Random House Review by Brian Tanguay The wheels of justice turn slowly. Hadi Matar, now 27, was sentenced this past February for his August 2022 knife attack on Salman Rushdie…
Category: Memoir & Biography
Swerve by Laurie Blauner
Rain Mountain Review by Walter Cummins A swerve is not a deliberate choice but rather the result of a last-second panic, an instantaneous response to a sense of threat, twisting…
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut
Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay The first work of theater devoted to the life of Henry Christophe was staged in 1821, only a year or so after Christophe took his…
After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart by Megan Marshall
Mariner Review by David Starkey Megan Marshall, a writing professor at Emerson College, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. However, in After…
Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene, Edited by Brigitta Olubas
Columbia Review by David Starkey Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene are far from household names. Granted, Hazzard was the author two widely acclaimed novels—The Transit of Venus (1980), winner of…
No Bars to Manhood: A Powerful, Personal Statement on Radical Confrontation with Contemporary Society by Daniel Berrigan
WIPF & STOCK Review by Brian Tanguay Where does courage come from? Why do certain people sacrifice their liberty, and sometimes their very lives for a principle, while others remain…
The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell
Belknap / Harvard Review by David Starkey “Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of…
Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk
Knopf Review by David Starkey Writing in the New York Times, Dwight Garner dismissed Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022 as “breezy and frictionless,” “a book of…
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante
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…
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…