Where is your nonfiction section please.
It's been a dark few weeks in the world, hasn't it? Everything still feels surreal, and the news brings fresh horrors every day. I try to keep this blog solely book-related, but of course the world doesn't compartmentalize so neatly. It feels worthwhile right now to point people towards some books that can help to... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Ravine, by Wendy Lower & Those Who Forget, by Geraldine Schwarz In her new book The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, Wendy Lower, a historian with extensive work around the Holocaust, is put onto an intriguing research journey: Lower encountered an extremely rare photograph depicting the murder of... Continue Reading →
Is it cold where you are? Egads, it's freezing in New York City right now. A good excuse to round up some of my long-overdue reviews of books I'd love to share but haven't managed to writing reviews for. That's been a pattern the last year plus. And when is the best time to read... Continue Reading →
There are few things I love more than a good memoir of Russia. Recently I've read two, both around emigration to the US and the lingering ties to family and country that remain. The park looked well kept, even cheerful, as darkness settled over the tress. Here, history inundated every square centimeter of ground --... Continue Reading →
Book review: Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) These pictures, these lights. My riches. The treasure of what I lived through... Last Witnesses is the latest work from incomparable Belarusian journalist and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich to be translated from Russian to English. In the vein of her other books, this oral... Continue Reading →
Book review: In Wartime, by Tim Judah (Amazon / SecondSale.com) As we came closer to the coast, birds skimmed and whirled. The coastline is always changing here. Sediment and sand constantly form new low islands and sandbanks. Finally, we came to where this branch of the river flows out to the sea. A monument has... Continue Reading →
Book review: Savage Feast, by Boris Fishman (Amazon / Book Depository) Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency—and it was how you showed love. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what... Continue Reading →
Book review: Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham (Amazon / Book Depository) Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives. So begins Adam Higginbotham's exhaustive account of the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster, recounting a blow-by-blow of the unfolding incident and the monumental effects of the aftermath, amidst the context of... Continue Reading →
Book review: Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) Sometimes it’s as though I hear his voice. Alive. Even photographs don’t have the same effect on me as that voice. But he never calls out to me . . . not even in my dreams. I’m the one who calls to him.... Continue Reading →
Book review: My Dead Parents, by Anya Yurchyshyn (Amazon / Book Depository) As the title indicates, this memoir is a bluntly told examination of the lives of the author's dead parents, focused around her trying to understand them through the lens of discovered materials and interviews. Sentimentality and emotion figure in, but author Anya Yurchyshyn... Continue Reading →
Book review: Dancing Bears: True Stories About Longing for the Old Days, by Witold Szabłowski Amazon / Book Depository Another version of this book, newly published in its first English translation, has the subtitle "True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny". That sums up perfectly what it's about - stories about how and seemingly... Continue Reading →
Book review: Almost Home by Filipp Velgach (Amazon / Book Depository) Almost Home is the memoir of Filipp Velgach, an American of Ukrainian heritage. He was recruited to translate in the Ukraine for a group of documentary filmmakers in 2013, at the time of major unrest and protests revolving around then-president Yanukovych and Ukraine's relationship... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 