American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

I picked up Shane Bauer's American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment at Book Expo last year, because, while it's not my primary research and advocacy focus, the prison system is a deep and important area of interest for me. It's intricately connected to education, and I can't help but care about the business of prison. 

Bauer is a journalist for Mother Jones magazine, and several years ago he decided to go undercover at a Louisiana prison to repent his experiences as a corrections officer there at a for-profit prison. His year-long experiment was quickly shortened — he lasted only a few months. However, it was enough to shape him and leaving him questioning everything he thought he knew about himself. 

He’s first hired over the phone, sight unseen. The for-profit prison system pays CO’s less than minimum wage, and they are hurting for employees. In fact, before finishing training, Bauer’s cohort is whittled down quite a bit. His whole training experience is enough to turn your stomach; beginning from the moment he walks in the door, not a single inmate at the Winn Correctional Center is seen as human. They are animals, and the COs’ jobs are to treat them as such. 

There is so much packed in this book, including a concise history of the for-profit prison industry, and it’s hard to know where to begin. The overall trajectory Bauer presents of himself — of a man seeking justice through journalism to a man who begins to see the inmates of Winn as the animals he is trained to view them as — was the most startling albeit the most predictable to anyone who has taken Psych 101. It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large. It also feeds into a long-term research plan of mine related to education, but that’s neither here nor for this particular post. I wasn’t surprised at all at Bauer’s transformation, but wow, was it fast. Only a matter of months. It’s shocking how quickly the human brain will transform into full-scale survival mode. 

Winn, as many for-profit prisons, was facing a CO shortage. Who wants to do that job for less than most cities pay in minimum wage? And then, for those who do, who feels as though they are respected enough by their managers that they then respect the men they are tasked with supervising? It’s a recipe for disaster. My favorite parts of this book quickly became the footnotes, which usually invoked the mentioning of Winn’s denial that any events Bauer discusses aren’t true or that they have no record of them. It’s laughable, really. Anyone who has simply read an article online from anyone who has ever walked into a prison knows that Bauer’s experiences are the norm. 

I highly recommend this book for several reasons: Bauer’s persons journey, his interactions with the incarcerated men on his watch, the history of the for-profit prison system, and the final chapters in which Bauer shows the aftermath of his experiences and his reporting. It is well worth the time to ingest this book and sit with it for a time. 

Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace

I have been familiar with Michael Morton's story -- and the egregiousness of Texas's gross misuse of the justice system to put away men for crimes they didn't commit -- for a while. I picked up his memoir, Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace recently on my library-book binge of true crime. 

Michael Morton was married with a small son when he left for work as usual one morning outside of Austin, Texas. His son wasn’t at day care that afternoon when Michael went to pick him up, and when he arrived home, it was cordoned off with crime scene tape. His wife had been brutally beaten to death in her bed with her toddler home to witness it. As if that wasn’t horrific enough, a few weeks after Michael becomes a prime suspect regardless of the evidence of his innocence, including an alibi and his son’s statements. Within a short time Michael is convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison, losing his son and his freedom in a matter of minutes. Decades later his case is taken on by the Innocence Project and Michael is exonerated. 

One of the lines that stuck out to me the clearest from his trial preparation was his lawyer telling him that truly innocent people are the hardest to defend in a murder trial. It dawned on me that this statement must be one of the truest I have heard, particularly in light of the hundreds of men and women exonerated in the last decade and a half due to DNA evidence. It’s heartbreaking to know that these mean and women have been sitting in prison for no reason other than hard-headedness and stubbornness on the part of prosecutors, who often have sole discretion on charges, plea deals, and sentencing requests. I found myself livid when I read about Michael’s case having evidence withheld because the prosecutor just simply didn’t call the lead investigator— he called a minor one in order to not have the lead ha d over his notes into discovery. There was information that, presented in court, may very well have exonerated the defendant. 

