Ham (NetGalley) Sam Harris I never meant to read this book. Quite frankly,when I was choosing books for my e-Reader I saw the cover, my eyes glanced over “David Sedaris” in the first line of the blurb–and thought I was getting an ARC of Sedaris’s newest. So when I opened the book on my Kindle and …
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (NetGalley) Rob Dreher release date: April 9, 2013 “When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another,” writes the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry. “How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s …
Pocket Full of Dreams David B. Burch Writer David Burch and his young family were God-sent neighbors for me when I was a struggling single mom twenty years ago. David tied my boys’ ties and played catch with them; Joan and I spent many summer hours heart-to-heart while the kids ate picnic lunches in the …
Full Catastrophe LivingJon Kabat-Zinn [Note to my readers: this post is a bit more personal than most of my book reviews.] Nearly twenty years ago I was diagnosed with a chronic pain condition; almost ten years ago I sought treatment. For the most part I’ve dealt with it by alternately ignoring it, plowing through, or spitting in …
Stuffed Patricia Volk Family is what we first know of the world. Family is the world, your very own living microcosm of humanity, with its heroes and victims and martyrs and failures, beauties and gamblers, hawks and lovers, cowards and fakes, dreamers and steamrollers, and the people who quietly get the job done. Every behavior in the world …
Orange is the new black (non-fiction)Piper Kerman Piper Kerman’s life was comfortably suburban and solidly upper middle-class–she was a Smith graduate with all the door-openings and privilege that a Seven Sisters degree can convey. But Kerman also yearned for the adrenalin rush that came with living on the edge. And less than two years after graduation, the twenty-three-year-old found herself running …
White Woman on a Green Bicycleby Monique Roffey The love story of George and Sabine Harwood begins as most love stories do: passionate and built on dreams. Their story ends as some marriages do: brittle, shattered, and, yet, somehow still connected. The whimsical cover threw me as I started the novel, which begins in the …
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacksby Rebecca Skloot In 1951, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital, took a tissue sample from the cervix of Henrietta Lacks. She was indigent, African-American, and weeks from death. The cervical cancer she had been diagnosed with was a particularly virulent form, and Lacks spent her last days in agony. …
Half-assedJennette Fulda A few years ago I lost some weight and also began faithfully reading several blogs. One of the blogs I discovered was Half of Me, written by one “Pasta Queen”. The blog chronicled the life of a twenty-something woman on a quest to lose half her body weight; I think I jumped in …
Columbineby David Cullen I actually finished this book at least six weeks ago; I read it in a 3-day rush over a weekend. Why the rush? Because it was so awful I couldn’t stop. Why the reluctance to blog? Because it was so awful I couldn’t think of what to say. David Cullen was on …
This is my symphony 