memoir tagged posts

“Danny, if I find you’re a threat to my family, I’ll put a bullet between your eyes. Family is everything.”

“I understand that, Clyde. If I were in your position, I would say the same thing—and mean it.”

“You would; wouldn’t you?” He smiled as he studied me.

Those are the opening lines of Damian and Mongoose, Danny Williams’ memoir of his central role in taking down one of the most notorious spy rings ever to afflict the United States military. They promise a real-life spy thriller, better than anything John le Carré, Robert Ludlum, or Ken Follett could have dreamed up.

Unfortunately, the promise is not kept.

The reason is simple: Williams, who spent most of his Army career as a counter-intelligence agent, treats the memoir as if it were another debriefing wit...

Jeri McAndrews is a classically trained ballet dancer who ran away from the School of American Ballet in New York and the demands and discipline of ballet. She landed eventually in southwestern Colorado, where among other things, she taught dance and choreographed and performed in modern dances in wild outdoor settings including the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. The title of the book is apt: while dance is certainly a core of McAndrews’ life, so it seems is running away, getting away from… many things: teaching middle school English (to be fair, a challenge only a few people are cut out for), marriage, parenthood, big cities (can’t argue with that one).

Why did she run? We’ll never truly know...

I don’t normally read memoirs but Love Life, with Parrots came highly recommended by a friend, so I thought I’d give it a try for something different.

The book covers the period between the end of Hanson’s first marriage and the early years of her second. Unfortunately, we never know for sure how many years that is.

What we do learn, in quite some detail, is that these are not easy years. Hanson struggles from one bad relationship to another, with each man having his own failings, some of them severe. While Hanson is never physically abused, she suffers a lot of emotional abuse which, combined with her low self-esteem (a legacy of her childhood), makes her struggles that much greater...