A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All tagged Memoir
Beryl Markham’s West with the Night (1942) is an eloquently written memoir that paints a series of powerful portraits of 20th-century Africa. Markham was a woman who boldly worked in male fields—race horse training and aviation—during the early- to mid-1900s. Unlike some memoir, Markham’s prose is eloquent, her imagery rich. West with the Night describes in vivid, suspenseful detail her experiences in eastern Africa, even after she left it. Among other things, this memoir reflects Markham’s love affair with Africa and the many ways that the continent formed her as a child and young adult.
J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is memoir punctuated by social commentary. Thirty-something Vance tells his life story, which, no doubt, starts out like many kids who live amidst broken families and poverty in the American Midwest. Growing up in Ohio, the grandson of Kentucky hillbillies, Vance’s memoir becomes an elegy for all the Scots-Irish of Appalachia, all the hillbillies.
Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016) is a beautiful, and at times heartbreaking, ode to the meaning of life. At the age of 36 and as the final year of his neurosurgical residency began, Kalanithi faced a terminal cancer diagnosis. His response, as embodied by this book, is both brave and thoughtful.
In Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (2015), British naturalist writer Michael McCarthy mixes memoir and nature writing to present a stimulating, beautiful expose on the link between human joy and the natural world. The book evolves from McCarthy’s environmental argument that nature is the one place in which humans may truly find joy. Looking back at his 1950s childhood in northern England and the ways communing with nature soothed the traumas and chaos of human existence, McCarthy begins this work of nonfiction through memory and memoir.
While my husband scours the Lonely Planet and Moon guidebooks for the islands and my first grade daughter eagerly listens to geographical and historical information set out in the Hawaii: The Aloha State book (one of a set of the fifty states) she found in the children’s section of our library, I opt for more literary preparation: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, The Story of Hawaii by Hawaii’s Queen, Jack London’s Hawaii stories and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii.
