“By the Iowa Sea”
“By the Iowa Sea” is a memoir by Joe Blair, a middle-aged Massachusetts-born motorcycle-lovin’ adventurer who examines how he became so profoundly unhappy with his life, his marriage, and with himself. In the summer of 1989, 25-year old Blair is trying to figure out what to do with his life when he decides to leave his hometown (Boston) and take a cross country trip on his motorcycle. With $1,500 in his pocket he spends two months exploring the US and decides he will always travel, never cave in to convention, or settle down. Read more 
“Wild”
Cheryl Strayed, author of “Wild” is a 43-year old writer, wife, and mother who lives in Portland, Oregon. When Strayed was 22 years old, she lost her 45-year old mother to lung cancer and spent the next four years alternating between trying to preserve her family and her marriage, both of which disintegrated by the time she was 26 years old. Recognizing the need for a change, Strayed (the name she chose for herself after her divorce) set out to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), a 2,663 mile trail that lies east of the Pacific coast from California to Washington, and then write about the experience. Read more
“Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage”
One hundred years ago today – April 10, 1912 – the Titanic left Southampton, England on its maiden voyage stopping at Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland before continuing across the Atlantic Ocean towards New York. Four days later on April 14, 1912 at nearly midnight, while maneuvering through the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, the Titanic hit a massive iceberg causing enough damage for the ship to sink 2 hours and 40 minutes later on the morning of April 15, 1912. Read more
“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”
Jeanette Winterson is a British born writer who wrote the best-selling and award-winning book “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” which is a contemporary story of a woman coming to terms with her sexuality.”Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” is not a sequel but a complementary book that reveals the author’s attempt to come to terms with her childhood and adult life. Read more
“F in Exams”
My daughter was in a French school from 1st – 4th grade and a bilingual French/English school from 5th – 8th grade which used an International Baccalaureate grading system of 1-7, where 1 is the lowest score, 4 is passing, and 7 is a perfect score. When she came back to the US to attend a high school school where the primary language was English, she had to abandon the metric system of measurements, adjust to the language, and adopt a letter grading system which led to this conversation: Read more
“Immortal Bird”
“Immortal Bird – A Family Memoir” by Doron Weber is the story of Weber’s firstborn son, Damon, who was born without a second ventricle on the right side of his heart which means there was no passageway to pump oxygen rich blood back into his lungs. A blue baby whose organs and tissues could not get enough oxygen, Damon underwent two open heart surgeries, the later called a “Fontan” which alleviated his problem by bypassing his right side altogether and pumping oxygen rich blood directly to his lungs. Read more
Jeffrey Zaslow on Daughters
A few months ago, I bought tickets for my daughter and I to attend an author forum featuring Jeffrey Zaslow, who I knew of from his column in the Wall Street Journal and as co-author of “The Last Lecture:” a life lesson story of a Carnegie Mellon professor named Randy Pausch who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and wanted to leave a lasting message to his young children. Read more
“Lords Of Finance”
In 2010, “The Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed, a professional investment manager was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History. A non-fiction account of “the bankers that broke the world,” this 505 page book takes a complicated topic – macro and microeconomics – and makes it easily understandable. Read more
“In The Garden of Beasts”
Berlin has always captivated me because it was the first European city where I could see and feel the remnants from World War II and the Cold War. The capital city isn’t known for its climate, especially in the winter when the weather can be harsh, the sky grey, and the days short but the weather is all but forgotten when walking through the streets because Berlin is really a dichotomy thanks to a series of events: World War II and the 28-year existence of the Berlin Wall which was torn down to the cheers of crowds in 1989. Read more
Remembering Marjorie Williams
Seven years ago, the world lost a great writer named Marjorie Williams who died at age 47 from liver cancer leaving behind a husband and two young children, ages 11 and 8. At the time of her death, Williams was an op-ed columnist with the Washington Post and a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair where she primarily wrote political profiles – not your typical rose smelling or hatchet job profiles but portraits that zeroed in on the character beyond what the image machine created. Somehow Williams managed to figure out what was at the core of a being – what drove him or her – and deftly tied in all the minutiae in their universe to show the reader who the person really was in an entertaining but truthful way. Read more
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