Book #49 of 2018: Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters The Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black began as an adaptation of a true-life memoir, with the character Alex Vause based on a figure from author Piper Kerman’s past. Out of Orange is that woman’s own account of her time as a smuggler-turned-prisoner, …
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Book #34 of 2018: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore This is an interesting account of two black boys with the same name who grew up in similar Baltimore neighborhoods, one of whom became a Rhodes scholar and one of whom is now serving a life sentence without parole. Both …
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Book #33 of 2018: A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal by Jen Waite On the one hand: this is a gripping true story, told engagingly in alternating chapters of the author first falling in love with her husband and then discovering years later that he’s been harboring a dark secret. On …
Book #32 of 2018: Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman Not nearly as funny as I expected from a comedian of Nick Offerman’s caliber. I still enjoyed the autobiographical sections on the author’s bucolic childhood and subsequent acting career, but without more jokes to leaven the life advice …
Book #7 of 2018: Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale with Stan Redding All things considered, I think the 2002 movie adaptation tells Frank Abagnale’s story better than Abagnale (with co-writer Stan Redding) does himself. Even setting aside the issue of whether the criminal prodigy …
Book #229 of 2017: The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich This book is partly a true-crime story about a child molester and murderer, and partly the author’s attempt to work through the sexual abuse that they themself experienced at the hands of their grandfather growing up. Because of …
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Book #224 of 2019: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah Given that comedian Trevor Noah has risen to international prominence as Jon Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show, I was expecting this memoir to be a typical rags-to-riches narrative (or at least something like Bossypants where a struggling artist …
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Book #222 of 2017: Night by Elie Wiesel It’s hard to find the words to describe Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. No matter what you know about the horrors of the Holocaust — and as a Jew born in the late twentieth-century, those horrors formed part of my earliest …
Book #218 of 2017: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt This memoir about growing up dirt-poor (first in Brooklyn, then in Ireland) is tremendously funny and moving in equal measures. I didn’t always care for author Frank McCourt’s conceit of writing from the supposed perspective of his childhood self – largely because there are a lot …
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Book #210 of 2017: What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton This book represents a deeply personal reflection from Hillary Clinton on her loss in the 2016 presidential election. She knows full well that many people are tired of relitigating the campaign, and that some would even like her to disappear from public life forever, but …
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