Rebecca Reads

In the best-seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, Daniel Goleman explores emotions and the cause of emotions from the perspective of physiology, psychology, and human and child development. While Emotional Intelligence helped me reconsider my default reactions and emotions in various situations, I can’t really say I enjoyed listening to this [...]

I am not very familiar with the political situation before, during, and after World War II. But after reading the best speeches of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, I am impressed that his powerful, confident speeches were a deciding factor in the perseverance of the United Kingdom through the trying times of World War II. [...]

One Saturday, my husband laughed out loud while listening to something on his headphones.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
” ‘Maggots’ is an ugly word; she’s using ‘haciendas’ instead!”
My husband doesn’t normally laugh out loud while listening to audiobooks. This was new. After a bit more coaxing, I found that he was listening to Stiff by Mary [...]

In The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester delves into two contrasting yet similar personalities who helped to create the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). One is the professor, Dr. James Murray, a prolific scholar who undertakes the daunting task of creating a comprehensive dictionary; the other is a madman, Dr. William C. Minor, a schizophrenic [...]

At age five, my mother was my scribe as I wrote my first book (”The Three Little Pigs”). Since then, I have wanted to be a writer.
I picked up Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, because it seems to be a commonly recommended book for aspiring writers. I’ve never read any Stephen King. I am not [...]

In The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman tells not just his mother’s and father’s story but the story of all Jews in World War II Poland. The Complete Maus is the story of the Holocaust.
In a break-through way, he tells this story in the form of a graphic novel. I was amazed not just with how [...]

I was looking for a nonfiction picture book for my son at the library the other day when I saw Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference by Lynne Truss. I enjoyed the grammar guide (Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) by Lynne Truss so this caught [...]

Katharine Graham was most well-known to me for being publisher of The Washington Post during the newspaper’s reporting of Watergate. However, her life extended far beyond the walls of the Washington Post city room. In a sense, her life was a life of contrasts and similarities. After reading Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, Personal History, [...]

While I loved reading Persepolis 1: The Story of a Childhood, I was not as impressed with Marjane Satrapi’s continued memoir, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Part of the problem was that while I liked the young girl striving to find herself, I no longer liked the angst-ridden teenager narrating the story of [...]

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis:The Story of a Childhood was a delightful but heartbreaking memoir of a girl coming of age during the Iranian revolution and war, 1979-1983. Marji is just 10 when the Shah is overthrown and Iran is transformed into an Islamic state. Marji suddenly must wear a veil and hide her sneakers, which are [...]