Burn the Place: A Memoir, by Iliana Regan. Midway Books, 2019Iliana Regan is the owner of the Michelin Star restaurant “Elizabeth”, named for her sister who died in a jail holding cell. She was exposed to food a lot as a child- they lived on a farm and grew, foraged, baked, and preserved most of their food, but until the point her mother rebelled ( Read more... )

Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs, by Bill Cunningham. Penguin Press, 2018
Born during the Depression to an Irish-American family with conservative values, Bill Cunningham’s penchant for fancy clothes and beautiful décor was discouraged- discouraged to the point of receiving a brutal beating when his mother caught four year old Bill ( Read more... )

Little Panic, by Amanda Stern. Grand Central Publishing, 2018
At 25, Amanda Stern was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. This, after going through stress hell growing up, being wrongly diagnosed with a learning disorder, worrying that her mother would die if she didn’t keep an eye on her, and worrying that the world would fall apart at any second ( Read more... )

Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter’s Life, by Malcolm W. Browne. Times Books, 1993Malcolm Wilde Browne (Wilde because his grandmother was Oscar Wilde’s cousin) was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered wars all over, starting in Korea, and thence to Viet Nam (for which he won said Pulitzer), and then to the Middle East. War wasn’t all ( Read more... )

Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, by John Perry Barlow, with Robert Greenfield. Crown Archetype, 2018
The recently deceased author had a really colorful life. He seems to have known everyone and done everything. Born to a cattle ranching family that was powerful in Wyoming politics, he went to school with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead ( Read more... )

Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality, by Sarah McBride. Crown Archetype, 2018

Sarah McBride is the woman who was the first trans person to speak at a national political convention in 2016. She was only 26 at the time, but had lived a life packed with more events than many people get in a long life time ( Read more... )

Another Little Piece of My Heart, by Richard Goldstein. Bloomsbury 2015 In 1966, twenty-two year old Goldstein walked into the Village Voice and invented the job he wanted: rock critic. During his time doing this, he had some amazing adventures and met a lot of the great rock innovators. He became friends with Janis Joplin, was a passenger in a car ( Read more... )

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, by Margaret Drabble. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009 Margaret Drabble gives us the history of jigsaw puzzles in a meandering manner with lots of detours along the way. In her research (which was extensive) she found that jigsaw puzzles started out as educational toys- maps cut into ( Read more... )

Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders, by Cole Cohen. Henry Holt, 2015
“Head Case” is the memoir of a young woman who had difficulties from birth, but no doctor could diagnose her. Was her problem psychological or neurological? Could medications help her? Would this or that new therapist be able to get her to talk and discover a buried problem? ( Read more... )

Grace: A Memoir, by Grace Coddington. Random House, 2012
Grace Coddington was a fashion model in the 1960s, appearing in Vogue and other magazines. When she was 28, she moved to the behind the scenes side of fashion magazines and became a junior editor at British Vogue, later moving to photo editor. After a brief stint with Calvin Klein, she ( Read more... )