All the Tibetans wanted was to be left alone, to practice their ancient religion and live the feudal lives they had always lived. They were isolated, hemmed in by some of the world’s highest mountains, protected by tribes of bandits. It should have been easy for them to live in peace. But for more than a century [...]
Archive for the ‘Nonfiction’ Category
Trespassers on the Roof of the World
Posted in History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on November 10, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Animals Make Us Human (audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Nonfiction on October 22, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Sometimes a poor interview can ruin a perfectly good book. I heard animal science expert Temple Grandin interviewed on NPR several years ago. The interviewer focused almost entirely on Grandin’s personal experience as an autistic person and her observations of animals. I was left with the definite impression that Grandin had come up with an oddball theory—that [...]
Down and Out in Paris and London
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction on October 13, 2009 | 12 Comments »
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it [...]
Vanilla Beans and Brodo
Posted in Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on September 29, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Good food. Beautiful scenery. Dreadful writing. That’s Vanilla Beans and Brodo: Real Life in the Hills of Tuscany in a nutshell. In this book, Isabella Dusi, an Australian expat, takes us through a year in Montalcino, the Tuscan town where, at the time of writing, she had lived with her husband for five years.
By writing [...]
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on September 28, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Savannah, Georgia, a small southern city known for its history and its hospitality, is both the setting and the subject for John Berendt’s 1994 book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. When this book was first released, it was a word-of-mouth sensation. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading it, but I let the [...]
Home Cooking
Posted in Contemporary, Food, Nonfiction on September 25, 2009 | 4 Comments »
As you can see from my reviews of Passion and Affect and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, Laurie Colwin is one of my favorite contemporary authors. For me, her writing is exactly right, like having precisely what you want to eat when you’re hungry: tart lemonade on a hot day, or a soup with [...]
The Tender Bar
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on September 23, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I read J.R. Moehringer’s memoir The Tender Bar for my book club. We usually read mysteries, but in this case the owner of the restaurant where we meet offered to buy our dinners if we read this book and discussed it with him. We weren’t about to turn that down!
JR was the only son of a [...]
The Woman at the Washington Zoo
Posted in Nonfiction on August 3, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Marjorie Williams was a Washington journalist who wrote for such well-known publications as the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and Slate. The essays in this terrific collection cover the political scene of the 1990s, women’s issues, family life, and Williams’s battle with the liver cancer that took her life in January 2005.
The book is divided into three [...]
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World
Posted in History, Nonfiction, tagged Review Copy on July 29, 2009 | 8 Comments »
A few years after William Shakespeare’s death, his business partners, actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, approached the printer William Jaggard with a proposal that he publish a complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Some of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed individually in small editions called quartos, but Jaggard elected to print this collection in the larger folio format, and in [...]
Soldier’s Heart
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on July 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Elizabeth Samet writes about “soldier’s heart” in several ways in the course of this book. It’s a phrase that can mean courage (“steel my soldiers’ hearts,” says Henry V), or the values a soldier holds dear. It is also the name of a condition that has been diagnosed since the Civil War: at first considered [...]
