Anderson, Joan. A Walk on the Beach : Tales of Wisdom From an Unconventional Woman. 2004. 240 p. 921 An232aj
Shortly after deciding to spend a year apart from her husband, Anderson met Joan Erikson, wife of pioneering psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, on a foggy beach on Cape Cod. The two women were at different points in their lives but struck up a friendship that helped sustain them through the challenges they faced: marital uncertainty for Anderson; the decline and imminent death of a beloved spouse for Erikson. Despite her grim prospects and advancing age, Erikson is full of life and energy and fond memories that set Anderson to wondering about the elements of marriage and friendship. Over the course of the year and for years after, the women sustain and inspire each other. After Erik's death, Joan completes their work on the stages of life. And Anderson, author of A Year by the Sea (1999) and An Unfinished Marriage (2002), finds the courage to accept changes in her own life, insights that she brings to this third book on renewal at midlife.
Arana, Marie. American Chica. 2001. 309 p. 070.92 AR
Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World, recently described this memoir as a love story. It is fraught with the tension of two worlds colliding: her North American mother's independent, free-spirited individualism crashes into her South American father's traditional, family-based orientation. Their children formed the bicultural bridge between them.
Beck, Martha. Expecting Adam. 2000. 336 p. 362.1983 BE
Expecting Adam is an autobiographical tale of an academically oriented Harvard couple who conceive a baby with Down's syndrome and decide to carry him to term. Despite everything Martha Beck and her husband John know about themselves and their belief system, when Martha gets accidentally pregnant and the fetus is discovered to have Down's syndrome, the Becks find they cannot even consider abortion. The presence of the fetus that they each, privately, believe is a familiar being named Adam is too strong. As Martha's terribly difficult pregnancy progresses, odd coincidences and paranormal experiences begin to occur for both Martha and John, though for months they don't share them with each other. Martha's pregnancy and Adam (once born) become the catalyst for tremendous life changes for the Becks. Focusing primarily on the pregnancy but floating back and forth between the present and recent and distant past, Martha Beck's well-written, down-to-earth, funny, heart-rending, and tender book transcends the cloying tone of much spiritual literature.
Cohen, Rich. Lake Effect. 2003. 224 p. 921 C6621c
Raised in an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Rich Cohen had a cluster of interesting friends, but none more interesting than Jamie Drew. Fatherless, reckless, and lower middle class in a place that wasn't, Jamie possessed such an irresistible insouciance and charm that even the teachers called him Drew-licious. Through the high school years of parties and Cub games and girls, of summer nights on the beach and forbidden forays into the blues bars of Chicago's notorious South Side, the two formed an inseparable bond. Even after Cohen went to college in New Orleans (Jamie went to Kansas) and then moved to New York, where he had a memorable interlude with the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Jamie remained oddly crucial to his life. Exquisite and taut, Lake Effect is a bittersweet coming-of-age story that quietly bores to the essence of friendship and how it survives even as it is destined to change.
Colt, George. The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home. 2004. 336 p. 974.492 CO
In this intimate and poignant history of a sprawling century-old summer house on Cape Cod, George Howe Colt reveals not just one family's fascinating story but a vanishing way of life. Faced with the sale of the treasured house where he had spent forty-two summers, Colt returned for one last August with his wife and young children. The Big House, the author's loving tribute to his one-of-a-kind family home, interweaves glimpses of that elegiac final visit with memories of earlier summers spent at the house and of equally idiosyncratic people who lived there over the course of five generations.
Conway, Jill. True North. 1995. 272 p. 921 C769cot
Conway continues her autobiography in this follow up to The Road from Coorain. She leaves Australia to discover the freedom of open inquiry at Harvard University, and to break away from her mother's oppressive demands. For the first time, she forms true friendships with other women and develops a sense of confidence and happiness that becomes almost complete when she marries Professor John Conway, her "true north" (compass point). The testament of an extraordinary woman living in an extraordinary time. She tells the profound story of the challenges that confronted her, as she sought to establish her public self.
Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. 1999. 282 p. 919.89 LA
In the summer of 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set off aboard the Endurance bound for the South Atlantic. The goal of his expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland, but more than a year later, and still half a continent away from the intended base, the Endurance was trapped in ice and eventually was crushed. For five months Shackleton and his crew survived on drifting ice packs in one of the most savage regions of the world before they were finally able to set sail again in one of the ship's lifeboats. Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage is a white-knuckle account of this astounding odyssey. Through the diaries of team members and interviews with survivors, Lansing reconstructs the months of terror and hardship the Endurance crew suffered.
McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes. 1999. 368 p. 921 M1372mc
Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic. Born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Perhaps it is story-telling that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. 2003. 384 p. 820.9 NA
An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color."
Nielsen, Jerri. Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole. 2001. 362 p. 919.89 NI
Serving as doctor to the Americans "wintering over" at the South Pole in 1999, Jerri Nielsen made headlines when she discovered a lump in her breast that a self-administered biopsy revealed to be an aggressive, fast-growing cancer. No flights in or out of Antarctica are possible during the continent's long winter, and Nielsen's account of giving herself chemotherapy while she and her fellow "Polies" waited for the weather to break is even more gripping than the news reports at the time. She's candid about her pain and fear; the media battle waged by her embittered ex-husband makes her ordeal even more challenging. Interestingly enough, however, this high drama does not overshadow Nielsen's deeper narrative of a woman who came "to the Ice" seeking new meaning in a life shattered by divorce and estrangement from her children. In the back-to-basics world of Antarctic medicine, with outdated equipment, few supplies, and no assistants, she rediscovered her vocation as a doctor free from the imperatives of corporate-directed medicine. More importantly, Nielsen found spiritual solace in the world's most extreme environment, where she was "introduced slowly to the notion of giving more than you have and using less than you need -- of knowing that all you really own are your own thoughts." She makes the glories of the Pole so palpable that, by the end, readers will not even be surprised when she signs an e-mail to her family, "from the wonderful Ice."
Noor, Queen. Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life. 2003. 480 p. 921 N93n
Anyone who loved The King and I will readily warm to the love story of Queen Noor and the late King Hussein of Jordan. Born in America in 1951 as Lisa Halaby, Noor came from a wealthy, well-connected family and was part of Princeton's first co-ed class. Her father's aviation business produced a chance meeting with King Hussein in 1976, and a year or two later Noor realized the king was courting her. He was 41, she was 26. The rumor mills buzzed: was she the next Grace Kelly? Before long, the king renamed her Noor (light in Arabic), and she converted to Islam. Her story covers his attempts to broker peace in the Middle East, meetings with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, American presidents and other leaders. Noor details Hussein's struggles to create Arab unity and his vision of peaceful coexistence with Israel.
O'Faolain, Nuala. Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. 1999. 219 p. 070.920F
Nuala O'Faolain attracted a huge amount of critical praise and a wide audience with the literary debut of Are You Somebody? Her midlife exploration of life's love, pain, loneliness, and self-discovery won her fans worldwide who write and tell her how her story has changed their lives. There are thousands who have yet to discover this extraordinary memoir of an Irish woman who has stepped away from the traditional roles to define herself and find contentment. They will make this paperback a long-selling classic.
Ofri, Danielle. Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue. 2003. 246 p. 610.92 OF
In the tradition of Abraham Verghese and Atul Gawande, a gripping memoir of learning medicine in the trenches. Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country -- and perhaps the most legendary. Yet the emphasis of Singular Intimacies is not so much on the arduous hours in medical training (which certainly exist here), but on the evolution of an instinct for healing. In a hospital without the luxury of private physicians, where patients lack resources both financial and societal, where poverty and social strife are as much a part of the pathology as any microbe, it is the medical students and interns who are thrust into the searing intimacy that is the doctor-patient relationship. In each memorable chapter, Ofri's progress toward becoming an experienced healer introduces not just a patient in medical crisis, but a human being with an intricate and compelling history. Ofri learns to navigate the tangled vulnerabilities of doctor and patient, not simply battle the disease.
Phinn, Gervase. Head Over Heels in the Dales. 2003. 336 p. 379.15 PH
Yorkshire school inspector Gervase Phinn continues his wry observations of the schools he visits daily in the third of his "dale" memoirs. Phinn is in his 30s as the action unfolds, so this book includes his romance with elementary school teacher Miss Bentley, whom he marries. Because he falls hard for his fiancée, he aptly calls this memoir HEAD OVER HEELS. A James Herriot without the animals, the author clearly loves the surroundings he knows so well, but that love is tempered with honest laughter.
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. 2003. 233 p. 611 RO
An oddly compelling, often hilarious forensic exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers --some willingly, some unwittingly -- have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.
Shipler, David. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. 2004. 336 p. 305.562 SH
As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology -- hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor -- white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy.
Compiled by Ginger Fearey, September 2004.
