nonfiction

If you’re not a fan of what happens to your food from one end of your body to the other, stop reading this review right now!  For those that are curious, Mary Roach’s Gulp is the book for you.  Roach humorously covers both silly and taboo topics: pet food taste-testers, internal deodorizers that keep bathroom odors away, resourceful prisoners who know just where to hide unbelievable amounts of contraband, and, yes, even the constipation that may have killed Elvis.  For me, the chapter describing an American surgeon in 1825 that used a wounded trapper as his own lab rat stuck with me long after

"Paranormal," Volk reminds us in the introduction, is a word that means "experiences or events that cannot be explained by science." Volk takes pains to carefully point out that this may mean "paranormal events" actually have a scientific explanation that we have not found yet, either by chance or because it is beyond our current scientific capabilities. Or it could mean that paranormal events actually have a supernatural cause. Human beings, Volk accurately writes, do not sit well with not knowing. We don't say "we're not sure yet" and let it go for the time being, or continue open-mindedly

What happens when "a Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer and a deeply eccentric Spaniard" come together to work for MI5?  Only one of the most important deceptions in modern history.  Ben Macintyre's latest book chronicles the machinery of the pivotal Operation Fortitude, a massive undertaking in misinformation and misdirection that led the Germans to believe that the Pas de Calais, not Normandy, would be the beachhead from where the Allies would launch their European invasion.  Macintyre documents the circuitous and often borderline

"It can be too sad here.  We often lose our way."  Anne Lamott's latest musing on faith focuses on the thorny parts of life and love—grief, anger, pain—and how to keep living throughout it all.  Stitching together the ripped shreds of ourselves, she says, is the answer.  Community, faith, music, even something as mundane as replacing smelly, stained floorboards—all of these help us sew our lives together and move on, stronger for the scar tissue that has knitted us whole again.   Like many of Lamott's works on faith, Stitches blends deep and insightful theological musings with personal (and

Zachary Heinzerling’s debut documentary about Japanese artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara is a film that astonishes viewers not because Ushio and Noriko are wonderful artists—and they are—so much as because they’ve managed to stay married to one another.  Forty years ago, a beautiful young woman came to America to study art and met Ushio, a hell-raising iconoclast who gained a bit of fame as a performance artist.  Noriko fell in love.  

Life with Ushio isn’t easy for Noriko—he drinks, doesn’t sell much artwork—but it is stimulating. She suffers, citing her husband (while sitting next to him!)

If you’ve ever felt uncertain or uncomfortable about giving or serving in your community or abroad, but could never quite put your finger on why, this book is for you. Toxic Charity explores how charity can often be detrimental to those it purports to benefit. Featuring stories of organizations’ and people’s successes and failures, it offers both negative and positive examples of where community service and giving can help or harm, what some rules of thumb are, and best practices. Whether your focus is secular or religious, this book addresses what’s working in charity, what isn’t, and gives

In The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses the Progressive Movement through the eyes of three principal actors—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Samuel S. McClure—along with the remarkable contributors to McClure’s Magazine, notably Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White.

As in her previous histories of Lincoln, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson, Kearns Goodwin provides rich descriptions of the relationships among the many players in her books. This makes her writing so much more compelling than histories that merely

Looking for a feel-good movie? Babies is a must-see documentary. Watch as four newborn babies from around the globe grow, learn, and love during their first year of life on this planet.

Each baby is born into a world full of different customs and opportunities, yet their universal humanity busts through cultural boundaries. Follow Ponijao from Namibia, Bayarjargal from Mongolia, Hattie from San Francisco, and Mari from Tokyo as each baby navigates his or her place in the world.

Whether it’s Ponijao sitting in the dirt pounding stones with his friend, Bayarjargal sharing his bathwater with

Mary Roach strikes it big again with Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Like her two previous books, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the After Life, Roach explores an often under-discussed yet extremely fascinating and history rich topic—in this case, sex—that proves both educational and entertaining at the same time.

Some of the various topics addressed in Bonk include self-willed orgasms, cross-cultural (cringe worthy) approaches to treating erectile dysfunction, and fetal masturbation. Roach looks at the classic sex researchers

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a much longer and expanded version of the Pulitzer Prize winning article Sheri Fink wrote about the suspicious deaths in a New Orleans hospital following hurricane Katrina. The author has collected the accounts of surviving doctors, patients, and rescuers, as they tried to save patients when the hospital was flooded, then lost power, and finally lost almost all access to communication to the outside world.  The book can be divided into two sections: the first, stronger half is about the storm and immediate aftermath.  The

In many ways, I love Pritchard’s story of rebuilding his family farm. Against the advice of pretty much everyone, Pritchard takes up farming the land that his parents could never make a living off of. Gaining Ground is his amazing journey. He starts off with crushing debt, little help, and no plan. Through trial and error, trial and error, and then a little more trial and error, Pritchard finds a way to make the farm not only his own, but profitable for the first time in many years.

