This is a book about the true story of a psychiatrist who helps a woman with severe anxiety problems via past-life therapy but the book is so much more than that. If you have ever lost someone, it is a must read, it changed my outlook on life and death dramatically. It is one of …
In Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, Immaculee Ilibagiza recounts her survival of the Rwandan Genocide in a bathroom with seven other women for 91 days. Through all the hardships she experienced, Ilibagiza was able to do what rarely anyone can: forgive. Throughout the book, we see Ilibagiza’s spiritual journey in order …
I’m just finishing Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. For years now I‘ve been aware that I missed reading this book in it’s feminist heyday and so finally came to it as a way of revisiting a period I lived through as a student some fifty years ago; it does feel like a historical …
I have been reading Life, the autobiography of Keith Richards, the leader of the Rolling Stones. On the cover Keith says: “This is the life. Believe it or not I haven’t forgotten any of it.” I have enjoyed this book for two reasons. On the one hand, it speaks to me very personally: Keith and …
I’m reading book 19 of a series of 24 . The book title is Wisconsin!. It is the Wagon’s West Series by Dana Fuller Ross from 1987. It is fiction. The book is about how people struggled leaving the east and going by wagon train to the west and setting up there to start new …
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life by Anne Lamott is a wonderful book that enveloped me quickly in Lamott’s comforting, yet realistic, advice, and sharp, unassuming tone. As the title suggests, Lamott shares a lot of shrewd opinions about the writing process and both heart-wrenching and humorous experiences she’s had as a …
The Monster of Florence: A True Story by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi has to be one of the most riveting books I have ever read. Douglas Preston is a successful crime novel writer, but this book is a very real account of Preston’s first hand experiences while researching a string of unsolved murder stretching …
I love history because people have already done most things that you can imagine. This book looks at pivotal events in Spain in 1492 including the rise of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and their attempt to consolidate power, and their use of the Inquisition and the persecution of Jews by the Roman Catholic Church …
Continue reading “Dighton Spooner, Associate Director, Career Planning”
I find myself drawn to examinations of the outer limits of consumer practices: trafficking in kidneys and other organs, adoption agencies that work as sales agents, mail order marriages. This chilling novel tells of one such “arrangement,” that of Ralph Truitt and his mail-order bride, Catherine Land. Truitt is, on the surface, a staid, turn-of-the-century …
Over the winter break, on a road trip that took me and my wife from the southern tip of Florida to Chicago, I read Saul Bellow’s recently published letters. They were perfect for digesting in bite-sizes on planes, in hotel lobbies, at highway rest stops, and even at breakfast when there were (rare) lulls in …