Turning Stones

Turning Stones

Rating:  Turning Stones: My Days and Nights With Children at Risk, by Marc Parent. Ballantine Books (1998), 400 pages. This is the memoir of a caseworker for Emergency Children’s Services in New York City. The stories the author tells of the children...
All Souls

All Souls

Rating:  All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Ballantine Books (1999), 265 pages. The six kids on the cover of this book (the photo wraps around to the back) are only the beginning of the story—the author and...
Digging to America

Digging to America

Rating:  Digging to America, by Anne Tyler. Ballantine Books (2007), 288 pages. Two families arrive at the Baltimore airport, each to meet their newly adopted infants from Korea. One boisterous family has come with friends, balloons, video cameras,...
Listening to Whales

Listening to Whales

Rating:  Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us, by Alexandra Morton. Ballantine Books (2002), 314 pages. Listening to Whales is part memoir and part nonfiction. It’s about whale and dolphin communication, the environment of coastal British...
The Invisible Wall

The Invisible Wall

Rating:  The Invisible Wall, by Harry Bernstein.  Ballantine Books (2007), 320 pages. Bernstein was 93 years old when he wrote this memoir (his first book) of his childhood in an English mill town. For those readers who require that their books be firmly...