by Donna | Jun 22, 2012 | Fiction
Rating: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House (2011), 353 pages. I borrowed this from a friend with the understanding that it is a quiet story about two old widowed people falling in love, which admittedly doesn’t sound terribly...
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...
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...
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....
by Cindy | Nov 15, 2009 | Nonfiction, Tragedies/Massacres
Rating: Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder. Random House (2009), 277 pages. Kidder tells the story in Strength in What Remains of Deo, a young man from Burundi who survives the Hutu/Tutsi massacres in 1994 and arrives in New York City with only...