Micheal’s story, along with that of so many others, makes clear that our prosecutorial system must change. People are losing their lives — decades in prison, and many put to death — over crimes they did not commit. It should make you angry. Michael speaks candidly about the pain he endured over losing his child. His in-laws were granted custody, in part because Michael was strategically kept out of court the day of the custody hearing. They believed deep down that Michael was guilty of killing their loved one, and because of that they only put up with the required visitation, keeping his son away from him for most of his childhood. This caused a huge rift between father and son, one that could only be recotified later in life post-exoneration. 

The thing that makes me the most angry of all the issues surrounding prosecutorial misconduct is that the obsession with pegging crimes on certain people regardless of evidence to the contrary is that the true perpetrators go free and often kill again. This happened with the Morton killer, and it’s happened in several other cases. The dogged insistence of prosecuting someone around whom there is, at a minimum, reasonable doubt (notwithstanding true innocence) put the rest of us at grave risk. It allows the bad guys to strike again, and prosecutors who have put away innocent men and woman are complicit in this. 

Michael’s book is well worth the read if you are just now dipping your toe into the world of faulty convictions. If this is your first go-round, wait until you hear about fade confessions. It will knock your socks off! 

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

I picked up Stephanie Land's Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive at BookExpo last year as it was touted at the Adult Book Buzz panel as one of the hottest releases of the year. 

Stephanie is like many in America, but in ways that you might be uncomfortable speaking about. She grew up in poverty, and in early adulthood, she was working service jobs when she meets Jamie, who will become the father of her child. They agreed that their romance would be a fling — Stephanie had dreams of college in Missoula. When she becomes pregnant, she wants to give Jamie the chance to be a father, but instead she finds herself in a domestic violence situation with nowhere to turn. When she finally gets away, she finds herself dependent upon government assistance for everything from rent and electric to childcare — this while working long hours doing manual labor. Even while keeping her head up and trying to stay afloat, she deals with people remarking, “You’re welcome,” to her while she checks out in the grocery store with her EBT card. Her story is one that is repeated all across America — an entire swath of our population lives on less than $2 a day. 

Land is a profound writer who hits the shapest notes of strength and pride while still baring her soul for her readers. This book is no pity party; rather, it’s the story of a woman of tremendous strength who wants her reader to understand that when you live in poverty, there is never any getting ahead. The moment you do, you find yourself knocked down again — something as simple as a car not starting wreaks havoc for months on the loves of those living on an hourly minimum wage. Savings is a pipe dream. Land weaved her tale for us in a tight knit that made me empathize with her plight and angry at her circumstances. While you may feel there’s not much you can do, this is inaccurate. 

You can’t hate social programs and then say we can’t, as one of the wealthiest countries in the world, gauantee a living minimum wage for workers in every sector. Welfare is dead, and it has been for years. If you are paying attention, you know this to be true. Land goes into tedious detail explaining what life is like when you are on assistance — it’s almost a full-time job just to get what you need to be able to work. It’s a different application for everything (occasionally you get lucky and some applications double up), and each visit to each office takes hours on end. This is assuming that you never get sick and don’t need to take off work to go to a doctor. These minor inconveniences to people with salaried jobs are major catastrophies for people — mostly women, mostly single mothers — who fear losing what difficult-to-find work they had in the first place. 

That’s if you are lucky enough to have a regular work schedule, which Land finds when she begins working for a cleaning company. My heart broke for her when she entered into a relationship destined to fail — when it finally ended I was hopeful that she could make it on her own. I was angry when the doctors called her a bad mother for her living conditions — we are all trying to do our best with the circumstances we have. I  rode for her when her car went out of commission, the circumstances of which you will need to read for yourself. Land is an outstanding writer, and she brings us along on the journey that starts when her daughter takes her first steps in a homeless shelter. 

I’m always amazed when I listen to how some people speak of those on government assistance, and the coded language they use to describe those they feel are below them. Little do they know that the summer I lost my job, I sought out SNAP to help ease my financial burden. I qualified, but the process of obtaining them was so time consuming that I wouldn’t have been able to work what jobs I could find babysitting. It was an eye-opening moment for me, as was my visit to the unemployment office for a mandated job-training course. We were all treated like absolute morons. It was sobering to be sure. 

