Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
The life of the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, although short, was full of faith and controversy. In his cultural biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman approaches Joseph Smith’s life for all it was, without apology. Bushman does not omit controversy from Joseph’s life; rather, controversy surrounding Joseph is carefully researched in the
Here’s a semi-political book I read in honor of the U.S. presidential election today. Now, if only women could rule the world! Why Woman Should Rule the World isn’t just another cliché: rather, in her well-researched social memoir of women, Dee Dee Myers shares what she’s learned about being a woman, both from her experiences
I spent two months in Jerusalem in 2000 as part of a religious study abroad experience. While our focus was on Old and New Testament Biblical studies, I also got a healthy dose of Jewish and Palestinian history and religious information. I loved my time there and I loved the people I met – Jew,
I disliked Three Cups of Tea; my mother loved it. Read our counterpoints. Hated It By Rebecca Reid of Rebecca Reads I heartily disliked listening to the 800+ minute audiobook of Three Cups of Tea by David Oliver Relin. To begin with, I disliked the horrible writing, which was full of extraneous details and parenthetical
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. Jeannette Walls lives comfortably. She’s a married woman, a successful gossip reporter, and a strong individual. She knows what she wants out of life. And yet she has
Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at age 46, when his youngest daughter was just 3 months old. As a well-known computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he was a world leader in virtual reality training. But the focus of his last lecture to the university is not about programming a computer: It’s
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
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
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
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