When Jane Tompkins couldn’t move, she read
Confined by illness, the feminist literary scholar dove into the complete works of V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.
The coming-of-age novel comes of age
If old age is another country, three novelists are exploring not just the peaks and valleys but also the rough places in between.
Death's call and our response
Even in the secular imagination, dying has become a vocation.
Teaching love
Honestly facing the conflict of self with self—and choosing words that reveal its particular manifestations in one life—is hard, hard work.
Tailings: A Memoir, by Kaethe Schwehn
Kaethe Schwehn's memoir of loss, quest, and initiation begins by introducing the special spiritual geography of Holden Village.
The Death Class, by Erika Hayasaki
Erika Hayasaki, having reported on a succession of traumatic events, read about a popular university class on death. She decided to enroll.
My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor
Celebrity memoirs often appeal to readers’ basest motives. They hope to discover some secret formula for success. Or they want to know whether the author took revenge on enemies or intimates....
Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? by Rhoda Janzen
"Isn’t that an off-brand religion?” One of my son’s soon-to-be-relatives asked this question when he was introduced as having grown up in a Mennonite family.
If Mennonites are off-brand to many Americans, then Pentecostals might be known as firebrands. The average person knows very little about either faith. Rhoda Janzen, who has moved from the former to the latter, brings awareness to both.
Mighty Be Our Powers, by Leymah Gbowee
Leymah Gbowee's tranquil, relatively privileged life as a 17-year-old university student exploded in 1990 when war broke out in her homeland, the West African nation of Liberia....
Learning to Die in Miami, by Carlos Eire
Carlos Eire, having won the National Book Award in 2003 with his first memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, must have felt author's anxiety as he approached the blank screen a second time....
A review of Reluctant Pilgrim
Does a writer's confession and confusion endear that person to you? If yes, you may be the perfect reader for Enuma Okoro's spiritual quest memoir. If not, you might want to take a pass....
A review of City of Tranquil Light
If Barbara Kingsolver's masterpiece The Poisonwood Bible has formed your image of Christian missionaries in the 20th century, you need an equal and opposite set of characters to round out ...
A review of Memory of Trees
Along America's highways, wooden barns used to reign, and blue or white silos stood like sentries. Today those wooden barns and silos are decaying, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect, and slowly being replaced by low steel buildings. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama.
Eudora Welty
"To make a prairie,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “it takes a clover and one bee, / . . ....