Category: Biography

Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire, 2003 What a beautiful, amazing, wonderful, educational, painful, delightful book! I LOVED THIS BOOK! Thank you, Jan, for telling me about it. I never knew anything about Cuba and Castro. This biography, by a man who was born in Cuba in 1950 and had to leave in 1962, brings to life the […]

life is so good

by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman, 2000, 2013 Excellent book. George Dawson, born in 1898, died at age 102, learned to read at age 98. Grew up on a farm in Marshall, Texas. Helped pick cotton at age 4. Oldest of children born to poor black farming couple in east Texas. He never got to […]

Red Notice

by Bill Browder, 2015 Eye-opening book about Russia. It details Bill Browder’s experience as a hedge fund manager starting soon after communism fell through his battle for justice for his lawyer, Sergie Magnitsky, who was tortured to death in a Russian prison. Bill fought and fought and fought to keep the truth in the forefront, […]

Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them

by Maeve Higgins, 2022 I learned a lot from this book. For example, Ireland has been blowing up monuments (to British men) for centuries. If our Black Americans blew up the monuments to slavery, the outcry would never end. Maeve was welcomed to America from Ireland because she is white and young and European. The […]

Willie Nelson’s Letters to America

by Willie Nelson with Turk Pipkin, 2021 Heartwarming letters from Willie Nelson to all sorts of folks, and even a scathing letter to the COVID-19 virus. He wrote this while at home under lock-down in Texas, and you can tell, he doesn’t like having to stay home, not being able to tour. He’s 88 years […]

Crossing the Line

by Kareem Rosser, 2021 Excellent book! Learned about it from the Library’s monthly Biographies email. As I was reading their description of the book, about a young black man who learned to play polo in inner-city Philadelphia, and came to CSU for college, I realized I had read his scholarship application! I made sure he […]

She Come By It Natural

Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh, 2020 Short biography of Dolly Parton written by a young feminist who grew up poor in Kansas and likened her grandmother, Betty, to be the real Dolly Parton. In the acknowledgements, she writes: “Thanks especially to the real Dolly Parton, my grandmother Betty.” […]

My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell, 1956 How I adored this book! He tells of his time on the Greek isle of Corfu in the 1930s. His family moved there from England when oldest brother, Larry, finds out from a friend how warm and sunny it is there. It is laugh-out-loud funny and wonderfully written. It takes you […]

Paul Simon, the life

by Robert Hilburn, 2018 Scanned this book quickly after getting through the first 100 pages but then getting bogged down. Learned enough: Born in 1941, grandparents immigrated from Lithuania and Ukraine, long before the Holocaust, which would have killed them since they were Jewish. His father was a musician, stand-up bass. He was born in […]

The Flame Trees of Thika

by Elspeth Huxley, 1959 Beautifully written autobiography about Elspeth’s childhood years in Kenya in the early 1900’s before World War I. Her Mom and Dad, whom she calls Tilly and Robin, are determined to make it as coffee farmers in Kenya, despite no one having done so before and them not having the skills or […]

Old Jules

by Mari Sandoz, 1935 Biography by the daughter of a pioneer in Nebraska. I didn’t finish this book because Old Jules was the meanest, cruelest, ugliest man, and when he started being cruel to his 2-year old daughter, I couldn’t read anymore.