Category: Memoir/Biography

January 5, 2023

Ducks by Kate Beaton *** (of 4)

Newly graduated from college with artistic talent, a liberal arts degree, and a mountain of college loans, 21-year-old Kate Beaton departs her economically depressed home...

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October 24, 2022

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar **** (of 4)

The title says the book is a novel, but the voice is the author’s and the story is about his life. News events, timelines, and...

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September 4, 2022

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe ** (of 4)

Keefe is the author of a couple of other books I thought were terrific (Empire of Pain, Say Nothing), but not this one. A staff...

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August 19, 2022

River of the Gods by Candace Millard **** (of 4)

By the 1860s California had absorbed an influx of hundreds of thousands of gold miners, the southern states of the U.S. had seceded, and North...

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June 20, 2022

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

As the 19th century was drawing to a close, the photographer Edward Curtis took it upon himself to photo-document and record ethnographic information on every...

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May 10, 2022

The Queen by Josh Levin ** (of 4)

In principle, the story of Linda Taylor, the woman stuck with the appellation of America’s Welfare Queen, upon whom so much political scorn has been...

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March 27, 2022

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura ** (of 4)

You can probably disregard my unenthusiastic review. Intimacies, after all, was loved by everyone else from the NY Times to the National Book Awards. A...

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September 28, 2017

March: Book Three by Andrew Aydin, John Lewis, and John Noel Claude Lewis **** (of 4)

This is the final installment of the biography of Congressman John Lewis’s youthful campaign for civil rights for America’s black population. Books One and Two cover...

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September 7, 2017

The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty ** (of 4)

It is a great idea for research that is long overdue. Michael Twitty explores the role of enslaved Africans in shaping American foodways. Think about...

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July 17, 2017

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance **** (of 4)

The simple description is on the cover. J.D. Vance, a self-denominated hillbilly from Kentucky, describes what it took to grow up in a family devoid...

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