Tag Archives: Memoir

In My Hands Today…

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The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir – Sarah Kendzior

It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland — and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road — again and again.

Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events – the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic – reshape American life. They explore Route 66, national parks, historical sites, and Americana icons as Kendzior contemplates love for country in a broken heartland. Together, the family watches the landscape of the United States – physical, environmental, social, political -transform through the car window.

Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future – even though at times she struggles to believe it herself.

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A Change of Habit: Leaving Behind My Husband, Career, and Everything I Owned to Become a Nun – Sister Monica Clare

In her twenties and thirties, Monica Clare was a talented but exhausted photo editor who spent her days getting yelled at by clients who were often strung out on cocaine and megalomania. For years, the voice calling her to a simpler, quieter life had been getting louder.

As a little kid, she’d seen Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story and thought: That’s me. That’s how she found herself straightening her habit nervously as she walked into a convent, preparing to live alongside eleven other sisters who’d taken the same vow of poverty and celibacy . . . indefinitely. Could a chronically fidgety, pop culture–obsessed woman of the world ever fit in? she wondered. And why did the other nuns seem so cold and disapproving?

As the months went on, she realized the other nuns were shy, not unfriendly—much like herself. The culture at the convent discouraged giving compliments or even saying “please” or “thank you,” since acts of generosity were to be freely given and received. But when Monica rose to the role of Sister Superior, she got the policy against compliments changed. Relationships started to blossom, first awkwardly and then more easily. Who would have predicted that Sister Christina, the one she thought had deeply disliked her from the start, would turn out to be a huge hugger? Or that they’d spend entire afternoons trying to keep a wild turkey from running amok in their community garden?

Equal parts tell-all and rallying cry, A Change of Habit reveals how much we can say yes to when we stop laboring to prove our worth to ourselves and others. In her role as a spiritual counselor, Sister Monica guides people from all walks of life toward resisting the false promises of capitalism, finding healing in small acts of nurture and connection, and ultimately, restoring themselves to a place of wholeness, all while living in this gorgeously messy world of ours.
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Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism – Sarah Wynn-Williams

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.

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Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly – Hannah Selinger

What happens when a career you love doesn’t love you back?

As Hannah Selinger will tell you, to be a good restaurant employee is to be invisible. At the height of her career as a server and then sommelier at some of New York’s most famed dining institutions, Selinger was the hand that folded your napkin while you were in the bathroom, the employee silently slipping into the night through a side door after serving meals worth more than her rent.

During her tenure, Selinger rubbed shoulders with David Chang, Bobby Flay, Johnny Iuzzini, and countless other food celebrities of the early 2000’s. Her position allowed her access to a life she never expected; the lavish parties, the tasting courses, the wildly expensive wines – the rare world we see romanticized in countless movies and television shows. But the thing about being invisible is that people forget you’re there, and most act differently when they think no one is looking.

In Cellar Rat, Selinger chronicles her rise and fall in the restaurant business, beginning with the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry and ending with her final post serving celebrities at the Hampton’s classic Nick & Tony’s. In between, readers will join Selinger on her emotional journey as she learns the joys of fine fine dining, the allure and danger of power, and what it takes to walk away from a career you love when it no longer serves you.

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How to Stand Up to a Dictator – Maria Ressa

What will you sacrifice for the truth?

Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte.

Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for—while she stands trial for speaking the truth.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars, to America’s Capitol Hill, to Britain’s Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes.

Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa’s urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late.