I’ve seen Brain on Fire a few times at the bookstore, and it was the subtitle that kept catching my eye – “My Month of Madness” – and so when I found it on sale, I picked it up. I thought I would be getting a book about a Nellie Bly-style reporter who feigns mental illness to write an expose on our country’s health care system. Instead, I got a terrifying account of what happens when a young woman can’t get the right diagnosis, and […]
Yet another great book from Knisley
Cannonball favorite Lucy Knisley just came out with a new book so of course I had to get my hands on it. Her books are always a high point in my reading life. Getting married was never something Knisley had planned for or looked forward to, so she felt like a fish out of water during much of the planning process. Something New is the story of how she and her now husband tackled their momentous wedding day and the years leading up to it. […]
A Good Setup to Watch the Paralympics
As an aging competitive swimmer who’s trying to get herself to Master’s practices regularly and ready herself for a 5K open water swim, I figured that Brad Snyder’s memoir, Fire in My Eyes, would be just the inspiration I needed. I have vague memories of his swimming performance in the London 2012 Paralympic games, and so when this book popped up in an e-mail from NetGalley I was curious to know more. Overall, this is a solid memoir, written by Snyder and a co-writer, Tom […]
Before the fictional Atticus Finch, there was the real Sister Blandina
At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, originally published in 1932, is the diary of a nun, a Sister of Charity, named Sister Blandina (born Rosa Maria) Segale who spent 20 years, from 1872-1892, as a Catholic missionary and educator on the frontier of the American West. She was only 22 when she was sent to the small post in Colorado known as Trinidad. She eventually went on to posts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque before returning to Trinidad and then back to her […]
Disposable tin soldiers
A child of the 80s, I grew up on a distorted view of Vietnam. Free love was a whispered aphorism that seemed almost impossible in the age of Ronald Reagan, televangelism, and HIV. Peace on earth, a barely remembered dream amidst the bluster of Cold War bravado and the cinematic blood lust of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 60s were dead. But in its place, like some perverse cosmic satirist with a zeitgeist-altering pen, was a hyper-visualized mirror image that exaggerated its […]
If I Forget Israel, Let Me Forget my Right Hand
There is a whole world of books out there written by women who have left Mormon fundamentalism, and I think I’ve read about half of them. I don’t know what it is about these books, but reading about this lifestyle is endlessly fascinating to me. Warren Jeffs and his brothers get a lot of media attention, but let me tell you, Ervil LeBaron has Jeffs beat in terms of creepiness any day of the week. Ervil and his brothers led a fundamentalist sect that lived […]
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