Although I’ve mostly written about nonfiction this year, I’ve actually been reading quite a number of great novels over the last several months. While I wouldn’t recommend all of them to every reader, they all seem like perfect reads in certain situations. Euphoria by Lily King Euphoria is the story of a love triangle between [...]
Book Review
Lynsey Addario’s memoir of her life as a war photographer, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life Of Love And War, opens in Libya in March of 2011. At the time, Addario, photographer Tyler Hicks, journalists Anthony Shadid and Stephen Farrell, and their driver, Mohammed, were working near Ajdabiya, interviewing and photographing rebels. As they [...]
This post originally appeared on Book Riot. On March 27, astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko blasted off from Kazakhstan in Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to spend one year living on the International Space Station – the longest amount of time two people will have ever spent at ISS. The point of the mission is [...]
In 1978, Brad Gooch was a struggling writer living in a studio apartment in the West Village in Manhattan. Helped along by a mixture of cigarettes, marijuana and vodka, Gooch spent his days trying to string words together before heading out at night. During one of these binges, Gooch meant film student Howard Brookner. The [...]
This post originally appeared at Book Riot. If you have not picked up Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, stop what you’re doing and get it right now. This book is fantastic. Americanah is the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, two Nigerians who are “young and in love.” When they try to leave Nigeria together, complicated immigration [...]
Over the last couple of weeks, I found myself drawn back to some books that I know fall right in the middle of my reading wheelhouse — well-reported nonfiction on quirky subjects. In this case, both The Great Beanie Baby Bubble and The Monopolists use stories about the cutthroat business of toys to explore large questions [...]
In her twenties, Nina MacLaughlin spent most of her time sitting behind a desk at a newspaper in Boston. Tired of moderating comments and feeding the endless beast that is the Internet (sound familiar?), MacLaughlin responded to a Craiglist ad looking for a carpenter’s assistant – “women strongly encouraged to apply.” Despite her lack of [...]
Earlier this week, a friend and I went to see Still Alice, a movie about a 50 year old linguistic professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Alice, played by Julianne Moore, tries to manage her disease as long as she can, but eventually can’t be left alone. In one of many heartbreaking scenes, her husband and [...]
One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a pretty good book is that it gets over-hyped. I love gushing about books as much as the next reader, but sometimes a book can get praised so highly that it’s impossible for it not to be disappointing. The two books I’m writing about today both [...]
My reading binge of biographies about famous, awesome ladies is still going strong. Today, I want to write about a wonderful biography of Ethel Payne, a pioneering black journalist who is known by many today as the “First Lady of the Black Press,” Eye on the Struggle by James McGrath Morris. Payne got her start [...]
