by Claude Knobler (Get the Book)
Memoir meets self-help in Knobler's enjoyable account of life as an adoptive father. Knobler and his wife had two "perfectly good" biological children, ages four and six, when, moved by an article about AIDS orphans in Africa, they decided to adopt. After the couple spent months navigating through government red tape, they took in five-year-old Nati, whose mother was HIV positive. Nati instantly upended stay-at-home dad Knobler's feeling of being in control of his household. Through this experience, he learned to think more about what was right for his own kids, and less about what American middle-class consumer culture says is best. Knobler's tone is straightforwardly disarming, as when he reveals that his mother, having spent his "entire life frantically trying to find a nice Jewish girl for me to marry so that I could give her nice Jewish grandchildren," was now ill at ease about having an Ethiopian grandchild. This wise account has the potential to reach a large parental audience-not just dads, and not just adoptive parents. --Publisher's Weekly
by Laura Hillenbrand (Get the Book)
A second book by the author of Seabiscuit (2001) would get noticed, even if it weren't the enthralling and often grim story of Louie Zamperini. An Olympic runner during the 1930s, he flew B-24s during WWII. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he endured a captivity harsh even by Japanese standards and was a physical and mental wreck at the end of the war. He was saved by the influence of Billy Graham, who inspired him to turn his life around, and afterward devoted himself to evangelical speeches and founding boys' camps. Still alive at 93, Zamperini now works with those Japanese individuals and groups who accept responsibility for Japanese mistreatment of POWs and wish to see Japan and the U.S. reconciled. He submitted to 75 interviews with the author as well as contributing a large mass of personal records. Fortunately, the author's skills are as polished as ever, and like its predecessor, this book has an impossible-to-put-down quality that one commonly associates with good thrillers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This departure from the author's previous best-seller will nevertheless be promoted as necessary reading for the many folks who enjoyed the first one or its movie version. --Booklist
by Amy Poehler (Get the Book)
This book is heavy. Literally heavy, as in surprisingly hard to carry around. Perhaps that's because it's so firmly packed with wit and insight. And all that insight makes it figuratively heavy as well, though you might not notice because of all the wit. Fans of Poehler and her offbeat characters expect her to be outrageous (I'm looking at you, Amber, one-legged, gassy reality star), and there's some of that here, but mostly this is a sweet, funny memoir and a thoughtful look at what it takes to be a woman, a woman in comedy, a divorced woman with children, and, peering into the future, a 90-year-old woman who has plenty of advice to offer middle-aged Amy. In fact, there's lots of advice given here, and it's smart, the kind of stuff your favorite aunt would tell you, albeit, an aunt who once shot a moose on the Weekend Update set while rapping alongside Sarah Palin. She addresses how to treat your career (like a bad boyfriend); how not to torture other women about their life choices; ways to shut people up about your newly single status (Hey, lady, I don't want to fuck your husband). With so much to enjoy and absorb, you may even want to carry this book around, reread it, and underline pertinent-to-your-own-life sentences, which would be perfectly reasonable, except for the fact that it's so darn heavy. --Booklist
by Nina Stibbe (Get the Book)
With a who's who at the beginning that ranges from film director Stephen Frears to Maxwell, the author's ex-pony, you might guess this is not your typical memoir. Not only that, but it comprises the tuneful, descriptive letters Nina wrote in the 1980s, while she tried her hand at nannying in London, to her sister, Vic, who stayed basically at home, near Leicestershire, England. The nannied children were young Sam and Will Frears their arty, daffy children's conversations fill the pages living with their sharp, blunt mother, Mary-Kay Wilmers, deputy editor of the London Review of Books. Nina herself, then just 20 and new to the task of being a nanny, was a lover of London and quite the observer, documenting for her sister back home the who, the when, and her full-blown, clever, open-eyed take on the what of life at the Wilmers-Frears. Stibbe notes that nannying is not like a job really, just like living in someone else's life, but what a funny, artist-filled life she lived, and how well she watched and participated. This is an offbeat paean to families, real and cobbled-together, to sisters and siblings, and to communicating with love. It's also a rare and wholly delectable epistolary slice of life. --Booklist
by Stepen E. Ambrose (Get the Book)
Stephen E. Ambrose draws upon extensive sources, an unprecedented degree of scholarship, and numerous interviews with Eisenhower himself to offer the fullest, richest, most objective rendering yet of the soldier who became president. He gives us a masterly account of the European war theater and Eisenhower's magnificent leadership as Allied Supreme Commander. Ambrose's recounting of Eisenhower's presidency, the first of the Cold War, brings to life a man and a country struggling with issues as diverse as civil rights, atomic weapons, communism, and a new global role. Along the way, Ambrose follows the 34th President's relations with the people closest to him, most of all Mamie, his son John, and Kay Summersby, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Nixon, Dulles, Khrushchev, Joe McCarthy, and indeed, all the American and world leaders of his time. This superb interpretation of Eisenhower's life confirms Stephen Ambrose's position as one of our finest historians. (Publisher)
by Carols Santana (Get the Book)
Although Santana first captivated the world at his Woodstock performance, his intimate relationship with his guitar had long sustained him. Now, for the first time, the elusive guitarist tells his story in prose that is by turns ragged and sparkling. As he does with his music, Santana uses words to paint pictures, describing the streets of his Mexican hometown of AutlĂ¡n, his earliest gigs at the El Convoy bar in Tijuana, and his move to San Francisco as a teenager, where his career first took off, with the help of, among others, famous rock promoter Bill Graham. Santana also discusses the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, perpetrated by a neighbor, and his parents' efforts to downplay the incident. He strikes the perfect chord when he traces his ongoing spiritual evolution, attributing his success and the beauty of his music to what he calls the "universal tone": "The story behind the stories, the music behind the music.... With it you realize you are not alone; you are connected to everyone." For him, it all comes back to the music: "It's the fastest way of getting away from the darkness of ego.... It's a blessing to be able to play from your soul and to reach many people." --Publisher's Weekly
by Claire H. Blatchford (Get the Book)
Having lost most of her hearing suddenly at age six after suffering from the mumps-"Imagine your hearing being switched off with one quick flick of fate"-former teacher Blatchford (Clarks School for Hearing and Speech, Northampton, Mass.) soldiered on for 60 years before sound returned after she underwent a cochlear implant in 2011. In this measured, useful work, Blatchford explains her careful decision to have the implant after being told by her audiologist that her condition was degenerating ("I thought she was kidding," Blatchford writes in an accompanying poem, "but her face was serious"). Married since 1968, with two grown daughters and several grandchildren, Blatchford recognized how much she was missing and how quickly technology had advanced since she grew up. Having been mainstreamed in school, taught to "speechread" rather than sign, and only fitted with her first hearing aid at age 12, Blatchford writes without a trace of self-pity about her vast loneliness as a child and how she became a master of "bluffing": pretending she understood "was a lot less jarring and less tiring than having to ask people to repeat what they'd said." With her implant, sounds became tactile, with texture and colors she describes lyrically, and she presents amazing revelations regarding her newfound hearing of music, birds, and voices-especially her own voice. With an appendix featuring a technical explanation of the cochlear implant by audiologist Jeanne Coburn, this is a wonderfully inspiring work. --Library journal
