Norma Kurap Herr was a talented musician when she started hearing voices at age 19. She struggled with schizophrenia for the rest of her life, and was in and out of psychiatric wards and often homeless before she died at age 80. In this new memoir Mira Bartok, one of Herr’s two daughters, describes in heartbreaking detail her mother’s descent into chaos and its effect on the … [Read more...]
‘Unbroken’ tells riveting tale of airman’s survival
For weeks, Unbroken has been perched at or near the top of the nonfiction best-seller list, and for good reason. The book tells the riveting story of a World War II airman who survived for 47 days in 1943 on a raft in the Pacific Ocean before Japanese soldiers captured him and held him in brutal conditions for the rest of the war. The airman, Louis Zamperini, was a … [Read more...]
‘Journal Keeper’ a compelling meditation on life, love and death
Phyllis Theroux offers readers a gift by letting us peek into the journals she kept during six years of her life beginning at age 61. The Journal Keeper excels on several levels – for the pure enjoyment of Theroux’s evocative writing, as a tribute to the art of journal writing, and as a meditation on life, love and death. Aspiring writers would do well to study Theroux. Her … [Read more...]
Account of nun’s death while fleeing Tibet proves riveting
Each year thousands of Tibetans attempt to flee their homeland by embarking on a perilous journey over snow-covered mountains. Some die along the way, and others are captured, jailed and tortured by Chinese soldiers. Most often their plight receives little international attention. But the case of Kelsang Namtso, a 17-year-old nun, was different because mountain climbers … [Read more...]
Soldiers of ‘Untold War’ bear awful moral burden alone
Most civilians are unaware of the physical and psychic horrors endured by soldiers, according to this timely new book by Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University. Sherman says up front that The Untold War “is not a political tract for or against a war.” Rather, it is about “the inner battles … the moral weight of war that individual soldiers carry on their shoulders … [Read more...]
Harrowing tale of life behind bars remarkably even-handed
Wilbert Rideau was 19 when he impulsively decided to rob a bank in Lake Charles, La., so he could flee to a new life on the West Coast. The botched 1961 robbery ended with Rideau taking three hostages. In the ensuing chaos he fatally shot and stabbed a female bank teller. Rideau was black and the victim was white, and a seething mob nearly lynched him. He was quickly convicted … [Read more...]
‘Savor’ offers useful perspective for weight control
Few people have done more to promote the spread of Buddhism in the West than Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk from Vietnam who lives in France and conducts well-attended retreats around the world. Nhat Hanh has written more than 100 books, most of them revolving around the theme of living mindfully in the moment. Now he has joined with co-author Lilian Cheung, a lecturer at the … [Read more...]
Tale of cell line’s ‘mother’ astonishes
Before the publication of this book, few people other than scientists had ever heard of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who died of cancer in 1951. Lacks was a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore when doctors, without her knowledge or consent, sliced cancerous tissue from her cervix for research purposes. To the astonishment of scientists, the cancer cells began … [Read more...]
Grief memoir moving, but oddly unhelpful
Kay Redfield Jamison has often written and spoken eloquently about her lifelong struggle with manic depression, otherwise known as bipolar illness. In her new book, Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, she writes with the same honesty and passion about coping with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, from cancer. Both were well-known psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins University … [Read more...]
‘Good Without God’ a well-written case for ethical non-belief
Books by atheist authors have flooded the market in recent years, and some, such as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, exhibit a stridently anti-religious tone. Now comes a more nuanced and balanced book written by Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Good Without God critiques religious belief in a respectful … [Read more...]