Biography
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Educated: A difficult, absorbing read
Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir has taken the reading public by storm since it was published last year, and with good reason. A gripping read by any measure, the book details Westover’s journey…
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Prairie Fires
Carolyn Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder won a Pulitzer in 2017. Little wonder. I’ve spent the past few weeks savoring it not just for its fascinating content, but…
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Defending Laura
The renaming of the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” as the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award” seems shockingly misguided. It coincides with my reading of Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, a biography of Wilder that…
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Recent Reads: A Schmidt-fest and a memoir
After enjoying the Wednesday Wars, I forged ahead to Okay for Now, Gary D. Schmidt’s companion book written from the perspective of the Wednesday Wars’ narrator’s classmate. Doug Swieteck is a different kind…
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A Life Observed
In A Life Observed, author Devin Brown offers a biography of C.S. Lewis for a new audience: “a generation who may know him only through the Narnia films.” Though I don’t fit into…
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Hillbilly Elegy
J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is the best book I’ve read in a long time. Google the title, or the author’s name, and you’ll discover…
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Recent Reads
I’ve had different degrees of success in my reading this summer. For example, though their premises were interesting and they were in general pretty good, I fell by the wayside and failed to…
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You Have a Brain
We bought Ben Carson’s You Have a Brain: A Teen’s Guide to T.H.I.N.K. B.I.G. for our kids. We knew a bit of his life story; someone had given us America the Beautiful a…
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The Fellowship
What then, were the Inklings? Was John Wain right to call them (as we reported on the first page of this study) ‘a circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one…
