The three-generation Kim Dynasty has made North Korea one of the most reviled – and ridiculed – nations in the world. Memes depicting Kim Jong-un laughing about the fact that he’s “no longer the craziest leader” keep popping up on social feeds, even while reports...
'Olive Witch' is the memoir of an outsider on a quest for belonging “bow echo,” the very first words of Abeer Y. Hoque’s raw, unblinking, urgent-in-these-times memoir, Olive Witch, is an easy-to-miss clue. Followed by a temperature (73°F) and what looks like a diary entry, the...
*STARRED REVIEW A full decade has passed since William Styron (Sophie's Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner, As I Lay Dying) died at 81 in 2006. He might have died 21 years earlier by suicide, but he escaped that "near-violent dénouement." With raw, unflinching openness, Styron shared...
Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, MO. Lezley McSpadden didn't see her 18-year-old son die, "but as his mother, I do know one thing better than anyone, and that's how to tell my son's...
As today’s most prominent transgender teen, Jennings stepped into the national spotlight in 2007 at the age of 6 in a televised interview with Barbara Walters. In the almost-decade since, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – psychology/psychiatry’s bible for identifying mental disorders...
At 4, Mawi Asgedom fled the civil war cleaving Eritrea and Ethiopia, spending three years in a Sudanese refugee camp. In 1983, assisted by World Relief, the family settled in a Chicago suburb. Their new life wasn't easy: Asgedom's father, once a respected community leader and...
Although he was a 1999 national writing-competition winner at 17 and runaway bestselling novelist a year later, Shanghai-based Han couldn’t finish high school. His subsequent rants against the education system, standardized testing, and corrupt bureaucracy earned him widespread acclaim. At 34, he has added rally-car racing...
Let me just say right up front: this is a (funny, yes – funny) story about cancer. As it might be expected of such stories, this is also filled with tears and resilience, suffering and hope, exhaustion and tenacity. And, it's undoubtedly one of the most unputdownable graphic memoirs I've read...
*STARRED REVIEW Originally published in 2003, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s groundbreaking memoir chronicling her transition from James to Jenny was updated in 2013: "Man, what you don't know could fill a book. I'm unique, however, in that the book filled with the things I don't know is...
In 1995 at age 22, MariNaomi leaves her boyfriend of five years, her job, her San Francisco home and transplants herself 50 miles south in San Jose, where she almost immediately "move[s] into an idyllic, century-old one bedroom cottage that rested on a large plot of untamed...
"[A]s a reporter, I was spending my life telling other people's stories and ignoring my own family's incredible one," Dawn Anahid MacKeen realized at 35. Her 78-year-old Armenian mother was aging, and MacKeen could no longer ignore her calls to "come home." In 2006, MacKeen left...
Beloved NPR host Diane Rehm’s latest memoir begins with her husband John's end – depleted by Parkinson's disease, unable to "stand walk, eat, bathe, or in any way care for himself on his own, he was now ready to die." After 54 years of marriage –...
*STARRED REVIEW In his sublime "foreword [that] might be better thought of as an afterword," physician and bestselling author Abraham Verghese reveals that he came to know Paul Kalanithi "most intimately when he'd ceased to be." That, too, is true of every listener here. Neurosurgeon Kalanithi died in...
*STARRED REVIEW "I was taught to avoid showing off," Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson (writing, Columbia University; On Michael Jackson) begins. "But isn't all memoir a form of showing off?" That hesitation permeates throughout, the restraint perfectly mimicked in Robin Miles's elegant recitation. This work is a...
“A house. A writing machine. …[And her] animals” are the “home” Sandra Cisneros needs to “feel like writing.” The MacArthur “Genius”-author of The House on Mango Street – one of those celebrated pivotal titles readers never forget – offers the “stories from my life [that]...
*STARRED REVIEW This is not your ordinary Hollywood memoir: no script doctor or publicist seems to have embellished or sanitized Tony/Emmy/Obie/Golden Globe-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker's first book. Written as a series of letters to almost three dozen "Mr."s both real and imagined, Parker's work captures past...
Outstanding International Books: Presenting the 2016 USBBY Selections As the domestic publishing industry continues to respond to the resounding battle cry of “We Need Diverse Books,” the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) has been working assiduously for over a decade to promote...
At age 6, Özge Samanci was desperate to be "on the other side of the binoculars" – that is, to be at school, being watched by her mother from across the street, just as she and her mother occasionally spotted and waved at her older sister Pelin,...
