Biography-Memoir – Page 4 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC & the Original Internet of Things

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Palo Alto sits at the center of Silicon Valley as the world capital of technological development. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Xerox’s PARC labs held an eminent place within its culture and helped expand ideas like Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and “ubiquitous computing.” The man who coined the latter phrase is Mark Weiser, a late scholar whose work I was not intimately acquainted with until reading this work. In this biography of…

Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation

By Scott J. Pearson | May 14, 2023May 14, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Evangelicalism grew popular in the 1980s-1990s, yet many, like myself and Jon Ward, were wounded by a movement that seemed more self-interested and self-absorbed than interested in bettering the real world. Ward’s memoir/”testimony” (a common term in evangelical religion) conveys this culture clearly. A pastor’s son, he describes how some of his one-time evangelical heroes fell in notable ways in the lead-up to and during the Trump administration. Ward himself has built a notable career…

Biography-Memoir Writing-Communication

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections of a Writing Life

By Scott J. Pearson | May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Pat Conroy is one of the giant writers of the modern American South. He grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in the so-called “Lowcountry,” south of Charleston. The son of a decorated but semi-abusive Marine pilot, he went to the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, then all-male, and played basketball. He wrote about all of this in several memoirs alongside other great works of fiction. Some of the fiction have even been turned into…

Biography-Memoir

Leaving: How I Set Myself Free from an Abusive Marriage

By Scott J. Pearson | April 11, 2023January 22, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

An abusive marriage filled with domestic violence is one of the worst possible outcomes of a marriage. While betrothed, it can be hard to foresee this result, but it can take a lifetime to recover from the trauma. If children are involved, they, too, can be scarred with worse mental health outcomes. Sometimes, social constraints – such as living in a patriarchal culture or under a country’s oppressive, misogynistic legal system – can make matters…

Biography-Memoir

Benjamin Banneker & Us: 11 Generations of an American Family

By Scott J. Pearson | April 2, 2023April 2, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Living in the Revolutionary War period, Benjamin Banneker was a genius in an age of American greatness. He was a freed black man in Maryland who built a clock out of wood (yes, you read that right), published several almanacs, and critically helped survey the land for the District of Columbia. Rachel Jamison Webster found out in recent years that she is a white relative of his. A writing professor at Northwestern, she constructs a…

Biography-Memoir Management-Business Software-Technology

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

By Scott J. Pearson | March 19, 2023March 19, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Tony Fadell assumes that the reader knew of his career by virtue of picking up this book. That was not the case with me. I develop software and implement technology solutions for a living and found the title intriguing. Fadell led iPod and iPhone hardware teams at Apple and pioneered the Nest “connected home” technology company (now Google Nest). So as an author, he brings some “street cred” to the topic of building technology companies.…

Biography-Memoir Indie Writing-Communication

We are the Words: The Master Memoir Class

By Scott J. Pearson | February 16, 2023February 16, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Writing a memoir seems deceivingly easy at first. Anyone can write about their own life, right? Yet crafting a good memoir – one that vividly communicates and mesmerizes with its words – is a difficult task. As this book’s title infers, a memoir consists of the writer’s life becoming the words, which in turn take on a life of their own. Its author Beth Kephart teaches writing at workshops and an Ivy League university (the…

Biography-Memoir History

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

By Scott J. Pearson | February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

When Barack Obama was born, few would have predicted that we’d witness a black US president in his lifetime. And yet he accomplished that himself. When he was elected president, few would have likewise predicted the depths of divide his presidency would unearth. And yet we are here. The pomp and circumstance of politics, as first told by the media, need to be supplemented by presidential memoirs to understand the logic of decisions. Though obviously…

Biography-Memoir History

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

By Scott J. Pearson | January 17, 2023November 23, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

I first heard the Crafts’ story as a student in American History class in a South Carolina high school. My teacher shared how the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was first tested with a couple in Boston who recently escaped slavery. Mass protests made a mockery of the enslavers’ efforts, the Crafts eluded capture by escaping, and the slave-catchers returned to Georgia empty-handed. I remember that the story seemed more complicated than that, but even…

Biography-Memoir

Educated: A Memoir

By Scott J. Pearson | January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

This book stems from a profoundly foundational family squabble. Westover’s parents practice a strictly conservative form of Mormonism in Idaho. They follow the virtue of self-reliance to the point that they did not put their children into school or get them birth certificates. However, some of their children, like the author, ended up making their ways into college and eventually graduate school. This memoir tells one daughter’s life from rural Idaho into BYU and eventually…