You're walking down the street and a legless man on a skateboard zooms by. Your first reaction--shock? disgust? pity? Welcome to Kevin Michael Connolly 's world. Author of the recent memoir Double Take , Connolly was born without legs. Instead of being institutionalized or coddled, Connolly's...
Many celebrity biographies possess certain similarities: ambition, failed relationships, struggle, and frequently, addictions and/or abuse. So much of the success of the book depends not only on how the author has dealt with these situations in real life, but also on how they are able to share the details...
The Ripest Moments is a simple pleasure to read. While reading this memoir of growing up in the 40s and 50s in Jasper and rural Dubois County, Indiana, I found myself reminded over and over again of my own childhood in northern Indiana, and the cousins, aunts, and uncles we'd often visit in Ohio...
In September of 1965 Lorree Rackstraw was a graduate student in her second year at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, apprehensive about her new teacher, a relatively unknown writer named Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut had published just three books: The Sirens of Titan , Mother Night , and Cat's Cradle ....
Yes, that's the subtitle of the book I just finished. Wesley the Owl is a must for anyone who has ever been in love with an animal. The story is written by Stacey O'Brien, who was a lab assistant at Cal Tech when she adopted a 4-day-old barn owl after he suffered permanent nerve damage and could...
I just finished one of those books that will stay with me for a long while. Helene Cooper's memoir, The House at Sugar Beach: in Search of a Lost African Childhood is remarkable and haunting. Her journalistic expertise opens the reader up to a privileged Liberian childhood, which ended in 1980 when...