Amanda's Picks
For many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn't take much--just hearing of someone else's accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work--to make us feel that we are not okay.
How do you cope when facing life-threatening illness, family conflict, faltering relationships, old trauma, obsessive thinking, overwhelming emotion, or inevitable loss? If you re like most people, chances are you react with fear and confusion, falling back on timeworn strategies: anger, self-judgment, and addictive behaviors.
In What My Mother Gave Me, women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter's story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life.
In this richly imagined, utterly original debut a mother- daughter road trip leads a young girl--a precocious Civil War buff--to a hard-won understanding of the American history she loves and the personal history she inherits.
Eleven-year-old Katherine McConnell is so immersed in Civil War history that she often imagines herself a general, leading troops to battle.
The beloved teacher and author of the million-and-a-half copy bestseller Writing Down the Bones reveals new breakthrough writing guidance as she recounts profound lessons she has learned from a lifetime of teaching and practice.
For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders' Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.
Farms have fences. People have boundaries. Mine began crumbling the day I knelt behind a male sheep, reached between his legs, and squeezed his testicles. This took place one blustery November day when I joined other shepherd-wannabees for a class on the basics of raising sheep. I was there with my partner Melissa, the woman I'd lived with for twelve years, because we were going to start a farm .
The stunning follow-up volume to her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard, by America's new Poet Laureate
Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South -- where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.
Like the Puritan-era narratives she studies, Hannah Guttentag's early-1990s narrative is a chronicle of the strange places she travels--Nashville, Ithaca, New Orleans, Cleveland, Nebraska--the savages who captivate her--librarians, grad students, professors, her baby--and the redemption she earns.
This personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy from award winner Rebecca Solnit is a fitting companion to her beloved A Field Guide for Getting Lost
In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline.
