by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 7, 2021 | LEARN: Everything Else
Douglas Abrams teams up with Jane Goodall to co-create The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. It’s a record of their conversations about hope, and focuses primarily on Goodall’s four reasons to be hopeful. Abrams is a skilled interviewer and captures the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 3, 2021 | RESIST: Social Justice
Jarrett Adams tells his alternately inspiring and maddening story in Redeeming Justice: From Defendant to Defender, My Fight for Equity on Both Sides of a Broken System. At 17, he attended a college party with two of his buddies. Before the night was out, they had...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 28, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Leigh Cowart explores why people consent to experience pain in their upcoming book, Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. They take the science of pain and correlate it with a variety of intentional experiences from ballet class to eating wildly...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 21, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Kiran Millwood Hargrave crafts a story of community and strength in her historical fiction novel, The Mercies. Set in a remote Norwegian coastal village called Vardø in 1617, the story centers on two women. Maren Bergensdatter is barely out of her teens when a...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 5, 2021 | LEARN: Everything Else
Nancy Marie Brown combines history and imagination in her upcoming book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. If you follow me, you know that I love books about Vikings and Norse people. And this is the best I’ve ever read. It covers a wide...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 31, 2021 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Mohsin Hamid creates a unique refugee story in Exit West. It’s partly delicate but cannot entirely be classified that way since it’s rooted in aggressive, war-torn circumstances. Still, the main characters, Nadia and Saeed navigate life despite the obstacles. And...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 19, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Renée Nicholson writes about two different parts of her life in Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness. Initially, she’s the young dancer making sense of competition, instructor corrections, and visions of the future. As the essays progress, Nicholson...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 15, 2021 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
The Library at Mount Char, a spectacular debut novel from Scott Hawkins, combines epic and urban fantasy. It’s confusing for a long while, but thankfully the focus ultimately tightens. Better still, Hawkins creates memorable characters whose true nature hovers just...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 16, 2021 | RESIST: Feminism
Elizabeth Packard is the subject of Kate Moore’s new book, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear. But I’ll venture to guess you’ve never heard of Mrs. Packard. Although her story is...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 6, 2021 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
The Maidens from Alex Michaelides is an erudite, binge-worthy mystery. Set in Cambridge, England among ivy-covered buildings many centuries old, it draws from Greek tragedy and mythology. But the murders at the story’s heart are definitely in the here and now. It’s...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 28, 2021 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
In her Dr. Greta Helsing series, author Vivian Shaw mixes weird science, likable characters, and tongue-in-cheek humor in a contemporary fantasy brew. Not as gritty as some urban fantasy, the books are built around Helsing’s career as a medical doctor to supernatural...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 18, 2021 | LEARN: Everything Else, RESIST: Feminism
Dr. Jen Gunther, MD is my new chief explainer of women’s health. Her upcoming book, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism is brilliant. It’s an utterly necessary addition to every 35+ woman’s bookshelf. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 7, 2021 | RELAX: Memoir
Angela Howard is a brave woman. Her memoir, Sin Child, shows that she achieved this character trait because she survived. Oh my, what she survived. And in the process, she clearly developed some serious internal strength. Nobody could beat it out of her, though God...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 6, 2021 | RESIST: Feminism
Caroline Criado Perez covers extensive ground in Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Because the world offers her illustrations galore of how we exclude women from data. Then she turns around and explains what this means in everyday women’s lives....
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 2, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Liese O’Halloran Schwarz crafts a family drama / mystery in What Could Be Saved. It’s set in current day Washington, D.C. as well as early 1970s Bangkok, Thailand. The Preston family—parents Genevieve and Robert and siblings Bea, Laura, and Phillip—go to Bangkok for...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Apr 23, 2021 | RELAX: Memoir
Sarah M. Broom creates a tour de force memoir in The Yellow House. And truthfully, it’s so much more. It’s about her family, her childhood, and the house she grew up in. But it’s also about her home city, New Orleans, including the politics, the racial divide, and the...
Recent Comments