(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay There are many ways to describe Sam Shepard, but the one word that immediately comes to mind for me is protean. Playwright. Actor. Director. Screenwriter.…
Category: Memoir & Biography
Six California Kitchens: A Collection of Recipes, Stories, and Cooking Lessons from a Pioneer of California CuisineSix California Kitchens by Sally Schmitt
Chronicle Books Review by George Yatchisin Sally Schmitt’s posthumous publication Six California Kitchens proves you can write a powerful memoir one recipe at a time. Whether the book will become…
God’s Ex-Girlfriend: A Memoir about Loving and Leaving the Evangelical Jesus by Gloria Beth Amodeo
IG Publishing By Walter Cummins The title, God’s Ex-Girlfriend, suggests a Dear John letter to explain why the author broke up with the Campus Crusade for Christ and its evangelical…
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Review by Walter Cummins Like Rachel Aviv, the people whose mental issues she explores in Strangers to Ourselves are driven to write, some with works that…
The High Desert: A Memoir by James Spooner
Review by David Starkey On a grand scale, not much happens in The High Desert, James Spooner’s graphic memoir of his freshman year at Apple Valley High School, which he…
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
Review by Walter Cummins Rob Delaney doesn’t exploit the ironic connection of the title used for his four-season television series—Catastrophe—and this book about the sufferings and eventual death of his…
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Review by David Starkey Patrick Radden Keeffe tells us in the Preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the twelve long-form…
Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
Review by David Starkey That Penguin Classics is publishing a new translation (by Allan Blunden) of a book packed with quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died in 1832,…
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller
The subtitle of Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph tells you most of what you need to know about the book’s contents. It is…
Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen
Review by Elizabeth Starkey The introduction to Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain concludes with a recap of one of those piquant Tony voice-overs,…