🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Endlessly fascinating, this treasure trove of wisdom easily takes the place as my absolute favorite non-fiction read of 2024 (and likely beyond). Written by a retired academic, the author’s quest for answers sees him following connections crossing over into so many fields the result is a veritable cornucopia of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Turning the final page on this literary memoir I find my head spinning, mind struggling to form an articulate, coherent summary beyond an overwhelming and incontrovertible — Wow. So here we are - my own “fusion” of somewhat disconnected (utterly blown-away) impressions underlying this incredible work. First, with sheer…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ I listened to the (excellent) audio version of this memoir, narrated by Julia Roberts and Riley Keough, and interspersed with audio clips from Lisa Marie Presley that she recorded as part of her book preparations. Lisa Marie, having reached out to her daughter, Riley, for help in pulling the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A raw and powerful memoir, a story of a life lived with trauma, written by an author who is very well known for her fiction, and who cannot resist playing a trick or two on the reader, beginning with her identification as a perhaps inevitably “unreliable” narrator. The author’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 For anyone who has experienced (make that, suffered) fat-shaming - the internalized mortification and inadequacy resulting from a life long barrage of society’s humiliations, disapproval, and disgust - this book may just be the very beginning of something transformative. “What I hated was less my body than the way…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Every now and then one of those books comes along that makes you stop, take a beat, and reset. This is just such a book - a heartbreaking, gorgeous compendium of interviews, journal entries, and notes concerning who must be (and still is) “the greatest Canadian hero ever”. This,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Written by an author, — a voice-over actress, food-blogger, and tomato-sauce entrepreneur — who has learned to manage her health (and her celiac disease) with a no-sugar-no-grains approach (NSNG), including elimination of processed foods, and a focus on real, low-carb, and metabolically-friendly foods. This is the third cookbook in…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Absolutely gripping and quite possibly the scariest book this reader has encountered this year, this real-life memoir, written by a first-person female former practicing member of Christian Fundamentalism (at its most devout) is a harrowing deep-dive into toxic patriarchal religious dogma and its stealthy indoctrination of the most horrifying…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An ambitious, earnest, heart-felt treatise on the much-needed ecological redemption of our planet - not based on a restorative tunnel-visioned scientific dogma which is destined to fail (as it has been, repeatedly), but integrating a newly-integrated indigenous perspective in which we, the Humans, (caretakers of old), live out our…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ For this reader, in a word, love, pure and simple, for this book of essays that tackles all the prickly, suffocating, isolating hard-edges that come with growing old, as a female, - unnoticed and unwelcome in a global culture that prizes patriarchy and youth. An aging experience that no…