Ebert’s Journal.” After 30 years of sobriety and an operation that left him physically unable to…

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So How ’bout that Toast?: A Mini-Memoir

  Our son Anthony and our new daughter-in-law Chelsea were married September 12 at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Manhattan. It’s time to share more of the story that has been unfolding here since they announced their engagement. I described the synchronicity in their meeting–their origin story involving Forrest Church and Match.com here.  And…

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The Harvest Time of Life: A Mini-Memoir

Last Sunday, Stuart and I celebrated the last day of August with one of our many bike rides in the hill/woods/lake country here in southwestern Michigan. We have enjoyed watching the grape vines become green, then produce fruit, and soon we will get to observe the harvest.  Next Tuesday another sign of the season arrives–all…

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Touchstones: Keys to a Great Memoir

Guest blogger Lanie Tankard returns today to talk about memories of her childhood using  “luminous particulars”-a phrase borrowed from Jane Kenyon and Ezra Pound via my former colleague at Goshen College Ann Hostetler. Lanie’s word for those wonderfully evocative objects is “touchstones.” If you enjoy this beautiful essay, you may want to read her first…

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Twenty Tips after Forty Years of Marriage: A Mini-Memoir

Marriage does not come with an instruction manual. Wise couples get some kind of counseling, often from the minister who marries them. They hear about marriage being complex and sometimes challenging – and listen without believing– in the same way that people in good health receive stories about dying. If ever a two people qualified…

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Don't Call Me Mother: A Memoir That Teaches When to Hold 'em and When to Fold 'em

Willa Cather once said that nothing is more exciting in life than to get inside the skin of another person. Sometimes I get that feeling when I make a new friend or have a deep conversation with an old one.  Other times books transform me in a similar way. I love reading just for the…

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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…

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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…

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