Category Archives: True story
* House of Stone by Anthony Shadid
It’s a little awkward to profess dislike of a book whose author was tragically killed shortly after publication, but House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East never quite came together for me. Shadid tries … Continue reading
Filed under True story
** The Favored Daughter by Fawzia Koofi
The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future is a memoir by the best-known Afghani woman politician, not so ably assisted by her co-author who seems to supply an awkward style and frequent syntax errors — … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** Why be Happy when you could be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir by the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit — in which we discover that her own childhood was not all that different of that of her heroine, … Continue reading
Filed under True story
** Memoir of a Useless Boy by Leonard Syme
Memoir Of A Useless Boy is a touching, if occasionally awkward, memoir of a man who grew up without much love in a working-class neighborhood where Jews like him were bullied and ended up as a successful academic who studied … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** John Wayne Gacy by Sam Amirante and Danny Broderick
Blood flows generously throughout John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster, as befits the story of a mass murderer, and the gruesome details are not for the faint of heart, but if you can get beyond that I highly recommend this … Continue reading
Filed under True story
** The Man Who Could Not Eat by Jon Reiner
Don’t think you can stomach (yikes!) the story of a man whose intestines are regularly and surgically shortened in an effort to alleviate the consequences of Cronh’s disease? Think again: The Man Who Couldn’t Eat is an engrossing story of … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
I’m not a fan of history books, and I’m not a WWII buff, but I liked Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption a lot. Written by the author of Seabiscuit, which I also loved, this … Continue reading
Filed under True story
** The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is the first part of the author’s memoir (the second, The Arrogant Years I read last month). It focuses for the most part on earlier memories and especially on her father, who did … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** The Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown
The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son is the memoir of a father of a severely disabled son, Walker, and I found it to be heart-breaking, loving, delicately told, but full of hope. Certainly, … Continue reading
Filed under True story
* Blue Nights by Joan Didion
I liked The Year of Magical Thinking and its melancholia, even it felt a little over the top for me. But Blue Nights seems barely written, just a collection of notes and musing without structure. There is the occasional hilarious … Continue reading
Filed under True story