Yet, as Pritchard waxes poetic about saving the family farm, he omits even the significant details of his

May was National Photo Month, so I picked up a few books light on words but chock-full of story.  Maddie on Things: A Super Serious Project About Dogs and Physics is like a pictorial version of a couple of my favorites, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways.  This is another take on touring the country to discover America.

Contrary to the subtitle, I didn’t learn much about dogs or physics, nor is it super serious.  Instead I got to witness Theron Humphrey’s heart-warming journey of discovery and growing fondness for Maddie, the rescue coonhound

Thank you, Roz Chast, for writing this book. And thank you for being so honest and providing us with a truer picture of what taking care of aging parents can really be like. And most of all, thank you for reminding us of the importance of finding some humor in the whole process.

Roz Chast, longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, has gifted us with a new graphic memoir about her experiences in helping her parents as they age, and of her thoughts and feelings at their eventual deaths when they are in their 90’s. While my own relationship with my parents was very different than hers

In the late 1980's, a quiet young man with began working as a nurse in a burn ward in New Jersey.  Whether initially tempted by pity or a need for control, it was there that Charles Cullen, dubbed by the media as the Angel of Death, murdered his first patient with an insulin overdose.  Over the course of the next sixteen years, he murdered many more, possibly over three hundred people all told, all within the sterile confines of hospital wards.  Journalist Charles Graeber first encountered Cullen while writing an article about the murderer's desire to donate a kidney from prison, and now uses

This is the autobiography of Frank White, the 8-time Gold Glove second baseman for the Kansas City Royals. White describes his childhood and the loving support of his family while growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, his high school days at Lincoln High School, and playing baseball as a young teen. He was a pretty good pitcher in those days. Interestingly, he describes fearful moments when visiting relatives in his birthplace, Mississippi, during the 1950s and 1960s when he and his friends dashed away from roadsides when cars filled with white people sped along the roads.

White describes

Unbroken gives us an opportunity to read about one World War II veteran’s war experience. It reveals what Louis Zamperini went through while serving in the United States Air Force and the hardships he endured as a Prisoner of War for over two years in Japan. His story certainly helps generate appreciation of the sacrifices that veterans have made while serving our country. Unbroken is a well-researched book, detailing Zamperini’s struggles both as a prisoner and as a freed man. This is an excellent book about a man who has led a fascinating life.  Angelina Jolie is directing a movie about

In his new book, Scott Stossel describes his harrowing experience with clinical anxiety as well as its origins as a psychiatric disease. He looks at the philosophical and biological underpinnings of anxiety and the amazing response from pharmacology, both as a benefit for those who suffer from the illness and as an industry that pathologizes normal emotions upon the arrival of drugs that can alter them.

Most amazing of all is how Scott holds nothing back while not seeming to whine as so many others do in memoirs about personal challenge. Read this book if you’re curious about what can be

In French Milk, Lucy Knisley writes about her experience living in Paris with her mother for six weeks. As a graphic artist, she draws brief scenes taken from her day—details of the food she eats, the markets she visits, and the art she sees. The story is simply a journal of her daily life. She also speaks about her insecurities about turning 22 and finding a job as an artist after graduation. The book is a simple read and her drawings and photographs are entertaining; however, the book is lacking in content and often centers on her complaints and anxieties about life. This book will resonate

Bissonnette, certified career development coach for adults with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) and author of Asperger’s Syndrome Workplace Survival Guide has created a handbook to guide adults with AS through the job search process to successful employment.  Her step by step guide walks the job searcher through researching different careers, networking, interviewing and new employment do’s and don’ts.  Focusing on tasks that are difficult for those with AS, Bissonnette breaks each step down into manageable tasks and gives hints, tips and encouragement for success.  Scripts to use for interviews

O’Toole, award winning author of Asperkids and The Asperkid’s (Secret) Book of Social Rules, a social worker, teacher, mother of three Asperkids and an Aspie herself, has developed a “how-to” guide for parents of children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) on how to best structure their home life to support their AS kids.  O’Toole’s instructional manual demonstrates the importance of structuring the home life and everyday tasks (or chores) around the house so that children with AS can feel confident, successful and comfortable thus reducing their stress and building self-esteem.  This visual

Weather—a fact of nature we all live with. The extremes of this past winter are a hot topic from the news to neighborly conversations. But rarely does weather become such a dominating life force as it did for almost a decade from 1931 to 1939 in the southwest plains—the Dust Bowl. In The Worst Hard Time Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan takes us back to a time we think we know and delves so deeply that we come away with a new respect for the people who lived through the “dirty thirties.”

