Emily Hahn’s China to Me: A Partial Biography is precisely the type of memoir I had hoped to write 40 years later about my own life. Like Hahn, I set out to live and work in a foreign country. Hahn chose China in the middle of turbulent times when Japan was asserting control over muchContinue reading “Book Review: China to Me: A Partial Biography”
Tag Archives: memoir
Book Review: Reach for Joy
In Reach for Joy, Tessy Reyes (a pseudonym) tells of her 30-year marriage to an independent survivalist who controlled her and her children until she succeeded at getting away from him. During that time, she bore ten children, nine of whom survived. Her memoir opens with the memory of the child who didn’t survive, aContinue reading “Book Review: Reach for Joy”
IWSG-July
Once again, the first Wednesday of the Month has arrived, the date on which many of us bloggers write about our hopes and fears in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, founded by Alex J. Cavanaugh. Please visit either site for more info and a list of participating bloggers, to join, or offer encouragement. For theContinue reading “IWSG-July”
Book Review: Leaving Before the Rains Come
“‘The problem with most people,’ Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, ‘is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.’” Alexandra Fuller learned from her parents how to live. She has lived enoughContinue reading “Book Review: Leaving Before the Rains Come”
Book Review: The Man-eaters of Tsavo
The Man-eaters of Tsavo by Lt. Colonel J.H. Patterson, first published in 1907, steps the reader back in history to the 19th-to-20th turn of the century to an area at a time when place names reflected the non-Africans who arrived and set out to tame the continent. The initial chapters of the book tell ofContinue reading “Book Review: The Man-eaters of Tsavo”
Insecure Writer’s Support Group–My First Post
It’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group Wednesday. I signed up last week when I learned of the group and its requirement to post each first Wednesday of the month. So here’s my challenge for the week. I know I have to prepare a synopsis of my memoir. I know I should prepare an outline. I know theseContinue reading “Insecure Writer’s Support Group–My First Post”
Book Review: Scribbling the Cat
“The windows of the pickup were rolled down because we, in common with everyone else in this part of the world, were jealous of every drop of fuel we spent. And, under these circumstances, air-conditioning (like the exorcism of war memories and the act of writing about it) was an unpardonable self-indulgence. K had goneContinue reading “Book Review: Scribbling the Cat”
Book Review: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir covers her childhood in Africa, including stints at boarding schools far from her parents, ending with her marriage to an American who brought her out of Africa and into another land. Her parents were grounded in Africa, her mother by birth and her father by experience. Yet after the death of theirContinue reading “Book Review: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”
Book Review: Farewell to Manzanar
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston revisits the three years she and her family spent in Manzanar, one of ten internment camps run by the US War Department for relocated persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Her father had been taken away earlier, arrested for presumably supplying fuel to Japanese submarines from his fishing boat offContinue reading “Book Review: Farewell to Manzanar”
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