To Sandy, From Henry: A Christmas Story About his paintings, Norman Rockwell said, “The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.” I grew up in Norman Rockwell’s small town America, where celebrating Christmas was wonderful and beautiful. This is aContinue reading “Merry Christmas”
Tag Archives: family
Book Review: The Liars’ Club
Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club set a new standard for memoirs when it came out in 1995. In it, Karr tells the story of her well-educated, artistic, alcoholic mother and the uneducated, hard-drinking, doing-the-best-he-can dad her mother married as they struggled with life in east Texas and Colorado. It isn’t a story of a financial struggle;Continue reading “Book Review: The Liars’ Club”
Book Review: The Glass Castle
In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls tells of her unorthodox upbringing by her artist mother and inventor father, during which she and her siblings—older sister Lori, younger brother Brian, and younger sister Maureen—survived frequent moves across the country, inconsistent access to school, and long periods of poverty so severe the children had nothing to eatContinue reading “Book Review: The Glass Castle”
Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns
During years of occupation by the Soviet Union and inter-tribal warfare in Afghanistan, two Afghan women of different generations and regions and very different socioeconomic situations find marriage to the same older man the immediate solution to stay alive when each loses her parents. But marriage brings its own problems, including brutal beatings by theContinue reading “Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns”
Book Review: The Accidental Truth
Lauri Taylor’s story of discovering her mother’s secrets and the secrets surrounding her death is masterfully told. Taylor unveils the distress of her mother’s disappearance and then the discovery that her body has been found in Mexico, bringing the reader with her for the suspenseful ride. The death is ruled suspicious, then a murder. Each step inContinue reading “Book Review: The Accidental Truth”
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