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  Recovering - A Journal

  May Sarton

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  An affecting diary of one year’s hardships and healing, by one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary memoirists For decades, readers have celebrated May Sarton’s journals for their candid look at relationships, success and failure, communion with nature, and the curious stages of aging. In Recovering, Sarton focuses on her sixty-sixth year—one marked by the turmoil of a mastectomy, the end of a treasured relationship, and the loneliness that visits a life of chosen solitude. Each deeply felt entry in the journal, written between 1978 and 1979, is laced with poignancy and honesty as she grapples with a cold reception for her latest novel, the sad descent of a close friend into senility, and other struggles.   Despite the trials of this one painful year, Sarton writes of her progression toward a hard-won renewal, achieved through good friendships, the levity provided by her cherished dog, and peaceful days in her garden.   A candid account of Sarton’s revival from personal darkness back into light, Recovering is another stunning entry in the author’s irrepressible oeuvre.

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  The Suicide Index - Putting My...

  Joan Wickersham

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  National Book Award Finalist: “Wickersham has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself and emerged with a powerful, gripping story.” —The Boston Globe   One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Who was he? Why did he do it? And what was the impact of his death on the people who loved him? Using an index—the most formal and orderly of structures—Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history, every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors, exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and a deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father.

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  Why Am I Taller? - What Happens...

  Elizabeth Howell, Dr. Dave Williams

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  What happens in space that causes the body to change? Learn about life in space from astronauts 
  		 
  Is the human body built for Mars? NASA’s studies on the International Space Station show we need to fix a few things before sending people to the Red Planet. Astronauts go into space with good vision and come back needing eyeglasses. Cognition and DNA expression could be affected for years. And then there’s the discomfort of living in a tight space with crewmates, depression, and separation from the people you love.
  		 
  Space doctors are on the case. You’ll meet the first twin to spend a year in space, the woman who racked up three physically challenging spacewalks in between 320 days of confinement, and the cosmonaut who was temporarily stranded on space station Mir while the Soviet Union broke up underneath him. What are we learning about the human body?
  		 
  As astronauts target moon missions and eventual landings on Mars, one of the major questions is how the human body will behave in “partial gravity.” How does the human body change on another world, as opposed to floating freely in microgravity? What can studies on Earth and in space tell us about planetary exploration? These questions will be important to the future of space exploration and to related studies of seniors and people with reduced mobility on Earth.

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  The Blessing - A Memoir

  Gregory Orr

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  An acclaimed poet’s “gripping” memoir of an accidental tragedy, a childhood haunted by guilt, and a quest to find healing through art (Publishers Weekly). 
   
  When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath—a period of shock, sadness, and isolation—it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered. 
   
  Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr’s experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried. 
   
  Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art. 
   
  “Even a chaotic and hapless family, it seems, can confer a blessing—the strength to live in the world as it is, and the wisdom to love people as they are. The book is not so much about surviving pain so much as developing a writer’s instinct for transforming it.” —Kathleen Norris, New York Times–bestselling author of The Cloister Walk

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  Let Me Finish

  Roger Angell

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  Essays from the award-winning New Yorker writer and author of This Old Man: “Witty, worldly, deeply elegiac, and…heartbreaking.”—The Boston Globe For more than fifty years, as both editor of and contributor for The New Yorker, Roger Angell has honed a reputation as a master of the autobiographic essay—sharp-witted, plucky, and at once nostalgic and unsentimental.   In Let Me Finish, Angell reflects on a remarkable life (while admitting to not really remembering the essentials) and on its influences large and small—from growing up in Prohibition-era New York, to his boyhood romance with baseball, to crossing paths with such twentieth-century luminaries as Babe Ruth, John Updike, Joe DiMaggio, S.J. Perelman, and W. Somerset Maugham. He discusses his dread of Christmas, a revealing recurring dream, and his stepfather, E.B. White. He recalls glorious images from the movies he saw as a child (for which Angell has a nearly encyclopedic memory), the sheer bliss of sailing off the coast of Maine, and the even greater pleasure of heading home to the perfect 6 p.m. vodka martini.   Personal, reflective, funny, delightfully random, and disarming, this is a unique collection of scenes from a life by the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Game, “one of the most entertaining and gracious prose stylists of his…generation” (Time). “A lovely book and an honest one…about loyalty and love, about work and play, about getting on with the cards that life deals you. It's also a genuinely grown-up book, a rare gem indeed in our pubescent age.”—The Washington Post  

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  The Sparkling-Eyed Boy - A...

  Amy Benson

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  A creative memoir reflecting on a long-ago summer love and the choices we make—“built on dreams and memories of what never happened, but could have” (USA Today).   Exploring the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire, this work of creative nonfiction—a Bakeless Prize winner—re-creates the achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spent together on the shores of the remote St. Mary’s River of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.   For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he’ll later find work, marry, and stay. In the span of a lifetime their encounters were relatively brief, but loaded with meaning. Here, her heart-stoppingly erotic—yet wholly imagined—scenes, her imaginings of different outcomes, and her searching riffs on love as possession, love as pain, read like a friend’s deepest secrets, shared.   “Full of color and light and life. This is truth of the most profound sort; truth revealed in the artful and lyrical sensibility of Benson’s words and memory . . . Benson shows us here what the memoir can and should do—destroy and resurrect itself over and over.” —Brad Land, author of Goat   “The great pleasure and triumph of this memoir is Amy Benson’s ability to make the familiar new again as she explores the country of first love. Over and over I found myself surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, peaks and abysses, of her journey. And also by her lovely, fiercely intelligent prose.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy   “A remarkably candid disclosure of what it feels like to be young and in love for the first time. Winner of a prize for creative nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, this is a provocative, intense read.” —Booklist

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