Stepping in the Write Direction

Melania and Me by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff reads like a study of all the intrigue and machinations seething below the surface of a venomous blended family Thanksgiving dinner that goes on for years. Normally books written by seemingly disgruntled employees have credibility issues, but this book is one of the most believable behind the scenes depictions of the nest of vipers that West and East wing factions devolve into. The author comes across as gifted in organization, details, and intelligence, all assets in recounting such a multilayered, complex tale. Her book is a flashlight beam that sweeps across the darkest recesses of egotistic and antipathic manipulations of political, professional, and family cabals, tearing at each other like hyenas over a fresh kill. It could be retitled, How a Would Be Sacrificial Lamb Escapes the Grill and Survives to Tell about It. The lecturing self righteous rants (though therapeutic, cathartic, and well earned) scattered throughout, diminish the pow...

Educated, A Memoir by Tara Westover is a stunning, breathtakingly powerful book. It is a recounting of her childhood as the youngest of seven children in a survivalist, fundamentalist mostly off the grid family ruled by the worst kind of patriarchy, one encompassing mental illness, paranoia, delusional religious pathology, and authoritarian tyranny focused with laser like intensity on targeting and controlling the most vulnerable. It’s about the human instinct for survival, the internal fortitude required to reject the fictions jackhammered into developing minds from birth, and the resiliency to thrive in the absence of a lifetime’s imposed structures of autocratic control, an authority often co-opting other family members into reinforcement. Family members live in a concentration camp without locks and keys, trapped by repeated humiliation, threats, deprivation of educational and medical resources, emotional and physical abuse, degradation, and shunning. It is proof that truth can be...

In her book Memorial Drive, A Daughter’s Memoir (7/28/20), Pulitzer Prize winning (poetry), two term Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey describes events in her life that occurred up to the age of 19, giving wings to the past.   The wounds and injustices are carried inside for years, ghosts resurrected in haunting dreams, a wound that never heals. This book is a coming to terms with childhood demons, demonstrating how a single act of brutality in a family can overlie a thousand smaller deaths suffered by the vulnerable, held hostage for years by a tyrant who rules behind the facade of neatly closed doors.  A chance encounter in a Decatur bar becomes a key to unlocking details, providing structure and context to her memories, and an opportunity for healing. The pattern of domestic violence is unconscionably further enabled by those confided in, who signal disengagement with, “sometimes adults get angry with each other.” The narrative is so well expressed, but the chapter of phone t...

The book Notorious RBG, The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik is an engaging overview of RBG’s life, marriage, education, legal career, and days on the Supreme Court. If you don’t have time for the 24 hour audiobook, this 5 hour one will give an interesting, balanced outline of the life experiences shaping her advocacy, insights into a number of her precedent setting cases, and who she was as a judge, woman, wife, mother, and friend. I wondered if male judges would have been equally pressured to retire from the Supreme Court, insuring a like minded replacement; at the very least, it would have cost her a minimum of four years of service. She fought so hard just to have a legal career, and serving the underserved with masterfully crafted precedent setting opinions was her passion and her purpose; it feels unseemly to even have asked her to cut her life’s work short by even one year, let alone several. The greatest judges have earned that fullness of...

I had to read the memoir Flat Broke with Two Goats by Jennifer McGaha when I learned it takes place in a rustic century old three level cabin with a 150’ waterfall in plain view from the front door, adjacent to North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest. The title alone compelled me. It’s a true story spun around the expression, “Life is what happens when you have other plans,” not unlike the couple in movie “Funny Farm” who leave their big city jobs in search of a more authentic life in rural America. Growing up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, I have spent many years driving through North Carolina, decades reading Blue Ridge Country Magazine, and hiking mountain trails, so I had to hear this tale. I thoroughly enjoyed these stories about her life after an involuntary eviction from the high life, leaving her family to “reboot” their lives in a neglected but affordable cabin surrounded by 50+ acres, complete with wolf spiders, snakes, and possums (some of them uninvited hou...

The book When Breath Becomes Air (1/12/16), by Stanford Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, remInds me of The Last Lecture (4/8/2008) by Randy Pausch. These memoirs are lessons on living while powering through the most devastating medical obstacles life offers. They share profound insights on living fully in the face of death, by virtue of their authors’ words and actions, as they and their families embark upon an unexpected medical odyssey manifesting the essence of human endurance and inner strength. I fell in love with author Paul Kalanithi early on in the book because of his passion for literature. He received a Bachelor and Master of Arts in English Literature, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology from Stanford University, later completing a Master of Arts in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Darwin College (University of Cambridge). By the time he’d completed his Masters, the calling to Medicine emerged the stronger passion, and Paul subsequently receiv...

I can honestly say by the time I got to the end of the audiobook Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, I felt like I was finding freedom. By 1.5 hours into the audiobook, it was apparent the book is a PR puff piece, bordering on obsequious, as though one were writing an autobiography and making oneself appear perfect in every possible way, ie “While in Africa he did a little secret diamond scouting with a close friend who helped him to source the perfect conflict free stone.” Two hours in, the book feels like a PR puff piece that is a complete rehash of every news story of all aspects of their relationship and life, already amply covered and published in every media platform, without any new information or insights. It’s actually kind of boring, but perhaps amping the playback speed to 1.75x would help (nah, sounds too much like narration by a member of the lollipop guild). Annoying words appearing throughout the book: giggling, perfect, cheeky, ado...