Biography-Memoir Sports

Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar

Despite watching tennis religiously throughout my life, I did not know the name of Charlotte “Lottie” Dod. She was a five-time winner of Wimbledon in the late 1800s. But she was more than a mere tennis player. She was an ice skater, a tobogganist, a mountain climber, an endurance bicyclist, a hockey player on the English national team, a championship golfer, and an Olympic silver medalist in archery. Quite the resume. After her sporting days…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir Religion-Philosophy Writing-Communication

Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing

This book is the manicured transcript of an event in New York City in the 1980s. This seminar featured six prominent writers influenced by different faith traditions. They spoke on how their religious beliefs/practices changed the way they wrote. By commenting on a practice as timeless as writing, this account captures much of religious writers’ sentiments towards their craft. All of these six speeches were interesting. They covered faith traditions as disparate as Roman Catholicism,…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir

In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

Appalachia has long been an economically depressed region, and its social conditions are just as harsh. Bobi Conn’s story fully evokes these sentiments in readers’ hearts. She was raised in extremely oppressive circumstances (drugs; physical, sexual, and verbal abuse; limited opportunities). However, she learned to pour herself into reading and writing, and these activities allowed her to build a semblance of a good life. Nonetheless, she still grieves over the people – family, relationships, and…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir Writing-Communication

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott is a brilliant mentor to writers and to creative people in general. She spins her yarn with a conversational, west-coast style. In this book, she writes about redeeming our experiences to produce literature. She has learned many lessons in her life, and she shares their fruit in vivid detail here. She is most brilliant, in my opinion, not in her quality novels but when she functions as a memoir-writer-turned-spiritual-advisor. What she says is…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir Healthcare

Fallible: A Memoir of a Young Physician’s Struggle with Mental Illness

As with most memoirs, this saga spans many sectors of life: religious faith (Mormon), an arduous journey (years of medical training), loneliness and solitude (missionary work in the Ukraine), deep, abiding love (a wife and kids), and obstacles (relentless anxiety). Jones relates his struggle with generalized anxiety disorder and in attaining a stable life. This difficulty is amplified by the fact that he undertakes psychologically stressful education to become a physician. The hardships never really…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir History Software-Technology

UNIX: A History and a Memoir

Brian Kernighan is most known for writing the definitive work on the C computer language. He worked for most of his career at famous Bell Labs from AT&T and worked among those who developed the UNIX operating system. UNIX powers much of the Internet and served as the basis for computer operating systems like Linux and MacOS. These all have influenced technological history, and he enlightens us as to how. He writes in a light,…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir Writing-Communication

Word by Word by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is a writer most known for her writings on spirituality and contemporary life. Based in San Francisco, California, she has also written a work that addresses writers’ lives. Although that work (Bird by Bird) is not prerequisite reading, this work follows up on that book and is set as a live, taped speech at a writers’ conference in 1999. This audio recording shares insights from that book and from other elements in her…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir History Indie

Harriet Tubman by Adrian Ramos

Americans, like me, prefer to think of their country as valuing where you end up rather than where you were born. They like to think that they judge people based on the content of their character rather than the peculiarities of their parentage. If these suppositions suggest how American someone is, then Harriet Tubman is about as American as they get. This biography helps us understand why. At 141 pages, Ramos’ work is not a…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir Kids

Smile by Raina Telgemeier

My daughter is into graphic novels (novel-length comic books), and she asked that I read this book with her. Telgemeier tells her autobiographical tale of growing up with severe teeth problems. You see, she accidentally hit her front teeth when she fell down at age 11. This story shares how the subsequent experiences helped define her coming of age. She does so in a relatable and interesting way through graphic pictures that many youth would…

Continue reading

Biography-Memoir Healthcare

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Dr. Jamison is a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University. She also has struggled with bipolar disorder (otherwise known as manic-depression) for her entire life. Her topic of research and clinical expertise is bipolar disorder as well. Due to this rare combination of deep suffering and erudition, Dr. Jamison’s autobiography is of intense interest. She is able to view herself and her disease in an extraordinarily objective light. Thus, she can present her…

Continue reading