Category: Memoir/Biography

December 6, 2013

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen *** (of 5)

What an interesting idea. Mix together a memoir of family history in the old Soviet Union with some Soviet history and the signature foods of...

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September 30, 2013

Zealot by Reza Aslan *** (of 4)

Before Jesus was the Christ (Savior), he was Jesus of Nazareth. This book does its best to set the scene in First Century Palestine. The...

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May 21, 2013

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden *** (of 4)

Shin Dong Hyuk was born into slavery in Prison Camp 14 in North Korea. He is also the only person to have survived an escape...

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December 26, 2012

Marbles by Ellen Forney *** (of 4)

A graphic, graphic-novel of the author’s descent, ascent, descent, and ascent through bipolar disorder. Her story is told with exceptional clarity, honesty, more than a...

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November 15, 2012

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak *** (of 5)

Jozef Ondrej is taken by his father as an infant, after his mother dies, to the mountains of central Europe on the eve of the...

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October 28, 2012

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro **** (of 4)

Third in Caro’s serial biography of Lyndon Johnson, this massive volume covers Johnson’s decade in the Senate. For most of the 1950s LBJ ran the...

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June 17, 2012

Churchill by Paul Johnson ** (of 4)

An interesting approach to a biography of the man who saved western civilization from Hitler. Churchill wrote more than 10 million words in his lifetime,...

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May 21, 2012

Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens **** (of 4)

A memoir of Hitchen’s 60 years on earth most of it he spent as an irrascible, cantankerous, and largely contrarian thinker, writer, and agitator. As...

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May 15, 2012

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson *** (of 4)

William E. Dodd, an unassuming, dysthymic, history professor at the University of Chicago finds himself America’s ambassador to Berlin in 1933. President Roosevelt is battling...

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February 5, 2012