As National Hispanic Heritage Month draws to a close this week, the audible rendition of this empowering memoir is an ideal celebration of two of the most legendary contemporary Latina heroes: Rita Moreno, the only actress ever to have taken Oscar, Tony, Grammy, and two Emmys...
She was left at age 2 by her father, then at 4 watched her mother go; both parents braved the border into "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) to make enough American dollars to reunite the family in their dream house someday. The youngest of three children, Reyna...
The titular Isobel – the 18-at-the-time-of-publication author here – knows how to make the eponymous 'nothing' into quite the entertaining 'something.' Although she grew up "squished somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool," she's now living somewhere "down in the South of England ...
It's National Hispanic Heritage Month ...
Not to play favorites, but since the 2014 National Book Awards Longlist For Young People’s Literature was announced earlier this week, I'm putting my bet on Jacqueline Woodson’s childhood memoir-in-verse, brown girl dreaming, to not only to make the shortlist (announced October 15), but go all the...
Let me begin with the reasons to go aural on this one: co-author Stephen J. Dubner narrates (his near-breathless energy is downright contagious), plus you get additional bonus selections (including commitment devices, banning tipping, and not-men women) at book's end from the authors' Freakonomics Radio archives during which...
Anne Frank, the world's most famous hidden child during the Holocaust, was one of 28,000 Jews in the Netherlands alone who went into hiding. She was one of 12,000 who were betrayed and didn't survive. Among the 16,000 who lived, was award-winning filmmaker and cameraman...
As in my post for Beirut’s preceding, award-winning companion title, A Game for Swallows, I find I need to start at book's end. "I remember Georges Perec!" the final image announces. Initially seeming to be unrelated to the rest of the book, the unexpected homage to the experimental...
If the cover looks somewhat familiar, that's because Sisters continues Raina Telgemeier’s highly entertaining (for the reader, certainly) coming-of-age escapades she shared in Smile, published four years ago to bestselling success. In Sisters, she's hasn't quite shed her braces, but she's heading to high school come fall. That pivotal summer...
Leslie T. Chang’s bio notes her gratitude to her immigrant parents for "forc[ing] her to attend Saturday-morning Chinese school" while growing up outside New York City. That multilingual skill clearly gave her privileged access during the decade she spent as a China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, while that lofty journalist...
Alain de Botton has a book I might never ever read – the one that happens to have a little note inscribed to me from de Botton himself, courtesy of a dear friend who met him in London and shipped the volume across the Pond. Truth be told, that...
"In 1975 ...
Some time in the recent past, a video link came through that began with birthday wishes for Anne Frank, as if she had miraculously survived the Holocaust and lived many fulfilling decades. [I can't seem to find the link again, so if anyone recognizes the description...
Get ready for quite the imaginative, clever twist on this predictable genre: even the youngest readers know what comes after A-B-C ...
In 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education desegregated all public schools throughout the United States, the Mendez family of Westminster, California, finally won a three-year fight for an equitable education for their children – and all children like them. In an era...
Sometimes my timing is so serendipitous, I wonder if I have a book angel whispering to me in my sleep. Somehow, I hit 'play' on this irreverent, potty-mouthed, guffaw-inducing, jaw-dropping memoir last week, only to see it pop up this week in my virtual world...
Christy Jordan-Fenton and her mother-in-law Margaret Pokiak-Fenton began publishing stories in 2010 about the older Pokiak-Fenton's difficult childhood as a young Inuit child growing up in Canada's Northwest Territories. Their four books in four years are comprised of two titles for middle grade readers, Fatty Legs and A Stranger at Home, which were then...
Check out this toothsome battle-cry: "The kimchi revolution: How Korean-American chefs are changing food culture" by Paula Young Lee for Salon.com. The article's first paragraph introduces a bi-coastal feast: Momofuku's NYC bad-boy David Chang (his signature cookbook is posted here) and L.A.-based Roy Choi. [The...
