As Lauret Savoy traces her own life along with her parents’ lives and attempts to at least place dots on the spots where her ancestors may have lived on this earth, she asks us to try to see what has faded and almost vanished to invisibility and to “wail the right questions” into the darkness. She has begun the difficult, important task of uncovering the answers to “choir the proper praise.”
There is a sense while reading that the simplicity of a rote recounting is exactly what Zolbrod doesn’t need, that its pat reassurances do her no good.
Brenner’s work . . . [illustrates] that Hebrew and Yiddish both played complex roles, and each influenced the other.
The Dreamland is expansive, and you get the sense that Livingston would give every woman in history her moment on the stage if we lingered long enough to watch.
1. After a swim, that’s when I miss him most. In November, when the water temperature is in the sixties, when I’ve toweled off and put on my bathrobe and started up the leaf-strewn lawn from the dock to my house, that’s when I think: I have to phone Oliver and tell him what a […]
Her sense of writing exists on a lofty plain—far from self-serving thoughts or motivations. Of course, this is a difficult program, and Pritchard is honest about this struggle.
Perhaps more than any other genre, memoir relies upon empathy. The memoir writer invites us to enter her world and inhabit her perspective. Our ability to do so largely determines our understanding of the memoir and our satisfaction upon reading it. Sarah Einstein’s Mot is remarkable in that it enacts memoir. Einstein invites us to enter her world as she enters the world of a homeless man named Mot.
The book is honest, brave, and soul-baring in its exploration of grief and clinical depression.
After twenty years of living as an expatriate in the United States, my German husband, Stefan, announced he wanted to go home. And by home he meant the village where he’d grown up, a hamlet of two hundred households tucked into the northwestern edge of the Black Forest, a slice of southern Germany with undulating […]
Colin Ellard’s wide-ranging and absorbing book is both an exploration of how human beings currently use physical spaces, and how space and place may be transformed by technology in the future. Ellard observes that we hardly notice the places we inhabit unless they are beautiful or dreary, but between these two poles are vast […]