In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

It has been eight years to the day since America was attacked on September 11, 2001. To commemorate, I’d like to discuss the best piece of 9/11 literature I’ve encountered in those eight years, a nonfiction graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers.
Even if you don’t normally read graphic novels, you [...]

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My Life in France, by Julia Child

Library users placing holds on a cookbook first published in 1961, spiking sales of butter and cream… Julia Child must be in the news again. With Meryl Streep playing Julia in theatres everywhere, cooks are inspired to recreate that iconic joie-de-vivre in the kitchen, and those of us who don’t cook are inspired to read [...]

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My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, by Russell Brand

“Time moves very slowly when you’re standing naked on Hackney Road at three o’clock in the morning. I can hear music from the bar below, and I realize there must be a party with a late license, but I can’t go down there completely naked. Luckily, there’s an umbrella standing up against the door, so [...]

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Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, by Sudhir Venkatesh

If you’ve read Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner you may remember a chapter called “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?” Levitt and Dubner write about the research conducted by a graduate student, who took to the streets of a Chicago public housing project. That student, Sudhir Venkatesh, elaborates [...]

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Young Men and Fire, By Norman Maclean

Warmth is fine, but fire like any natural element can easily get out of control. Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is a sobering look at the lives of those people who choose to go out into the wild to fight forest fires. In beautiful and precise prose, Maclean takes the reader through the intricacies [...]

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These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves, by Emily Flake

Are you a smoker who’s trying to quit? Are you a former smoker?
Yes?
Okay, sorry, you can’t read this book. I forbid it. This memoir of smoking is too powerful. Your cravings for nicotine will shoot through the roof.
If you’re a smoker with no intentions of quitting, it can’t hurt anyway. And I’ll grudgingly let you [...]

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Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream, by Adam Shepard

I first found this title on the new book cart. The description on the back cover claims this book is a response to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Having read Nickel and Dimed several years prior, I was intrigued by the premise. The author has recently graduated from college. He decides to see if the [...]

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Funny in Farsi: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America, by Firoozeh Dumas

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this entertaining memoir by Firoozeh
Dumas. The book begins when Dumas’ father accepts a temporary job and moves the family to California in 1972. Firoozeh was 7 years old.
They remained in the States for two years and then went back to Iran for a few years before returning to California just before the Shah was [...]

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The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family, by Mike Leonard

I am a big fan of audio memoirs and this book is no exception. The author, an NBC Today Show correspondent, decides to cheer his aging parents up by taking them on a 8,000-mile, month-long RV trip with his three grown children and daughter-in-law. This is either a very brave or very stupid man.
What ensues [...]

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The Woman Who Can’t Forget, by Jill Price

The subtitle of this book is The Extraordinary Story of Living With the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science. What, I wondered, would it be like to have near-perfect recall?
As it turns out, Jill Price’s remarkable memory pertains to mostly autobiographical information. From about the age of ten on she can tell you what happened [...]

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