Every day for one year, Nina Sankovitch read an entire book and posted a review on her website -- all while raising four boys. As a mother of just two children, a mother who struggled to find time to read this one book, I was curious to know how Sankovitch did it. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading tells her story.
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But the best food stories, as writers like M.F.K. Fisher proved decades ago, aren't just about food. Instead, they tell us something about ourselves and the world we live in. They show us how food is connected to life and how our lives are enriched (or sometimes diminished) by what we cook and bring to the table. In this sense, a great food story does the same as a great novel: it teaches us what it means to be human.
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Cooley's personal experience informs Milk Dress: her pregnancy, the birth of her first child, her experience of the World Trade Center attacks and the floods of Hurricane Katrina, and finally the birth of her second child. Despite the book's realistic narrative and chronology, readers may not assume each poem is narrated by Cooley herself. In many poems, the speaker is purposefully ambiguous, as befits a collection exploring the essence of identity. Through a range of poetic styles, Cooley examines the roles women play -- mothers, teachers, poets, wives, daughters -- and the conflicts raised when roles intersect.
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Normalcy as Fiala and her family knew it disappeared that Labor Day weekend, with all the speed of blood rushing through a ruptured artery. The "normal" of family life and work -- swimming pools, birthday parties, weekend brunches served on blue-and-white dishes -- vanished into a new reality of round-the-clock shifts in intensive care, eyes glued to monitors, shunts, and drains, wondering if Jeremy would pull through and, if he did, how his life would be forever changed.
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You could say that Good Eggs, a new graphic memoir by Phoebe Potts, is about infertility. You could say it's about overcoming depression, or about becoming an artist. I pitched the book to my adult bat mitzvah study group as a Jewish coming of age tale. And there's certainly a case to be made that Good Eggs is about family, specifically, the wild frontier between mother and daughter. But you could also call it a love story. Plenty of books tackle these topics, but I can't think of one that combines them as hilariously and brilliantly as Good Eggs. And I guarantee none of those books contains a portrait of the author as a bowl of Honey-Nut Cheerios.
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As reviews editors (and mother-writers ourselves), we decided to take stock of our books on writing, to share our thoughts on three newly published books, and to pull our favorites off the shelf and remember why we return to the old classics again and again.
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Ten years after the publication of Having Faith, Steingraber's most recent book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis revisits chemical assaults on growing children's bodies. In Raising Elijah, however, Steingraber expands her focus to include other elements of the environmental crisis, which she likens to a tree: the trunk is our dependency on fossil fuels; its two branches are global climate change and the build-up of toxic chemicals in our bodies.
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