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Blog posts tagged with "book review"
Loosen Up

A couple of months ago, I curled up in chair in the corner of my living room to begin reading Dinty Moore's latest book, Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals. The book, as you can probably guess from the title, is a writing guide in the form of an advice column. In it Moore fields tongue-in-cheek questions from 20 contemporary essayists on topics such as grammar, the writing life, why so many writers write about writing, and how to recapture the humor of a cocktail party story without having to get drunk again.
An Inner Exuberance

With this review, River Teeth begins an occasional series of essays on nonfiction books we believe deserve to be read, whether again or for the first time. We are calling it "Neglected Nonfiction Classics." One of the most poignant, absorbing autobiographical memoirs Iâve ever read is this gem from 1943, The Little Locksmith.
Here's One for the Bookstores

Each writer in Days Like This responded to the prompt, âMy _________ From Hell.â Each essay or story, in turn, depicts the epiphany that comes in the midst of a day from hell. Or a job from hell. Or a girlfriend, an amputation, an acne problem from hell so severe that it drives you to snort heroin in your fatherâs basement. This, fill in the blank, was the absolute worst. And this is where the writer ended up, afterwards.
What's Left from the End Times

To begin her new book, Joni Tevis, the author of the equally unusual, The Wet Collection, quotes the Midwestern novelist, Sherwood Anderson, in an epigraph: âJust say in big letters, âThe World is on Fire.â That will make âem look up.â So she does and so do we.
Climbing the High Ridges and Stumbling

I should be clear: I think writing well is terribly hard work, and I admire anyone who endures it. Me, Iâve yet to publish a book of any kind, and I donât teach writing or literature at any college or university, so maybe youâd just as soon stop reading right here. After all, Iâm hardly a professional book reviewer. But because Iâm a professional educator, an environmental educator, I do know this: it all comes down to creating an authentic experience.
Turning the Tables: How One Woman Put Food in Its Place

Andie Mitchell is a âfoodie.â She is a serious, hard-core âfoodie,â a fact that comes through in delicious, descriptive detail on virtually every page of her 232-page memoir, It Was Me All Along.
It's About Time

On the first page of Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso tells us that she started keeping a diary because she didnât want to lose anything. So she wroteâ800,000 words over twenty-five years. But you wonât see a word from those diaries in Ongoingness, The End of a Diary...
Where Have All the Overmedicated Mermaids Gone?

Elissa Washutaâs memoir is a twisting, chameleon-like work of reportage, highly poetic at times, showing how cultural forces and tragic events have left their tracks on her body and mind. The search âfor an identity to sink intoâ in a savage, selfish world is at the heart of this book.
A Son Coming Home

Steven Harvey, in his marvelous memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, is on a journey to discover and understand his mother who committed suicide in April, 1961, when Harvey was eleven years old. Reflecting on her act, Harvey observes that it âhad exploded in my life like the flash of a camera at close range, darkening everything around me and casting me into blindness, and when the light returned she was gone. . . . "
Which Way Next?

In his brief essay, âDead Weight,â Eric Freeze describes a walk he takes with his dog, Zeke, a walk that ends horribly. He sees a police cruiser descending a hill, his Dalmatian blundering into its path, and thereâs nothing he can do but shout and witness the inevitable. This scene reveals a tension that runs through many of the fifteen essays in his first collection of essays, Hemingway on a Bike: the threat of lurking disaster in the most peaceful of moments versus the potential in such moments for sudden and wonderful insight.
A Beautiful Savage Game

After forty years of watching the game, playing fantasy football, and mourning yet another Oakland Raidersâ loss, Almond no longer indulges his love of watching football and his latest book, Against Football: One Fanâs Reluctant Manifesto, explains why.
The Infinitely Unending Art of Judith Kitchen

Judith Kitchen, writer, editor, critic, and teacher, died at the age of 73 on November 6, 2014, after living with metastasized breast cancer, the subject of The Circus Train. I choose the word âlivingâ deliberately because Kitchenâs presenceâher aliveness on the pageâis a swirling force behind many memorable passages in the book...
Raise High the Roof Beam, Women Authors

Since its inception, Shebooksâ digital collection of downloadable fiction, memoir, and journalism has grown to over 70 books, each of which the publishers say can be read âin an hour or two.â Their library is composed of works by both new and established writers. We review three selections in this month's book review.
To the Body Born

âI started my martial arts training on the day the Gulf War began,â Peggy Shinner recalls. It was a discipline she would go on to master and teach. Moving across the page in her essay collection, You Feel So Mortal, with the same agility she took to the polished wood of the dojo floor, Shinner explores the flesh and blood experienceâhers and oursâof having a body.
The Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is

In Praise of Nothing is both an interesting and a frustrating book. Itâs interesting in its attempt to write a postmodern memoir. Itâs frustrating, however, because it does not fulfill the readerâs conventional expectations of coherence and meaning. Postmodern thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, are highly skeptical of the idea of human agency and would also doubt the coherence of the self. They believe the idea that a human being who is a psychologically whole and stable person is largely fictionalized. Therefore, LeMay has written an unstable memoir.
Essaying a Spinning World

Much of what Skloot deems "off-kilter" seems the kind of emotional imbalance with which we can all identify.
The Inner World of Caregiving

If caregiving was a compass and sainthood was at zero degrees north, The Fifth Season would orient us due south.
Growing the Soil and the Soul: On Richard Gilbert's SHEPHERD

Sometimes a memoir, spilling into the ken of autobiography, must grapple with an authorâs lifelong enigmaâhis bookâs story, the story. As we read, we feel this cyclonic summing-up, the best chance after the life (or as far as the life has got) to say what, in particular, shaped that lifeâs core meaning. Perhaps the revelation is that we donât get another go-round (obvious but important), that we never knew the storm was gathering while it happened (as much good as bad), and that the life we thought we lived was not exactly the one we did live (the new self the memoir discloses to its surprised narrator). Such is the case with Richard Gilbertâs book, Shepherd.
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