https://tinyurl.com/3mv95f7x “‘I want you to know that the way I grew up, I guess I was wired to live small, if that makes any sense. See, I came from people with low expectations. All my life I haven’t been able to get past that.’” I was interested in the book from the beginning, not that […]

“Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media”: https://tinyurl.com/yu3n73vw With all this hype about BookTok, I decided to do a deeper dive. A waste of time. What we’ve got here is women, and a few men, testifying as to their love of a […]

“The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America”: https://tinyurl.com/mryc7n8c This is the real “Hillbilly Elegy.” If you want to understand the rural MAGA mentality, this is the place. What we’ve got here is Clinton, Arkansas. Not Fayetteville, the hip Arkansas, not Little Rock, the urban Arkansas, but nowhere Arkansas, where […]

“The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood”: https://tinyurl.com/39p9w4kz This is a fabulous book. I was not planning to read it. Read the reviews, reserved it at the library, but I’m anti-nonfiction, I find that fiction resonates more, and I’d just finished a couple of music biographies that made me feel like I […]