Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa

by Donna | May 11, 2012 | Memoir

Rating:  Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, by Peter Godwin. Grove Press (1996), 418 pages. “I think I first realized something was wrong when our next-door neighbor, oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered. I must have been about six then.” Is this not a just-right...

A Widow’s Story

by Cindy | Aug 19, 2011 | Memoir

Rating:  A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco (2011), 415 pages. Joyce Carol Oates, in my experience, is a writer you either love or hate (love because of how effortlessly and incisively she maps out the terrain inside her...

Blood, Bones & Butter

by Cindy | Jul 24, 2011 | Memoir

Rating:   Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton.  Random House (2011), 291 pages. Hamilton has written a smart, funny book that stands out in the glutted chef/memoirist category in that she writes...

Coming of Age in Mississippi

by Donna | Feb 3, 2011 | Memoir

Rating:  Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody. Random House (1968), 432 pages. I saw this for sale in the textbook section of a university bookstore and bought it because (apart from the obvious reason that that it’s a coming-of-age memoir from the...

Let’s Take the Long Way Home

by Cindy | Aug 29, 2010 | Memoir

Rating:  Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship, by Gail Caldwell. Random House (2010), 190 pages. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is Caldwell’s story of her friendship with the writer Caroline Knapp who died of cancer in 2002....

House of Happy Endings

by Cindy | May 18, 2010 | Memoir

Rating:  House of Happy Endings, by Leslie Garis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2008), 360 pages. The title of this memoir refers to Garis’s grandfather’s stories for children (Uncle Wiggily, as well as Tom Swift and hundreds of others) in which...