Our dogs come into our lives as “just the family pet,” but before we know it they become drinking buddies and fuzzy shrinks, playmates and Cheerios-munching vacuum cleaners, alarm clocks and sleeping partners. And, in their mysterious and muttish ways, our dogs become our teachers.
When Dana Jennings and his son were both seriously ill—Dana with prostate cancer and his son with liver failure—their twelve-year-old miniature poodle Bijou became even more than a pet and teacher. She became a healing presence in their lives. After all, when you’re recovering from radical surgery and your life is uncertain, there’s no better medicine than a twenty-three-pound pooch who lives by the motto that it’s always best to play,
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Lies My Mother Never Told Me is the mesmerizing and luminously told story of Kaylie’s battle with alcoholism and her struggle to flourish despite the looming shadow of a famous father and an emotionally abusive and damaged mother. Deeply intimate, brutally honest, yet limned by humor and grace, it is a beautifully written tale of personal evolution, family secrets, second chances, and one determined woman’s journey to find her own voice—and the courage to embrace a life filled with possibility, strength, and love.
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One day Ackerman’s husband, Paul West, an exceptionally gifted wordsmith and intellectual, suffered a terrible stroke. When he regained awareness he was afflicted with aphasia—loss of language—and could utter only a single syllable: “mem.” The standard therapies yielded little result but frustration. Diane soon found, however, that by harnessing their deep knowledge of each other and her scientific understanding of language and the brain she could guide Paul back to the world of words. This triumphant book is both a humane and revealing addition to the medical literature on stroke and aphasia and an exquisitely written love story: a magnificent addition to literature,
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After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed—or killing someone else. He signed on as a boxer.
Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn’t have been more stark—or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father.
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A memoir sharing a lifetime’s worth of lessons from a generation female cooks.
Somewhere between the lessons her mother taught her and the ones she is now trying to teach her own daughter, Kim Severson stumbled. She lost sight of what mattered, of who she was and who she wanted to be, and of how she needed to live her life. It took a series of encounters with female cooks-including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan-to reteach her the life lessons she had forgotten, and many she had never learned in the first place.
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When Paula Butturini’s husband was shot and nearly killed, it marked the abrupt end of what the couple had known together and the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned for.
A story of food and love, trauma and healing, Keeping the Feast is the triumphant memoir of one couple’s nourishment and restoration after a period of tragedy, and the extraordinary sustaining powers of food, family, and friendship.
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