This isn’t a plea for empathy so much as it is a call to give Land’s book an open-minded read. Live in her world for a few hours, and imagine yourself in her shoes. 

Joy Enough: A Memoir

I picked up Sarah McColl's memoir Joy Enough at Book Expo last year on a whim, and it was the perfect size book to read on my way home to Atlanta and then give to mother. 

Sarah McColl has always loved her mother and depended on her for more than she realized. When her mother becomes ill, she must care for her while her marriage is crumbling and her heart is breaking in more ways than one. Can anyone ever find joy when their world is falling to prices around them, or do you just find joy enough in the wake of the destruction? 

I was quite blown away by this slim memoir. McColl is a hell of a prose writer, drawing me in with her raw wet concrete of words, smoothing it out all over the page, and allowing me to read it while it dries. That’s what her prose felt like; a soothing process making her grief permanent so that everyone else can walk on it and experience it. She felt completely exposed in this work, and she allowed me into her world and, even deeper, into her heart, laying near her worst moments so that I could just tangentially feel her grief over the two things she wanted most: her mother and her marriage. 

These books can be difficult for me, because the understanding that I will one day lose my parents breaks me. I recognize how fortunate I am to have them in my life and to have the support and love that they offer. As an adult these relationships are different than they are when we are younger, as it feels as though there is a timer that will one day go off. McColl distantly captures what it feels like when you hear the seconds on that timer counting down. I as the reader wanted to sit down with her so that I could hold her in her grief and figure out for her how to get through it. 

This book is well worth a read from any perspective — McColl’s expression of a time in her life that has shaped her is an incredible read, and I imagine that each person who reads it will get something different from it. 

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is one of those books I picked up forever and a day ago. I’m not quite sure what took me so long to get to it, other than that I am simply a book hoarder.    

I was just a little too young for the riot grrrl movement, so I was not especially a fan of the band. However, I wasn’t not a fan of the band either, and I am always interested in a little history, be it musical or otherwise. 

Carrie‘s memoir tells of her coming of age as a girl in the Pacific Northwest and her introduction into the music scene at a time when the whole area was ripe with musical energy. I found her trajectory as a musician to be particularly interesting – she needed a means of expression and found it through music rather than finding music and then using it as a means of self-expression. It’s fascinating and respectful, and her history goes hand-in-hand with that of Sleater-Kinney.  I am so thankful I grew to learn more about this point in time situated in a particular location. 

She lays her self bare in her memoir, and it makes her absolutely endearing. She is someone whom I would like to go grab a beer with, and ask her questions about life, her work, and everything in between. Even after doing some poking around online and listening to Sleater-Kinney, I can say that it’s not really my style of music, but I appreciate who they are and what they’ve done. The in-depth history of their albums and the process of writing and recording them has given me a lot to contemplate, and I’m going to give their music another go ‘round this weekend with this book in mind. 

Sick: A Memoir

Porochista Khakpour's Sick: A Memoir was a popular new release, so I jumped on the bandwagon as soon as it came out. I was unfamiliar with her previous work, and much to my shame. She is a beautiful, compelling writer who drew me in with her prose and her tale-weaving. 

Most likely but as a child, Porochista has never known a time when she wasn’t sick. Things had always felt off for her, and when as a young woman at college in New York she finds herself spiraling down into a series of health breaks, she can’t quite put her finger on why. Although several people mention the possibility of Lyme over the next few years, it’s not until a definitive diagnosis almost a decade later that she can find any sort of short-lives relief. Her work and wanderlust takes her all over the word, but her illness continues to bring her back. 

