| ||||
Currently ReadingRecently Read | Every time period has its trappings. And while it may be impacted by its recency, it’s hard to imagine a historical period that carries more baggage than the 1960s. In her reflective quasi-memoir The Sixties, British author Jenny Diski sifts through some of the baggage but ultimately comes away dismayed and discouraged. At the outset, [...]            Tim September 8th, 2009 | Tags: 1960s, Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed |  Print This Post |  Email This PostIt is the actions of the masses, not great men, that truly shape history, Leo Tolstoy argued in War and Peace. Support for that theory might be seen in Lijia Zhang’s “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China. Zhang’s book is a personal memoir, not a political one. That’s why it is [...] Tim May 5th, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, reading challenges, Review Copy, World Citizen Challenge | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostAt least in name, Georg von Trapp achieved international fame as the father of the family portrayed in The Sound of Music musical and film production. How accurate that character was has been challenged by von Trapp’s family. One aspect was right: von Trapp was a retired naval officer. Not only did he serve in [...] Tim May 4th, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostTo the extent hockey gets much national attention, it begins this week with the opening of the NHL’s Stanley Cup playoffs. The NHL, though, is simply the tip of a huge iceberg. The men’s NCAA Division I hockey championships concluded last weekend. Most other minor and junior leagues likewise are in the midst of or [...] Tim April 16th, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, Hockey, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostAmerica’s tendency to rush books into print after newsworthy, or even not so newsworthy, events has generally soured me on books appearing shortly after the events with which they deal. After all, can the paperback you see in the a supermarket checkout line a month or so after the latest trial of the century really [...] Tim April 2nd, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, foreign affairs, memoir, nonfiction, reading challenges, Review Copy, World Citizen Challenge | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostThere’s plenty of things parents of teens hope never happen to their children. Drug or alcohol abuse. Serious injury or death in an accident. Terminal illness. One that’s probably small on the radar screen is having to suddenly commit your teen to a mental hospital. That is exactly what Michael Greenberg faced when his 15-year-old [...] Tim November 25th, 2008 | Tags: Book Reviews, Books, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | 2 comments - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostWe have strange attitudes toward mental illness. Psychological disorders aren’t so bad if they give us characters who entertain us on television (the obsessive compulsive title character in Monk), in movies (the multiple phobias and disorders in What About Bob?) or even in classic literary works (the depression of Winnie the Pooh‘s Eeyore and apparent [...] Tim March 17th, 2007 | Tags: Book Reviews, Books, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostWhen Time magazine reporter Michael Weisskopf went to Iraq to do a cover story on the U.S. soldier as Time‘s “Person of the Year” for 2003, he came back with the story of a lifetime. Problem is, it wasn’t the cover story. It was a story that came from losing his right hand to a [...] Tim October 3rd, 2006 | Tags: Book Reviews, Books, Iraq War, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostGovernments, projects and businesses tend to fear insider accounts. That’s because being on the inside means access to even the most damaging information. Yet what can be even more revealing is an insider account by someone who isn’t really an insider. That may not have been what Rory Stewart set out to accomplish with The [...] Tim September 29th, 2006 | Tags: Book Reviews, Books, Iraq War, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostThere are some people you hear about and all you can think is, “Are you nuts?” Take Rory Stewart for example. Stewart spent 16 months walking 6,000 miles across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He decided that to make his journey complete, he must go back and walk 600 miles across Afghanistan. But he’s going [...] Tim July 16th, 2006 | Tags: Book Reviews, Books, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy, travel | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This Post |         The views expressed here are mine and mine alone. I do not speak for my law partners, our associates, staff and clients or my family and friends. Not only should any opinions here not be attributed to them, chances are they probably don't agree with me.  | ||
Copyright © 2012 A Progressive on the Prairie - All Rights Reserved | ||||
