Penguin Review by David Starkey The paperback version of Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition was published on January 21, 2025, the day after…
Category: Memoir & Biography
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case
Grand Central Review by George Yatchisin Given she’s enchanted by fairy tales, it’s only fitting that Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You leaves its…
American Mother: A Life Reclaimed by Colum McCann and Diane Foley
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay James Foley was the first American citizen executed by ISIS. He was decapitated in Northern Syria in August 2014. The act was filmed. The perpetrators…
A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman by Robert Hilburn
Hachette Review by George Yatchisin A tunesmith with a con, not a song, in his heart, Randy Newman is a quintessential American composer. And like America, what a bill of goods…
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik
Scribner Review by George Yatchisin Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz…
A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption by Peter E. Murphy
Toplight Review by Walter Cummins Peter Murphy relates the story of his adolescent and youthful perpetual drunkenness in the second person, addressing the person whose life he explores as “you”…
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss
Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther
Gallery Books Review by George Yatchisin Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she…
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World Review by Brian Tanguay “I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated…
Life at the Dumpling by Trisha Cole
Review by George Yatchisin Despite the obvious misery of the pandemic, if you had the luck, privilege, and health to make it through, it also provided opportunity. It forced us…