Items Tagged with "Book Review"
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Growing the Soil and the Soul: On Richard Gilbert's SHEPHERD
Sometimes a memoir, spilling into the ken of autobiography, must grapple with an author’s lifelong enigma—his book’s 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 tha
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The Inner World of Caregiving
The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving by Lisa Ohlen HarrisWe could agree that Lisa Ohlen Harris, wife, writer, and, at the time of this memoir, mother of three young girls, deserves sainthood for spending seven long years caring for her mother-in-law, Jeanne, an overweight
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Essaying a Spinning World
Floyd Skloot's Revertigo: An Off-Kilter MemoirWe generally refer to essays and memoirs as if they were distinct forms of creative nonfiction, but when we encounter specific works, those categories seem harder to apply. Is this short first-person reflective narrative a personal essay or a memoir
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The Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is
Eric LeMay's In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and ExperimentsIn Praise of Nothing is both an interesting and a frustrating book. It’s interesting in its attempt to write a postmodern memoir. It’s frustrating, however, because it does not fulfill the reader’s conventional expec
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To the Body Born
You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body by Peggy Shinner“I started my martial arts training on the day the Gulf War began,” 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 agi
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Raise High the Roof Beam, Women Authors
When in 2013 e-books publisher Shebooks launched the online sale of short reads written by women, some folks in the industry perked up their ears and welcomed an exclusive outlet for female writers in the male-dominated publishing business. Since its inception, Shebooks’ digital collection of
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The Infinitely Unending Art of Judith Kitchen
The Circus Train by Judith KitchenA few years ago, as I dashed around a corner at a writing conference, I (literally) ran into Judith Kitchen. Mid-apology for my recklessness, I noticed her nametag and screamed, “You’re Judith Kitchen!” Her eyes held steady—dare I say tw
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A Beautiful Savage Game
Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto by Steve AlmondFirst and foremost, Steve Almond wants you to know he’s a football fan: he’s one of you; he’s one of us. But after forty years of watching the game, playing fantasy football, and mourning yet another Oakland
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Which Way Next?
Hemingway on a Bike by Eric FreezeIn his brief essay, “Dead Weight,” 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 there’s nothing he can do but shout and
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A Son Coming Home
The Book of Knowledge and Wonder by Steven Harvey 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 i
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Where Have All the Overmedicated Mermaids Gone?
My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa WashutaElissa Washuta’s 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 “for an identity to sink into” in a sav
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It's About Time
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah MangusoOn the first page of Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso tells us that she started keeping a diary because she didn’t want to lose anything. “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had happened.”So she
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Turning the Tables: How One Woman Put Food in Its Place
It Was Me All Along by Andie MitchellAndie Mitchell is a “foodie.” She is a serious, hard-core “foodie,” a fact that comes through in delicious, descriptive detail on virtually every page of her 232-page memoir, It Was Me All Along.Today, Mitchell is a food blogger and recipe
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Climbing the High Ridges and Stumbling
Soul External: Rediscovering the Great Blue Heron by Steven H. Semken I should be clear: I think writing well is terribly hard work, and I admire anyone who endures it. Me, I’ve yet to publish a book of any kind, and I don’t teach writing or literature at any college or university,
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What's Left from the End Times
The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse by Joni TevisTo begin her new book, Joni Tevis, the author of the equally unusual, The Wet Collection, quotes the Midwestern novelist, Sherwood Anderson, in an epigraph: “Just say in big letters, ‘The World is on Fire.&r
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