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…
Category: Memoir & Biography
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…
Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream by Susanna Crossman
Penguin Review by Linda Lappin London. Amid the exhilarating social turbulence of the 1970s, Alison, a single mother, packed up her three children and headed off to a commune to…
The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap
Mariner Review by Walter Cummins My own attempt at a geographic cure many years ago ended up as foolhardy, which is the common result for most who try. Canadian psychologist…
1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose
Harper Review by George Yatchisin Here’s why Francine Prose is a better writer than you or me—she can craft a sentence like, “Tony was very funny, though when you say…