- Sep 18, 2020
Six Illuminating Memoirs I've Read This Year
01 Leaving the Witness In Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, Amber Scorah takes the reader into her confidences and lays bare her sheltered experiences, religious indoctrination, societal and gender pressures, hearty evangelism, and her eventual questioning and subsequent freezing out from the Jehovah’s Witnesses—which meant she was cut off permanently from almost everyone she knew. Scorah retraces her steps from being a covert, illegal proselytizer i
- Sep 4, 2020
Review of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey
Harvey emphasizes the urgency of the need for change and offers age-appropriate examples to help build young advocates equipped to work toward racial equality. "What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? What roles do we want them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? How do we equip them for these roles? How do we talk about race honestly with our children, which means naming white privilege...?" Harvey explores how to m
- Jul 8, 2020
Review of So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Oluo offers specific steps we can take toward "talk[ing] our way to understanding...and using that understanding to act."
- Jun 27, 2020
Review of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
"A stirring call to conscience and consciousness in white brothers and sisters."
- May 15, 2020
Review of The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre
Macintyre presents a wonderfully paced and skillfully recounted Cold War-era story of spy intrigue, paranoia, bravery, and twists and turns.
- May 11, 2020
Review of Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
Carefully researched and documented by Farrow, with twists and turns that feel so disturbingly outlandish as to seem like fiction at times.
- Apr 24, 2020
Review of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
The issues Stevenson raises may make readers uncomfortable, but they're all worth looking at under a microscope and demanding change.
- Jan 27, 2020
Review of Apeirogon by Colum McCann
This is beautiful, powerful, illuminating, and heart-wrenching.
- Jan 23, 2020
Review of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
Vance shares his unlikely, circuitous route to an emotionally and financially stable adult life. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance mainly shares the story of his own many, varied, and enormous life challenges and disadvantages and his unlikely, circuitous route from a childhood that often centered around upheaval, danger, and despair to an emotionally and financially stable adult life. But he also explores hillbilly and Appalachian culture and how as an insider he feels it contribute
- Jan 1, 2020
Review of The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life... by Tracy Walder
I love a peek at a secret world, and here Walder offers fascinating glimpses of her life as a CIA and an FBI agent.