From Soccer Mom to Prison Inmate

“The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.”—Lara Love Hardin, The Many Lives of Mama Love. Soccer mom Lara Love Hardin had a seemingly perfect life until the police knocked on the door of her million-dollar home. Behind her suburban facade, she was funding a heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Hardin’s memoir, The Many Lives of Mama Love, blends despair and comedy as she recounts her journey. “I carefully pick through the bottom-of-purse debris until I find some small […]

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A Bitter Pill

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, known for his novel The Sympathizer, brings forth his personal narrative in A Man of Two Faces. His memoir delves into his journey as a Vietnamese refugee, exploring the intricacies of identity, memory, and belonging. Nguyen’s story starts at age four, when he and his family fled Vietnam and sought refuge in the United States. This book isn’t your typical coming-of-age memoir. Instead, it reads more like a diatribe or a history lesson, packed with intense political commentary that some may find offensive. Nguyen doesn’t hold back in his scathing criticism of the United States and its people. Nguyen wrote portions of the book […]

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Maria’s Scarf

“The world said I would never amount to anything. My mother said all things are possible to those who believe. I believed my mother.” ~ Zoro Maria’s Scarf is a beautiful memoir about the unbreakable bond between a mother and son, a family’s struggle to survive in the face of desperate circumstances, and a starry-eyed boy’s quest to live out his dream. From the very first page, Zoro’s journey pulls you in, tugging at your heartstrings with every twist and turn of his life story. Raised in abject poverty, Zoro defied the odds stacked against him. Before the age of nine, his single mother, a Mexican immigrant, had moved her […]

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The Happiest Man on Earth Review

  “Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you.” Eddie Jaku, The Happiest Man on Earth. In this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best life possible. Eddie Jaku was born in Leipzig, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. He was proud to be German. When Hitler came to power, he expelled all Jewish students from school. Since Eddie was a talented student, his father used his influence to get his son false papers so he […]

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April Reads

A new month is upon us, fellow bibliophiles, which means it’s time to post what I read in April. There weren’t any 5-star winners, but there were no real duds either. In all the years I’ve been rating books, I’ve only given two 2-stars reviews—one because of grammatical errors and the other because of objectionable content. As an author I know how hard it is to write a book, and I think most books deserve at least three stars (unless a book is self-published, and then it’s no holds barred). April turned out to be a wonderful mix of genres: mystery, thriller, historical fiction, and memoir. I laughed out loud, […]

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GREENLIGHTS- Book Review

The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things—the sooner we get better at them. We must be more than just happy to be here.  Matthew McConaughey     I read Greenlights in a day, not because I’m a particularly fast reader, but because it is short, and I also listened to the audiobook as I was cleaning the house (and it needed a lot of help). Because I write memoir, I also read it to see trends in the market, and this one was a pleasant […]

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BOOK REVIEW: EDUCATED

  In 1986, Tara Westover was born into a Mormon survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho. She prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills” bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father’s junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one […]

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