This is my book club read for the month. It was an inspiring, if not entirely engrossing read. The memoir covers Daugherty’s experiences as a father to Jillian, his second child, who has Down syndrome. The diagnosis is a surprise to Daugherty and his wife Kerry, but they become loving, attentive, and tireless advocates for their loving, attentive, and tireless daughter. Early on in the book, Daugherty reveals the mantras that he and his wife developed in the hospital that carry them through in their parenting […]
“We evolved to respond with automatic care to the young, while old age repels, makes us afraid of our own mortality.”
Well clearly I need to read the rest of Lucy Knisley’s work. I loved Relish: My Life in the Kitchen so when narfna reviewed Displacement in February, I immediately put it on my 2016 TBR. Displacement was even better than Relish. Relish was enjoyable, it’s just that Displacement spoke to my personal life and resonated in a deeper way. Knisley’s elderly grandparents, Allen and Phyllis, signed up for a cruise to the Caribbean. Unfortunately they’re in their 90s, have low mobility, know no one else […]
From Appalachia to Yankeedom, This Land Was Made From Eleven Nations
I first learned about this book in an article, probably this one, which shows how long it sometimes takes me to actually get around to reading my nonfiction books, since that article is dated November 2013. The concept interested me as someone who has lived in various states and lived outside the U.S., which gave an interesting perspective looking back at my own homeland. Now that I’ve read this book I can see that I’ve lived in probably five of the North American nations posited by Colin […]
An Important Voice
I’m taking a non-fiction elective this semester, and one of our required readings is “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.” I knew nothing about it before opening it, and as a person who’s already a little bit terrified at the idea of someday being responsible for the survival of another human being, this book hit me hard. The prose is absolutely beautiful. Cusk’s words flow out naturally and accessibly even as she’s unpacking serious emotion, and I blew through this book in about two […]
“Lads” have never seemed so unpleasant.
3.5 stars I read Among the Thugs for a Sociology of Sports class that I’m taking right now, but I see no reason not to review it here. This is an intense book. Buford spent a few years in the late 1980s insinuating himself into a group of “football hooligans” – what we would call soccer fans in the US. Football fandom is absolutely a lifestyle for these men, and violence is a given. Buford wanted to understand why they did what they did: rioting […]
The Wide Brown Land
“This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.” Every time I read this book it reawakens in me a longing to visit Australia. I want to see literally every place Bill Bryson visits. I can’t get enough information about the animals and plants (whenever I reread it, my Google search history is full of tingle trees, potoroos, cassowaries, and box jellyfish). What is it like to ride […]
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