A Blissful Feast by Teresa Lust

The trouble with going to the less traveled spots is that sometimes it is hard to find books that cover said regions. I have an acquaintance who travels extensively and often who swears by travel blogs as a source from which to plan your trips. She travels off the beaten path, and I am seeing the wisdom of her way. So I picked this up because it starts in Piedmont, a region that I am traveling to very soon. The author's maternal grandparents came from the Italian Piedmont, and it's there that she begins her what is part memoir, part recollection of culinary lessons and cultural insights in three parts of the country. The book contains more than 35 recipes for the likes of braised rabbit with white wine and rosemary, breakfast biscotti, and tagliatelle made with fresh eggs, the real instruction comes through the stories Lust tells about the cooks who fed her and whom she worked alongside to learn how to cook regionally in Italy. Ancient and contemporary Italy overlap in her stories of cooks and marketplaces, restaurants and holiday feasts, regional rivalries and evocations of Dante. She went to Piedmont to learn Italian at a language school, and she recounts her struggles when the limitation of her language skills led to challenges in her understanding the conversations she had with the cooks, bakers, and butchers but as her skill improved her stories have more depth and interest. It really stuck with her, because she is now a professor in Italian language study at Dartmouth, and some of the stories towards the end of her book are about trying to take the cuisine of Italy home to New England. I especially appreciated her story of harvesting hops shoots and how perplexing it was for the farms caretaker to understand what she was about. There is a hazard that you're likely to want to make your own trip to Italy, and luckily I had that in hand before I started the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynne-Williams

I read a review for this memoir of a New Zealander's time at Facebook that characterized it as darkly funny and genuinely shocking to be a fairly good one sentence summation. It comes long after the revelations of Frances Haugen, and I have read it in the wake of the 2.0 version of the Revenge Presidency, and still it unsettles me to to the point that I am not sure where we are heading and what the end of the road holds. This is an insider account of Facebook, which she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever feckless as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. Including the one that was seeking re-election in the United States at the time--all of which has come to fruition in an astoundingly inhumane, areligious, and profit driven manner. The bottom line, the summation of all that is wrong with the tech bros was a conversation that she had with Zuckerberg about the United States president that he most admires is Andrew Jackson. Jackson is more nuanced as a person than is oft remembered, but the bottom line is that he is responsible for the Trail of Tears. Unforgivable imposition of human suffering and Zuckerberg admires him, despite that or because of it, it matters not in the end. We are all screwed.

The Sweet Life In Paris by David Lebovitz

I am glad that I read this memoir after a recent trip to France that included a several day stop in Paris. I am not a big fan of big cities, and in France my absolute favorite thing to do is to drive around and visit small medieval villages that have great restaurants and enjoy the food and culture. That said, I loved Paris on this recent trip and could finally see why others feel that way. This is a memoir that is already somewhat dated by an author who writes excellent cookbooks (I highly recommend them if you are seeking to cook French food--he was a pastry chef at Chez Panisse for a decade, so his desserts are top notch but his savory food is good too--there are quite a few embedded here that you could try out, but while Dorie Greenspan is my go to American writing about French food, if you want to widen your net, this is a good place to go--or if you are going old school, Julia Child is another option). He moves to Paris, and while he hasn't quite settled there, he doesn't want to go back to San Francisco. Even though he loves and misses Mexican food and BBQ, the tug of Paris has its grip on him. This is a book about his everyday life there, and I really loved were all the anecdotes about daily life in Paris–complete with all its complications, contradictions, and even annoyances. One reviewer complained that the book is not really about a sweet life at all; Lebovitz makes living in Paris look like hard work--which I suspect it is both foreign and difficult but clearly when all is said and done, worth it.

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry

I have very mixed feelings about this memoir, and the whole thing made me feel old. Reviewers describe this a joyful, and all I could really feel at the end was sad. Neneh Cherry is a mixed race woman who's Swedish mother raised her after her father, from Sierra Leone, left them. Her mother later married jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, And she was raised in Sweden, New York, and London. Her mother her mother, Monika Karlsson, was the constant in her life--she worked as a painter, textile artist, musician and set designer. She was and needed to be thrifty, picking up raw materials at flea markets, creating colorful and fantastical work that augmented folk traditions with cosmic, almost visionary motifs. So her childhood was chaotic, creative, and unpredictable. This book was always going to be interesting even if I didn't love it. Cherry has had a fascinating life – she was brought up by a jazz musician and an artist, has lived in different countries and experienced both real hardship and enduring success. She could just have listed it all and that would have been enough to sell plenty of copies, but she has taken the opportunity to produce something that’s beautifully written – it’s thoughtful, considered and deliberate. She talks about many incredibly tough experiences (a parent with a drug addiction, rape, alcoholism and the grief that led to it, teenage pregnancy, and more), and what’s striking is her tone. She often seems brutally honest, but without ever becoming lurid or undignified. She avoids harsh judgements – even where they’d be pretty understandable – instead acknowledging and describing pain with grace and tenderness, in a way that makes it real and tangible. I am not sure really what to make of it, but it is a remarkable story and reasonably well written.

