Kimeli, a young Maasai man, returns to his village in Kenya after being away for a long time with “one story [that] has burned a hole in his heart.” He remembers the “[b]uildings so tall they can touch the sky,” he saw the “[f]ires so hot...
Beloved novelist Gish Jen (World and Town, 2010) expands on the East-West cultural paradigm she applied to examining art and culture in her previous nonfiction work, Tiger Writing (2013), to see “what it can show us about the world.” As the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants,...
From our northern neighbors comes the story of Irene Couchie Dupuis, co-author Dr. Jenny Kay Dupuis’s grandmother, who at 8 years old, was forcibly removed from her home by the Canadian government and sent to a faraway residential school with her two brothers. The strict nuns...
When 19-year-old Jim Thorpe (1888-1955) joined Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School's football team in 1907, it was the fastest team in the country, "the most creative, the most fun to watch." Already the school's track star, Thorpe was, self-admittedly, "a scarecrow dressed for football" when...
Colin Dickey (Afterlives of the Saints) cites a statistic that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 30 percent profess to have had firsthand encounters. Such undying fascination means there was no shortage of stories to choose from when Dickey spent several years traveling...
When Rashomon won the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion in September 1950, the world embraced its director, Akira Kurosawa (1910–98), who quickly gained unrivaled prominence – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are a few of his self-declared disciples. Convinced “that Westerners...
*STARRED REVIEW Angela Duckworth (psychology, Univ. of Pennsylvania) grew up hearing, "You know, you're no genius!" from her own father; she didn't even qualify for the gifted and talented program in third grade. In 2013, the MacArthur Foundation overturned her father's judgment, awarding her one of...
*STARRED REVIEW At the risk of sounding utterly selfish, thank goodness Barbara Bradley Hagerty (Fingerprints of God) recovered from her excruciating throat injury to narrate her latest title. Her conspiratorial, gregarious recitation, a skill that clearly contributed to her two-decade, award-winning NPR career, instantly convinces listeners...
*STARRED REVIEW Beyoncé, J.K. Rowling, and Albert Einstein are examples of introverts who harnessed their "quiet power" to become iconic successes. Here Susan Cain offers an entertaining, illuminating adaptation of her adult bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, to help younger readers...
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...
Thirty years before Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregation in public schools, a Chinese American family in the Mississippi Delta fought to continue their daughter’s education. On September 15, 1924, Rosedale School’s principal banned nine-and-a-half-year-old, straight-A student Martha Lum and her older sister...
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...
