Pegasus Review by Walter Cummins Not only could the title of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, be appropriate for Helena Kelly’s exposé of the many biographical deceptions she has…
Category: Memoir & Biography
Bloom: On Becoming an Artist Later in Life by Janice Mason Steeves
Friesen Review by Linda Lappin Painter and art educator Janice Mason Steeves came to art quite by chance late in life after a friend invited her to attend a pottery…
Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick
Bloomsbury Review by Walter Cummins I decided to read Becoming Beauvoir when I came across this endorsement in a review excerpt: “Here we finally have a biography that makes Beauvoir’s…
A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis
Norton Review by Brian Tanguay “There is simply no accounting for her gifts. She was a unicorn, born among horses.” So wrote author and cultural critic William Deresiewicz in “The…
August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan
Simon & Schuster Review by Brian Tanguay August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century, which include the critically acclaimed Joe Turner’s Come…
Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ’80s by Gary Gulman
Flatiron Review by George Yatchisin Gary Gulman is the kind of comedian you figured had a book in him, given his love of words and language that helped him craft…
The Talk by Darrin Bell
Henry Holt Review by David Starkey Darrin Bell’s The Talk joins James Spooner’s The High Desert as the second superb memoir published within a twelve month’s span about growing up…
Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay A black boy, just young enough to walk through town alone, hears a truck rumbling down the dirt road near a cafe. The truck pulls…
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
Simon & Schuster Review by David Starkey What in the world are they thinking, those uniformed museum guards standing in the corners of the galleries, looking alternately stern and bored,…
In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey by Jeff Biggers
Melville House Review by Linda Lappin Sardinia’s landscapes captivate visitors: pink granite cliffs whipped into weird shapes, massive basalt boulders, tawny hills where tiny wild horses roam, dunes of sparkling…