I’ve been reading Norman Ollestad’s memoir Crazy for the Storm, which Starbucks has chosen for its latest featured book. As a preteen in 1979, Ollestad survived a small-plane crash that killed his beloved father, an adventurous child star-turned-lawyer who had taught the author to surf and ski when the younger Ollestad was barely old enough [...]
Thailand’s last prison executioner, Chavoret Jaruboon, fired eight bullets into a rapist and murderer in 2002. It was his fifty-fifth execution, and the last of its kind. (Executions in Thailand are now done by lethal injection.) He tells all in The Last Executioner, a memoir written in English with coauthor Nicola Price. “Those who had nothing to lose – those whose [...]
Yet another leading light of the music scene is penning a memoir. Bob Mould, now 48, was the frontman for that well-loved ’80s speedcore/punk band, Hüsker Dü. He’s working on a book with the help of rock writer Michael Azerrad, according to Prefix magazine. Due in fall 2010 from Little, Brown, the book “will cover his work [...]
Defying all apparent indicators of dorkdom — the author is a middle-aged professor; the book’s title is “A Love Affair with the Sea” — this memoir by a British marine biologist recounting his research and adventures around the world is limned with joltingly gorgeous writing and hilarious observations that will leave you flopping and panting [...]
A disgruntled lawyer in the waning years of California’s dot-com boom, Walton discovered eBay. An old army buddy taught him how to buy cheap art at thrift shops and sell it on the site for thousands. Greed got the better of both men as they began forging famous artists’ signatures’ onto paintings — when one [...]
She only ever saw her parents kiss once, and that was just a “chaste peck on the cheek.” In this engaging cartoon-as-memoir, Lambda Award-winning comics artist Bechdel searches through layers of incident and artifact for the truth about her father, a style-conscious, aesthetically inclined funeral-home director (hence the book’s title) and English teacher who was [...]
To truly “get” this book, it helps to be a poker lover. Or, failing that, to have played a fair amount of poker. Or, failing that, to at least have played some sort of card game, sometime, and to know the rules — because this account by a journalist and all-around regular guy of his [...]
What is it about food-memoirs that makes their authors choose ick-inducing titles? From Anthony Bourdain’s Bone in the Throat to Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires (which makes me think of sharp shattered gems stir-fried into food, like those times I’ve found tiny stones in tostadas) — this fourth book by the Bust columnist starts with [...]