Arthur and Sherlock by Michael Sims
★★★★☆ Why should there be yet another book written about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes? There have been so many explorations of their real and imagined (and intertwined) lives that it seems...
Category: Biography & Memoir
Home and Away by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund
★★★★☆ Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund’s Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game is a mesmerizing correspondence about the World Cup in 2014 that quickly grows into a text about so much more...
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin
★★★★☆ Why do we write? Why do so many school kids say they are going to be writers? What causes the disconnect between that desire and its actual execution? We write to learn, to...
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
★★★★★ Bill Hayes left San Francisco desolate after the death of his partner, Steve. He bought a one-way ticket to New York and rented an apartment. He recalls observing five ailanthus trees from his...
The Book Thieves by Anders Rydell
★★★★★ Anders Rydell illustrates the myriad ways in which the Nazis made book disappear: they were stolen, burned, or locked away in their private libraries to be studied in order to turn their truths...
The Fortress by Danielle Trussoni
★★★☆☆ Reading a memoir adds another story layer to what’s happening between the book covers. While you’re engrossed in the story the author is telling, you’re also marveling that the author is so open and frank...
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King
★★★★☆ Ross King’s account of how Claude Monet (1840-1926) came to paint his famous water lilies is surpassed only by a visit, despite the hordes of tourists, to his home and gardens in Giverny,...
True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy by Kati Marton
★★★★☆ Yellow Dog Democrat. Rabid Republican. True Believer. Each term conveys an assumption that one’s beliefs supersede any and all facts. There is no reasoning — no recognition that a viewpoint other than one’s...
Darling Days by iO Tillett Wright
★★★★☆ With a cascade of oddballs, theaters, dancers, confrontations, and concussions, iO Tillett Wright opens her tumultuous childhood to us. NYC in the 90s was a brutal place for the poor, and iO shows...
