Too Close to the Falls  Author: Catherine Gildine

Don't know how I missed this memoir....published in 2002 and I am just reading it now 

It's a great story about a girl growing up near Niagara Falls in the 50's.  She gets herself into quite a few messes when she's younger, but what a good storyteller!  Only halfway through, but I know it's going to be one of those books that I hate to finish because I probably won't find anything as good to read for awhile.

And just read another really good one Waltz With Me Alaska  Author: Donna Blasor-Bernhardt

Great writing, and had me in tears at the ending - a real shocker, but excellent writing

Time to bring this thread back to life....since I just finished a couple of excellent memoirs.  One was an older book (1999) but it was hard not to make some comparsions to what is happening now with covid.  Completely different disease, but some of the hospital experiences brought covid to mind.  Anyhow, it was a well written book that I didn't want to put down.  Some heartbreaking stories, but also many uplifting stories.  The Least of These My Brethren A Doctor's Story of Hope and Miracles on an InnerCity AIDS Ward  Author: Daniel Baxter. 

It's a story that will stay with you for a long time, as will the next one I read, which  was Mrs Kennedy and Me  Author: Clint Hill, Lisa McCubbin.  It was written by the Secret Service agent who was assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy during her years in the White House.  I learned a lot about Predsident Kennedy's time in the White House, written in a very engaging (and heartbreaking) manner.

I highly recommend these two excellent books!

Sherry, about a year or more ago, Mike Rowe posted about meeting Clint Hill, and he talked about his books and other things.  He highly recommended them.  I liked Mrs. Kennedy and one other in particular (Five Presidents?), but one other was a rehash of a lot of stuff (Five Days in Nov?).  Funny, what stuck out the most was how very little SS men got paid in those days, and that they had to pay their own motel bills when on assignment!

Glad to see postings here.

I haven't been on PBS for a while but felt I had to comment on the book I just finished.  I posted this in the Biographies thread but thought it would be good to add it here as well.  I think this autobiography is the best thing I have read in at least 5 years and that is why I wanted to post this.

Becoming Superman: A Writer's Journey from Poverty to Hollywood with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes  by J. Michael Straczynski.

I knew of JMS as the creator of the sci-fi series Babylon 5 so I had decided to read it when it came out in 2019 but only got to it this year.  I haven't read a lot of biographies on a regular basis but have tried a few this year.  The title was a bit over the top so I wondered if he was being sarcastic but was I wrong.  We all have heard and read stories of people who had horrific childhoods and this one fits the bill.  The amazing thing to me is how he survived and didn't become a monster like his father, his love of Superman was one thing that kept him going.  It was hard to read at first but I kept on going because I knew he had to have made it out ok with B5 as a reference point.  This book chronicles all the projects he was involved in and it literally blew me away that so many tv shows, cartoons, graphic novels, movies and series on cable he has written.  I watched Thor again so I could see his cameo in it, I realize now that it was the writing of the script of that show which made me like it so much.

The other thread through this book is how to become a writer, he shows how he did it and if he could succeed then others will be able to as well.  There were so many twists and turns in his career, chance meetings with other writers and how their lives intersected at numerous times.  If you have watched any of these shows or comics then you have come across his writing:

Sense 8, Jeremiah, World War Z, Changeling, Murder She Wrote, Jake and the Fatman, The Real Ghostbusters, Twilight Zone 86-89, She-Ra and He-Man,  The Amazing Spiderman, Thor and many others.

I know this is rather long but it was such a revelation of how many ways he used his talent to write, his tenacity to do the one thing he always wanted to do and be the exact opposite of what his father was.  It is not always an easy read but it is so worth your time. 

Rather long is quite acceptable.  Quite a fine review, Karen.  Thank you.  I will look for this book.

Thanks Bonnie, hope you do read it.  I am buying copies for other friends to read.  Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.

It's been awhile since anyone posted here...but I just read a really good memoir so thought I'd share here.  

Secret Girl  Author: Molly Bruce Jacobs

It's been on my TBR for awhile, and I'm so glad I finally read it - great book!

Karen and Sherry, thanks for your recent posts.  I have not read much the last few years.  I think life has just had me too exhausted to read.  But, I've picked back up in the last two or three months with a vengance, so good to see some interesting recomendations.  I did recently listen to an audio book that was a memoir, and it was really interesting.  Can I recall the author or title at the moment? no.  So, I'll have to come back with it.  But, thanks for getting my brain started!

This is the review I just posted for The Long Haul.  I will post it here because I don't really want to decribe the book and my thoughts again.

The Long Haul by Finn Murphy

I love memoirs, but am pretty sick of the battered child the abusing, drug-addicted, alcoholic, father, mother, mother's boyfriend.  The bullying.  This book is a breath of fresh air, funny as heck, and informative.  Whodathunkit?  A memoir written by a mover, a long haul trucker.  What's to tell?

Oh, a lot.  Did you know that there is a heirarchy in the trucking world and that movers are so far at the bottom that they will seldom sit at the counters of truck stops and that even waitresses treat them as something the cat dragged in?  This is a tale of movers, the customer's, and how they try to rip off the company with damage claims, that usually the driver must make good on, even false claims.  A story of packers and how they do it best, how they make the most money per round trip, the competition.  Sooo interesting.

Another little treat in reading this is that a bit of a way in when I was already hooked, Murphy tells about his friendship with the owner of Joyce Movers out of Oxford, CT, and how he came to be affiliated with him.  Joyce was twice our movers and we loved them!  Everything Mr Murphy says about how careful they are with the house, the belongings, their writing up the condition of pieces is true.  I've seen it twice and watched them sticker every item we owned down to an individual shovel, a basket, a garbage pail, and just yesterday pulled a 10 year old sticker off of the back of a bookcase I moved across the room.  Sadly, movers have the most complaints and worst reviews of most any other company that works with the public.  Unfair, in my experience.
I highly recommend this book.

Nice review Bonnie....now another book goes on my wishlist 

Nice review Bonnie....now another book goes on my wishlist 

Haven't read any memoirs yet this month....very unusal for me!  I did find a free kindle book this morning that was on my wishlist.

Free today only

Two Floors Above Grief: A Memoir of Two Families in the Unique Place We Called Home 

Thanks, Sherry.  Just picked it up.

I haven't read any memoirs this month either.

Just finished a great memoir - I highly recommend it!

In Pursuit of Disobedient Women A Memoir of Love Rebellion and Family Far Away  Author: Dionne Searcey

When a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world.
 
“A story you will not soon forget.”—Kathryn Bigelow, Academy Award–winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty

In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front.
 
In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram–conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent.
 
Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Readers will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.

Sherry, thanks for such a thoughtful review!

I enjoyed these last two reviews.

Thanks Bonnie and Sherry.