Category: BOOKS

  • WHY WRITE A MEMOIR?

    WHY WRITE A MEMOIR?

    “Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.”   

    –C.S.Lewis

    Steeped as I am in books, story, and memoir, I’m sometimes taken aback to come upon people who don’t much know what a memoir even is.

    When they find out, they narrow their eyes and ask with a barely-disguised sneer so you just know they’re thinking: “Has your life really been that interesting?”

    What’s so great about you that we need to know about it?

    (more…)
  • AGATA IZABELA BREWER’S “THE HUNGER BOOK: A MEMOIR FROM COMMUNIIST POLAND”

    AGATA IZABELA BREWER’S “THE HUNGER BOOK: A MEMOIR FROM COMMUNIIST POLAND”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Lent is upon us. Pray, fast, and give alms, saith the Lord.

    Apropos of fasting, I recently read a food-based memoir that is about very much more than food.

    Agata lzabela Brewer, author of “The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland” (Mad Creek Books, $24.95), grew up in Lviv during the 1980s with a terrifying, unstable, alcoholic mother and a little brother whom she adored and protected.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD DECLARED UNTO MARY…

    AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD DECLARED UNTO MARY…

    BLESSED SOLEMNITY!

    Turns out it’s also the 100th anniversary of O’Connor’s birth….Happy Birthday, Flannery…

  • SISTER WENDY BECKETT’S “THE ART OF LENT”

    SISTER WENDY BECKETT’S “THE ART OF LENT”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Sister Wendy Beckett (1930-2018), a contemplative nun and consecrated virgin, delighted audiences worldwide during the 1990s with her BBC documentaries on the history of art.

    Born in Johannesburg, she moved as a child to Scotland; in 1946 she joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a teaching order, and earned a degree in English Literature at Oxford.

    She then returned to South Africa and in spite of her “constant longing to pray,” lived an active life of teaching from 1954 to 1970. When she began to have stress-induced heart trouble and epileptic seizures, she was given permission to return to England. There, in solitude and silence, she found her true vocation. 

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • RICHARD FLANAGAN’S “QUESTION 7”

    RICHARD FLANAGAN’S “QUESTION 7”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize-winning novelist, was raised and lives in Tasmania.

    His new book, “Question 7” (Knopf, $28), takes its title from a metaphysical puzzle posed in a short story by Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

    “Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave Station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach Station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach Station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

    Chekhov’s point is that the writer’s job is to ask the deepest questions without purporting to answer them.

    In a family memoir that weaves together the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, the development of the atom bomb, and his father’s internment as a Japanese POW, some of the questions Flanagan asks include: Who owns the truth? Is there a final accounting? If there’s no one left to remember that a particular incident happened — the brutal torture inflicted by a group of camp guards; the incineration of a city and its people — does that mean the incident never happened?

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • FINDING THE BEAUTY IN A MAN AND HIS “CLUTTER”

    FINDING THE BEAUTY IN A MAN AND HIS “CLUTTER”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942) is a Boston-based photographer and writer whose domains are the palimpsest melding of past, present, and future; the natural and the man-made; the wonder and mystery of decay.

    Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts — her father was a professor of Byzantine history and Victorian literature — she’s spent much of her life in the dim back rooms of natural history museums.

    In “Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals” (Mariner Books, $16.68), she writes: 

    “As a sojourner, I relish the random search: wandering through miles of corridors, opening hundreds of heavy doors, and choking through fumes, dust, and dark to find the holy grail.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

    A huge thank you to all the many readers who responded to my call for Credible Witnesses: I so appreciate each and every one of you. I tried to respond to each person individually, but if I somehow missed you, my apologies.

  • ART IS FOR INCREASING LIFE

    ART IS FOR INCREASING LIFE

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    From a recent essay in “Salmagundi,” a literary journal published at Skidmore College, titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art,” by William Deresiewicz: 

    “Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for — why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it. What do I mean by increasing life?… Being fully present to the world, and feeling without reservation: the two things that making art requires and that experiencing it involves. … Art is one of the only times when life is anything like being in love. Attention, intensity. …”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • HANNAH’S CHILDREN

    HANNAH’S CHILDREN

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Author Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Harvard-trained economist and mother of eight, realized somewhere along the line that “in a two-child world, an eight-child choice begs for an explanation.” 

    The result is a book called “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth” (Regnery Gateway, $24.99). 

    Pakaluk happens to be Catholic but she didn’t choose her family size because the Church decreed it. Our stance on abortion and birth control notwithstanding, as Pakaluk points out, “There’s no doctrine that it’s holier to end up with more kids.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • READING TIPS FOR THE SEASON

    READING TIPS FOR THE SEASON

    Here’s how this week’s arts and column begins:

    People often ask for reading suggestions this time of year. One book I always recommend as we approach Christmas is “The Prison Meditations of Father Delp” (Herder & Herder, $22.98). 

    A Jesuit priest, Father Alfred Delp (1907-1945) wrote with his wrists manacled, largely during Advent, while awaiting execution by the Nazis. A sampling:

    “Life means waiting, not Faust-like grasping, but waiting and being ready. … Anyone who remains stuck, waiting in fearful expectation just to see whether or not he will survive, has not yet laid bare the innermost strata. For the fearful expectation was sent to us in order to remove our false sense of security and behind it is this other metaphysical waiting that is part of existence.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • A GOOD NEIGHBOR AND THE ROAD HOME

    A GOOD NEIGHBOR AND THE ROAD HOME

    During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people hunkered down, barricaded themselves indoors, and developed a new suspicion of their neighbors.

    Mary Lea Carroll, a native Angelena and inveterate pilgrim sidelined by travel restrictions, seized the opportunity to reflect upon the riches of community, to reconnect with next-door friends from long ago, and to foster a new spirit of warmth and fun in the Pasadena neighborhood in which she’s lived for 37 years.

    “Across the Street Around the Corner … A Road Home” (Clyde Custom Publishing, $21.95) is the result.

    (more…)