Food For Thought by Alton Brown

I liked this but I did not love it. That also sums up my feelings about Good Eats, which was a show that my family--five men--liked more than I did. I think the science of cooking was a great hook for them and it did almost nothing for me, although I did not find him annoying, which is not a given for this sort of show. Same can also be said about this book, which really is a collection of ruminations and expositions on a wide range of topics mixed in that mostly adds up to a bit of a memoir. There is a fair amount about what it was like to be him as a child, growing up in the South and largely without a father, how he really struggled in a traditional classroom and he repeatedly tells us this, that he barely got out of high school, but never seems to realize that the way he learns is not the way others learn, and that is where public education failed him. He strikes me as a kinesthetic learner--maybe he has since figured it out. There are a few details about his current life, and the story about what they did during COVID and what he learned about his wife and himself is charmingly told. Then in between there is the part about how he came to be known by all of us, how he more or less stumbled in to what he is now widely known for. This is a better book once I reflect on it, because the story telling is non-linear, but at the end you do emerge with a sense of things about him. If you like food memoirs, this isn't really that, but it is food adjacent and enjoyable with that lens.

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots by John Swanson Jacobs

The story behind this publication is in some ways cooler than the book itself and perfect for Juneteenth. Schroeder, who wrote the biography of the author that is included in this publication, is a literary historian, and he knew the story of Harriet Jacobs, the abolitionist who famously wrote about her life and abuse while enslaved, her secret relationship with a white politician and her escape to freedom in the 1800s. Schroeder searched a database of historical documents for details on Harriet's son. He wasn't getting far, so he tried another search term focused on Harriet's brother, Johnathan S. Jacobs. That is how he stumbled upon an autobiography by John Swanson Jacobs, first published in Australia in 1855 and largely lost to time - until now. Six hundred thousand despots is a reference to the number of slave owners in the U.S. at the time. John Swanson Jacobs was born in 1815 in Edenton, N.C., and he was born a sixth-generation slave. Today, he's a footnote in the life of his older sister, Harriet Jacobs, who is the best-known Black female author of the 19th century. He was an abolitionist in the U.S. and U.K. He was a gold miner in California and Australia. He was a sailor on four oceans and four continents. And he was an expat for nearly all of his free life. He had become a gold miner after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. He left the U.S. for California, and then for Australia, which was going through its own gold rush at the same time as America's gold rush. And he eventually struck it rich or at least did well in the Australian gold rush. And that gave him a rare moment of time off from the kind of labor that dominated most of his life to go to Sydney and to finish the life story that he had begun practicing in the 1840s as an abolitionist in William Lloyd Garrison's Boston and Frederick Douglass' Rochester. This is a recreation of his autobiography, and then a biography of what we know about him now with the help of time.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

This is a peaceful book, one that focuses within rather than without. On the one hand it is a memoir of a time and of a relationship that seems like it might fit better in a children's picture book than in a grown up reflection. It is so beautiful that I felt transported by it. The setting is the English countryside, the time is COVID, and the relationship is between a woman and a hare. Things are in lock down and people are not seeing much of each other. Enter the leveret, a baby hare, which is both a magical interloper and harbinger of transformation. The author finds the creature lying on a country track outside her home, seemingly abandoned. From the outset, she is conflicted about whether to rescue the hare and take her into her home or let nature take it's course. She relents, though she places certain restrictions on their relationship: she does not name the animal, tries not to touch it, and does not, except briefly, confine it (it can leave the house through a specially constructed flap). Over the course of the book they develop a remarkable relationship with its own language; not, of course, a human language, but one of gestures, movements and exhalations (hares, we learn, emit soft, puff-like sounds). Dalton has a zoologist’s eye for detail combined with a poet’s sensitivity to descriptive language; she conjures the beauty, the allure and variation of the hare’s sounds, mouth, eyes and fur, which changes with the seasons and marks the passage of time. Her language is shot with such intense tenderness and emotion--she cares deeply about what happens and as a result, so do we. This is a breath of fresh air in a chaotic time.

Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges

This is an unusual memoir that has taken me a while to write about, which means that I have been thinking a lot about just what to write. I got it because it was the electronic version of The Community Reads, meaning that my library had unlimited e-books to take out and while it is pretty rare for me to love these books, I usually at least like them and they are always something that I wouldn't have discovered on my own--this book fits that bill. The author was a concert violinist who stopped working as a professional musician because she developed performance anxiety. In the quest to make sense of her life as a musician and the experiences she was having, she has examined it through the twin portals of neuroscience and quantum physics. Rather than dwelling on the purely emotional aspect of dealing with crushingly high personal expectations, she steps outside of herself and looks at how music informs our experience of time, and whether she as musicians was living in time, or whether time lives within her. She doesn't ignore the anxiety and where it comes from for her, and exactly how her anxiety manifests. It would start typically by fixating obsessively on a particular passage that never seemed to go exactly as she wanted, so much so that the actual performance would become temporally distorted. In addition to the temporal dichotomy performers are familiar with – the coexistence of ‘real’ time ‘out there’ and the music’s internal temporal flow – she would experience a sense of accelerating uncontrollably towards the ‘doomed place’, and then at the point of arrival would feel as if time had stopped. I couldn't relate to much of what she was describing about her experience, but it is pretty mesmerizing to read, nonetheless.

The Choice by Edith Eva Eger

The author was a young teenager in Hungary when WWII began. It has been said that the best chance of survival for a European Jew in Nazi occupied Europe lived in Hungary--the extermination came later there than to other countries, but the best chance wasn't very good. The front end of this memoir is a first hand account of what it was like to be there. She and her sister, who had been rivals before being interned at Auschwitz, clung to each other after Mengele personally evaluated them on arrival and sent their mother to the gas chamber and allowed them to live. The second half of the book is about her PTSD and how she struggled over the years to cope with it, sometimes well and often times not very well at all. She ended up, well into middle age, deciding to train as a therapist and to help others claw their way to better mental health, to overcome the immeasurable trauma that they had experienced and live fuller lives. She published this when she was in her 90's and she is still alive at 97--one of the oldest Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany.

Patriot by Alexei Navaltny

This is a tragedy in the form of a memoir. Alexei Navalny knew how it would end: “I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison and die here.” He was right. On 16 February 2024, the Russian authorities announced the death of its highest profile political prisoner in colony FKU IK-3, north of the Arctic Circle. He was 47 years old. By the time it was published we definitively knew the outcome--that Putin killed Navalny. He had after all tried once and failed. When Navalny recovered and returned to Russia, everyone knew where it was headed. In the meantime he demonstrated conclusively that the Russian state had put a hit on him. The documentary that chronicles this story is remarkable--it also shows why Navalny was so dangerous for Putin. He was a smart, charismatic and handsome man who was charming, self-effacing, and the leader that Russia needed and arguably at one point at least, deserved. Having watched the documentary that won the Academy Award in 2024 and followed Navalny's return to Russia, his imprisonment, and his slow death there, the front end of this memoir was more gripping for me. It tells Navalny's rise to a much feared opposition leader, which included he and his extended family being targeted by the Russian government. The depth of corruption in Putin's Russia and the corruption it thrives on is well detailed here and he is a good writer to boot. This is a difficult read, and one that is unlikely to change any minds, but well worth reading.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

I read a review that called this more of a self help book than a memoir, and it is a good way to think about and approach the author's story. She was a closeted gay woman who married because she thought she had to, developed an eating disorder as a teen to have a locus of control, became an alcoholic as an adult, and was a deeply unhappy person who tolerates her husband's serial infidelity to keep her family together at the front end of her memoir. The first half makes a case for how we are born into society's metaphorical cages that teach us how to act, what to say, who to love, and who to be. Why? Because women are taught to be quiet, stifle our emotions, dream realistically, and fit the status quo, but many of these cages keep us from ever truly knowing ourselves or living freely, offering instead a life of elusive discontent that we avoid by drinking, convincing ourselves that "good enough" is good enough, or simply never looking straight at our problems because they're too much to bear. Then she meets the love of her life and she breaks free in almost every way possible. After blowing up her marriage and starting life over--you could even say she resets the starting line--she offers four keys to unlocking these cages: Feel It All, Be Still And Know, Dare to Imagine, and Build and Burn. These essentially translate to: Feelings are meant to be felt, you need to trust yourself, discontent is a sign you're in the wrong place, and new construction can only come from deconstruction.

Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson

I am not sure why, but this is the first memoir or biography that I have read of a Supreme Court Justice--and it was a good place to start. I picked it up because it was on the New York Times Notable Books for 2024, and the author is the first African American woman on the court, and only the 5th woman to serve on the highest court. One review I read said that this chronicled her meteoric rise, but I would characterize it more as a clawing upwards against the odds. She is smart with equal parts tenacity and hard work to propel her forward. For those who are seeking something along the lines of her judicial opinions, there is none of the scathing writing or flashes of wit that she is known for as a judge. This is quite literally the story of her life, which includes both struggles and successes. She grew from a serious-minded little girl, eager to earn her parents’ approval, to a hardworking young woman determined to overcome every challenge. A self-proclaimed “risk-averse rule follower,” she describes herself as someone whose “nature was to seek harmony and cooperation wherever I happened to be.” The boldest thing she did was to marry her college sweetheart--someone from as different a background from her as it could be--he a white Bostonian who's family traces their roots to the Mayflower and she who arrived enslaved almost as long ago but under very different circumstances. It is a good read, but by no means earth shattering. Happy to have her in the siege defense as democracy is under attack.

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante

Happy Mother's Day. This is a memoir of transitioning, written by a writer and university professor by trade, about her "egg breaking", being unable to continue to live as a man and coming out as a woman at age 60 and what the experience was like for her. This is the second such book I have read--written by another author and university professor, Jenny Boylan about her experience, and these are so valuable to me as a mental health provider who has a substantial patient population of people who have done just this. The struggles within one's self--not with questioning their essential femaleness but rather holding it in for so long, then letting it go free, who to tell, how to tell them, and who might get hurt--both this author and Professor Boylan had significant others they did not want to lose, and in one case, kids as well. I have a limited imagination, and so these frank renditions of what happened and how it felt are valuable--and also very likely frightening to release into the world, so thank you for that.

Climbing The Mango Tree by Madhur Jaffrey

My spouse and I picked this out to listen to while traveling by car together because the author is an icon in cooking. She is the most recognizable Indian cookbook author in America and the most prolific. This is not about that at all, but it is still worth a listen. Daniel Boulard encourages aspiring cooks to explore what they know, to understand the food of the culture that they grew up in, and the India of Jaffrey's youth was very multi-cultural before independence and partition. She had a very privledged childhood, in which her barrister grandfather lived on a road that was named after him and the family had a full-blown folk tale about its origin, involving an ancient kingdom and a massacre from which one infant boy was saved by the sheltering wings of a kite. This bird became the tutelary goddess of the family, henceforth held sacred by all its descendants. While the memoir is not about food, her taste memories sparkle with enthusiasm, and her talent for conveying them makes the book relentlessly appetizing. She provides many family recipes (which we did not listen to), including one for split-pea fritters, as well as directions for preparing both traditional and easy tamarind chutney. The whole package — fritters, yogurt, chili mixture and chutney — is a stupendous dish, and not too hard to make at home. But the full magic of Jaffrey’s description has less to do with the chaat’s extraordinary flavor than with the presence of the khomcha-wallah and the wondering appetite of a child. This is worth having a go at, but it is not about the cookbooks so much as it is about the author.

Burn Book by Kara Swisher

I feel like I should have read this when it came out and then everything that is happening/unraveling in 2025 would have come as less of a shock--shocking still but more obvious as to what was to come. This is a memoir, the author recounting her life in journalism in Silicon Valley, but it is also an expose of the top guns in tech, who they are, what they care about, and most importantly, what they do not give a crap about. She also does a decisive take down of Elon Musk, having sussed him out early on and ruffling his dainty feathers. She is straight forward, brusque even, and she had a front row seat to the whole thing unfolding, sharing in the hopes for what tech could do to change the world, and then seeing how it could unravel democracy in the wrong hands--which is where we are now. I think this is something everyone should read and think about, and maybe hope we heed the warning signs of just how bad these people really are, and what can we do about it now that all her fears are coming to fruition.

Feeding Ghosts by Tess Hulls

This is a graphic memoir that is the author's family story. She is feeding their ghosts by pulling them into the light, which she does metaphorically with her words and graphically with the accompanying drawings. She is also feeding her own ghosts, having grown up in a home with generational trauma that she is seeking to disect and understand herself. The story covers three generations of women, starting with her grandmother, Sun Yi, who herself was once a bestselling author of a memoir. Sun Yi’s path wades through a treacherous Chinese history, from the brutal massacre of Chinese in Nanking by Japanese soldiers through her escape to Hong Kong in 1957 — just missing the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation that came with it. Then, as Sun Yi withdraws into a spiral of hospitalizations and mental illness. the story picks up through Sun Yi’s daughter, Rose, who is unbearably aloof and seemingly cruel at times to the author herself, Rose’s daughter, as she pieces together their past to make better sense of the reverberating wounds that have threatened to drown each of them in matrilineal succession. The graphics are on the simple side— cartoons drawn with black strokes on white paper — but what it conveys is so much more intricate. Panels often bleed into one another, allowing for layered illustrations rich in metaphor. She visually represents trauma as ghosts in her bones, emanating from her, her mother and her grandmother, often intermingling like smoke; veins of their shared history branching out from their bodies as a physical representation of their emotional interconnectivity. It is a bit wordy as grphic novels go, but it conveys a time in hisotry through the eyes of one family's story.