He begins with a history of the area that covers the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, western Colorado and

Proctor pulls no punches in his 600 page depiction of the cigarette industry. He paints cigarette manufacturing as an industry that addicts over 80 percent of its users, kills half the people who use the product as directed, kills 400,000 Americans each year, kills 50,000 Americans a year through second-hand smoke, corrupts science, corrupts government, and corrupts the legal profession. Still, it is a legal industry.  American addiction to cigarettes began in the early 20th Century with the advent of the match, an instant flame. Most of the book concentrates on the cigarette industry’s

Through his organization Edge Foundation, John Brockman asks academics and artists to respond to a provocative question about science that will bring something new to a discussion.

This year he asks: What should we be worried about? One hundred and fifty contributors – many well-known, others less famous – take us on short trips to a land of anxiety, detailing fears we might never have otherwise known existed.  Should we worry about the loss of humility, radio leakage, maniacal robots and the black hole of finance? Shouldn’t we also burden our worries with the worry about worry? What about

Delia Ephron has written an entertaining group of personal essays that range from the deeply touching to the absurdly humorous in Sister Mother Husband Dog, (etc.)  The first essay in the book is a tribute to her late sister, the writer Nora Ephron.  The two sisters worked together writing  screenplays for several popular movies, including You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. Certainly she writes of her sister in a loving way, but she also shares with us the humanness of the relationship – the jealousy and the competition. Another of the more heartfelt essays titled, “Why I Can’t Write

This book is a combination of short stories of Niequist's life with a focus on difficulties having children. She is a woman of faith and relates her stories to spiritual lessons which she realized after each individual experience. Almost every chapter is tied to a specific dish which she cooked for a particular experience and she includes recipes at the end of the chapters. I thought that this book was interesting because it was an intimate portrait of a woman's struggle with being thankful for what she had while wanting a larger family. Her stories were well-written and provides readers with

If you're anything like me, you've spent too much time thinking, "I want to be a writer/artist/musician/craftsperson," and not enough time thinking, "I am a writer/artist/musician/craftsperson." Maybe you spend time writing, drawing, painting, playing music, knitting, doing woodwork, making collages, but, because you aren't doing it full-time or professionally, because you think what you've created isn't wildly original and brilliant, you think of yourself as someone who "wants to be" instead of someone who is an artist. Which is pretty silly, because all creative types, even the most famous

The War of 1812 is one of the “forgotten wars” of the United States. It is, however, the conflict that helped to create the nation we have and provided the inspiration to our national anthem. In Through the Perilous Fight, Steve Vogel skillfully weaves together a narrative highlighting an eight week period of Washington D.C.’s history. Despite poor decisions, bad tactics, and the demoralizing burning of the city, the United States managed to survive and end the war that came very close to destroying the fledgling country. The only thing that I would have added is a back story to the War of

In the Palm of Your Hand isn’t just a handy poetry guide for poets, it also contains a hefty chunk of poems from both known and lesser-known poets.  Steve Kowit masterfully demonstrates that a combination of both writing and reading is essential for a strong and extensive writing path.

The book is organized quite well with simple but thorough explanations of various aspects and forms of poetry followed by thoughtful exercises.  Poems are peppered throughout the book, offering direction, insight and inspiration. 

I was quite impressed with the unique and multi-faceted exercises.  The

Perhaps the best essay in Wild Comfort is the piece that launches the collection, The Solace of Snakes.  It’s possible that it’s my favorite essay because of her cunning implementation of snake tins (sheets of metal) to give snakes a proper home in a cleared field.  Kathleen Dean Moore further explains her recordings each day as she carefully lifts the snake tins and examines the life beneath: “A large vole. . . dropping blind babies from her teats like ripe plums,” garter snakes, rubber boas, an alligator lizard – treasures of the dark that are suddenly revealed in the light of Moore’s simple

Like in his most recent work, At Home, travel and history writer Bill Bryson uses a loose premise to explore all of the quirky nooks and crannies of history with his trademark humor and insight. Bryson covers the more eventful happenings in the summer of 1927, like Charles Lindbergh's flight, the advent of flappers, and Babe Ruth's spectacular, record-breaking season, but also finds the strange bits of trivia that connect them.  Did you know the Lindy Hop was originally called the Lindbergh Hop, coined after Lindbergh's fateful flight over the Atlantic?  Or that Babe Ruth gained and lost over