A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
by Nathan Thrall, 2023 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, 2024! A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a true story that occurred in 2012, a tragedy involving a bus full of Palestinian school children occurring just outside Jerusalem. The bus collided with an 18-wheeler semitruck on a highway during a […]
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
by Tracy Kidder, 2023 Tracy Kidder, a literary journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine in 1981, has written a compassionate and personal account of the homeless community in Boston, Massachusetts, and the medical doctor who is determined to treat them wherever they are—under a pile of dirty blankets, […]
Say Nothing—A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
by Patrick Radden Keefe, 2019 Spurred on by reading the 2013 obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times, the author, a journalist for The New Yorker, became intrigued enough by her story to start researching for Say Nothing. Ms. Price, formerly a central figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), had been the […]
Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders
by Kathryn Miles, 2022 Just released on May 3, 2022, I’ve blasted through Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders within 5 days of its release date. This is a true account of two female backpackers who were murdered in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park in May 1996. They were there for a week-long […]
The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story
By Laura Davis, 2021 I’m a member of a Facebook group that focuses on memoir writing, and this author, Laura Davis, is a regular contributor. I’ve seen her post helpful comments to other writers on occasion, and I’ve come to learn that she has been teaching the craft of writing for a living her entire […]
HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time
by Brad Aronson, 2020 Brad wrote HumanKind after helping his wife through a leukemia diagnosis and treatment, and being overwhelmed by all the acts of kindness and generosity his family experienced from friends, family, and colleagues. He started writing down and collecting these stories, and tells how small acts can make a massive difference in […]
Never Simple: A Memoir
by Liz Scheier, 2022 There are mother-daughter stories, and then there are jaw-dropping mother-daughter stories, where you read them and think, can this possibly be real? Surely this is made up? Liz Scheier learns in her freshman year of college that she doesn’t have a birth certificate. No, it’s not a simple matter of the […]
Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner, 2021 Michelle Zauner has written a heartwarming story of love, loss, and food in her memoir Crying in H Mart, which came out in 2021. She is the only child of a Korean mother and an American father, and tells of her deep and abiding love of her mother whom she lost […]
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Ditlevsen, 2021 The New York Times Book Review editors were wildly enthusiastic about The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency, and because I usually agree with their assessments, I dived in. But the deeper I got into this, I have to admit, the less I liked this author. This is a series of three […]
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror & The Light
by Hilary Mantel, 2009, 2012, 2019 Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & The Light I list together, as they are a trilogy by Hilary Mantel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, from the time he rose to power in Tudor England, in Henry VIII’s court, until his execution on the order […]
The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom, 2019 The Yellow House was the 2019 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction. A memoir about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans, Louisiana, and how, in particular, it affected the poor. The “yellow house” is the house the author grew up in, the damage it sustained, and how it […]
The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
by Margalit Fox, 2021 The Confidence Men is another fascinating war story, this time about two prisoners of war during WWI who engineered their escape by an ingenious psychological scheme played out on their captors. I learned that the term “con men” actually comes from the phrase “confidence men,” something that is explained more fully […]
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country
by Sierra Crane Murdoch, 2020 Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country caught my interest for about five different reasons: 1) it’s a true crime story about a murder… 2) in the oil industry… 3) in North Dakota where I grew up… 4) involving a native Indian reservation and […]
The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition
by Caroline Alexander The Endurance was published in 1998 and I read it shortly thereafter, handed to me by a friend in a book club. It is by far one of the most memorable books I have ever read. It is a true account of the 1914 expedition of Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton and his […]