Flynn, Sean. 3000 Degrees Warner, 2002Hardcover, 245 pagesISBN 0-446-52831-5 Recommended On December 3, 1999, six firemen died fighting a fire in an abandoned storage warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. 3000 Degrees tells the story of that fire, of the six who died and their families, and of several Worcester firefighters who survived that night. Like Sebastian Junger […]
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Flaherty, Alice W. The Midnight Disease Houghton Mifflin, 2004Hardcover, 307 pagesISBN 0-618-23065-3 Trained as a scientist, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty always enjoyed writing. But after the birth and death of premature twin boys, she had a mental breakdown that made her write nearly constantly, a condition known as hypergraphia. She took medication and was hospitalized for
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Review: Lucky: A Memoir Sebold, Alice. Lucky: A Memoir Scribner, 1999Hardcover, 251 pagesISBN 0-684-85782-0 Simon & Schuster Audio, narrated by Alice Sebold In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been
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Kidd, Sue Monk. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996) HarperCollins, 238 pages, $12.95 trade paperback ISBN 0-06-064589-X Highly Recommended Long before Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees hit the bestseller lists, Kidd was an established Christian inspirational writer and speaker. Then suddenly one day an incident involving her teenage daughter
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Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea Viking, 2000Hardcover, 289 pagesISBN 0-670-89157-6 Recommended At the beginning of the nineteenth century the American whaling industry centered around Nantucket Island. Young boys of Nantucket were taught to “idolize the form of a ship” and grew up anticipating the day when they, too, would join a whaling crew:
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Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation Random House, 1998Hardcover, 412 pagesISBN 0-375-50202-5 When my father-in-law died just about a year ago, I realized that it wouldn’t be long before everyone with personal experience of World War II would be gone. Even the youngest people who went off to that war are in their mid 70s now. So
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Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith Pantheon Books, 1999Hardcover, 275 pagesISBN 0-679-44240-5 I’m not a big fan of the poor-me-I-had-a-lousy-childhood school of memoir writing that’s so popular today, so when Lamott began her book with declarations of her childhood search for parental love, approval, and acceptance, and with acknowledgement of an abortion and drug
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Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work Carbondale, Ill., 1978Hardcover, 196 pagesISBN 0-8093-0883-5 Highly Recommended Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism, which treated
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Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls Random House, 1997Hardcover, 267 pagesISBN 0-679-40297-7 Joan Jacobs Brumberg teaches in the fields of history, human development, and women’s studies at Cornell University. In this cultural and historical study, she describes how growing up female has changed over the last century and how, in
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Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman HarperCollins, 1998Hardcover, 242 pagesISBN 0-06-017596-6 Recommended Compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), begun in 1857, required more than 70 years and the help of hundreds of volunteers who submitted examples of the usage of individual words. The editor of the project was Professor James Murray, a scholarly former
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