Be Ready When The Luck Happens by Ina Garten

I didn't love Ina Garten when I started the book, and I didn't love her when I finished it--in between some things did change, however, and I would recommend this book to people who know of her career and are interested in either food or women as entrepreneurs. She was a pioneer, and she deserves credit for what she has accomplished. Thee first thing to remember is that she grew up at a time when it was very hard for a woman to create her own business. She wasn't alone but she was not in a crowded field either. I am a decade younger than she is and when someone at a faculty meeting I was attending said they could not tell a joke in mixed company, I offered to leave--I was the only one who was mixing the company. This is a memoir--it is not a How To Build A Successful Brand book. She describes an unhappy childhood but a happy marriage to a man who supported her as an equal in their life choices. She has shifted her focus from owning a store to writing cookbooks to a successful television show, all while keeping tabs on what she was enjoying and what she was not. She has built a large and loyal fan base, and it is well worth reading her story.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This is the second of two books that I read in a short period of time that fall into what I think is a very narrow genre--that is books that are written by authors who were married to authors about the profound grief they experienced with the sudden death of their spouse. The two books follow the same pattern--maybe this is how one does this genre--juxtaposing the event itself, in this case, Didion's husband dropped dead in front of her--and the aftermath. The book is a raw plunge into grief, confusion, and guilt. Much of it has the feel of talking to ones self about the experience and trying to make some kind of sense of it, and ultimately trying to move forward from it.. It intricately unravels the layers of grief. It reveals some truths that I have found in grief, which is that it isn’t static. It shifts daily. Some days, you lose yourself in memories. Other days, you try to fend off the sorrow. On others, the past, and the things left behind, pull you back into the stories attached to them. It is a new path, one that no one wants to be on, but one you cannot return from either.

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

In the course of a week I read two memoirs by two celebrated authors about the experience they had with suddenly losing a beloved spouse. Geraldine Brooks suddenly lost her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz, when he collapsed on a Chevy Chase sidewalk and was then pronounced dead at a D.C. hospital Memorial Day weekend, 2019. He was 60 years old, and while he carried a myriad of risks and mitigating circumstances for heart disease, he died of something more rare, myocarditis. She lost him suddenly, she was not with him, and she struggled mightily in his absence for a myriad of reasons--many of which she shares in this slim volume. There is some sense of hope that sharing her pain might help others to avoid falling victim to what she went through. She wrote this 4 years on, still not moving forward, much less over it, and she closes with some things she wished she had done to prepare for losing her spouse. We will all be either the one left behind or the one who dies first, so in some ways it makes sense to heed the cautionary tales she tells, but what is most real about this is just how hard it is to lose someone that you still deeply love and are expected to carry on in their stead, be the parent your children need, to be the person you were going to be if they had gone on living, and just how frighteningly hard that is to accomplish.

We Will Be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo

Nemonte Nenquimo is a Waorani woman from Ecuador’s Amazon region who co-founded the Indigenous-led Ceibo Alliance that scored a major legal victory in 2019, protecting half a million acres of rainforest from oil drilling. She and her family lived within nature, with food from the river, the rainforest and their gardens. A monkey was her childhood pet. According to family lore, she knew she would become a spirit jaguar when she died. But things were changing fast: A huge metal tube had descended from the sky not too many years before she was born. The missionaries who emerged from it didn’t speak her language, but they persuaded her community’s leaders to put a mark on a paper in return for clothing and other gifts. Within a couple of decades later, her river was black with pollution, much of her forest was cut down, her community’s men had been coerced into laboring for oil companies in exchange for pieces of paper their way of life had no use for. Missionaries said Nenquimo and her community must worship their god. She and other children were herded into schools that forced them to put aside their traditions--and as seems to almost always be the case with these set ups, there are sexual predators involved. This memoir conveys the sheer confusion and terror of colonialism for the Waorani and other Indigenous peoples. Missionaries, oil executives and government officials used underhanded methods to wrest control of the region from families like Nenquimo’s. Ironically, the missionary education gave Nenquimo and others the tools they needed to fight back. Her story is one of fierce determination to claim a heritage that was nearly stolen from her.