Porochista’s story is fascinating, and well worth a read. She has many in her life who don’t believe her, and through her story I did a great deal of reckoning with myself over people I have known who have suffered from similar ailments. Was I a non-believer? Did I hurt anyone I loved because of an illness that was hard to diagnose? Quite possibly. I also had to reckon with my own ailments. I have been suffering from extreme exhaustion on and off for four years. It got better with pregnancy and post-partum, but it’s recently started to read its ugly head again. No doctor has taken me seriously, and so I soldier on, grateful that I have the ability to work from home on days when I just have difficulty moving. 

Following Porochista’s journey from childhood to adulthood and colored by this mysterious illness that has lent a cloud cover to her development was fascinating. Her timelining her illness with her relationships was something we can all easily relate to, even though by the time her illness became so bad that she had to leave Germany, I wanted to smack her and tell her to let herself heal emotionally as well as physically. For once, a character listened to me! For a bit, anyway, so by the time she found a relationship after making her way back to NYC I was cheering for her. 

I appreciate that she ended the book with the recognition that her journey is far from over. She talks about the book that she pitched which is not the book that she ended up with due to an unexpected relapse. Her open heart that she lays bare on her pages makes me feel as though she is my friend, and her words strung together on the page have made me think more deeply and honestly about capital-H Health. 

When Breath Becomes Air

Recently in my apartment building, someone started a book table where they leave books and others can take them. I am not interested in most of the titles, but occasionally one pops out that I have wanted to read. This was the case with Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air.

This book is mostly a memoir, but it is a beautiful and arresting treatise on life and love. How do we live to our fullest? Kalanithi tells us, because he did it. Beginning as a child with a deep love of literature instilled in him by his mother, he was encouraged by his parents to delve deep into his curiosity and to learn. In college he continued to immerse himself in his beloved literature as well as indulge his curiosity in how the mind works through biology and the beginning inklings of neuroscience. He then went off to find himself, continuing his studies at Cambridge before moving on to medical school and eventually becoming one of the most sought-after neurosurgeons and neuroscientists in the nation. He married Lucy, the love of his life whom he first met in medical school, and together they had a child when they knew his life was near its end. Other than dying at a young age -- 37 -- he had it all.

But the thing that Paul teaches us in this book that dying is merely the end, but it's not the definition of who we are the lives that we have led. The measure of our worth as humans are the things we have accomplished in between birth and death -- knowledge, love, kindness, and the depth of our souls. In this short memoir, he puts that all to words in the most eloquent, moving, and thoughtful prose I have ever read. His words seared my heart in a reminder of how important it is to reflect on our lives through the lens of thankfulness when we have been given so much. Paul is one of the most gifted motivational writers that has ever existed (and yes, I am not exaggerating), and just a few hours with his gifted mind feels like it was a gift meant for me. It is clear why he would have been incredibly successful as a writer, and his self-education in literature is apparent in his writing.

There are so many beautiful moments in this book to touch on, but I want you to read them for yourself. When Paul is diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in his 30's, at the height of his career, when he is being pursued by some of the most elite medical institutions, he has to reexamine his life plan. Practicing medicine for the next 20 years and spending the following 20 as a writer isn't possible anymore. He just won't live that long. He has to make a decision to live the last of his days and months to their fullest. He finishes out his residency, he begins this book, and he and Lucy decide to have a baby. This is where I am broken.

Paul's final words in his final chapter broke me as a human. His final paragraph, written to his infant daughter, is the most meaningful work I have ever written. It's simplicity belies the depth of his words and the meaning of life and love for another human. Even if the rest of the book wasn't worth the read -- and it very much is worth every second you will give to it -- those last few words will wreck you.

But you aren't done -- you need to read Lucy's afterword. Reading her bear her raw soul in telling us about her last few moments with her husband was so real that I had to read it in one-paragraph chunks. It was too much to bear in one setting without openly breaking down.

This book as a whole is one of the all time greatest memoirs ever written. 

Hey Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

Jarrett J. Krosoczka's graphic novel Hey Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction called out to me at Book Expo as a way to speak about these issues, particularly parental incarceration and addiction, with a younger audience who doesn't know that they are not alone. 

Jarrett grew up initially with his mother but when he was a toddler, his maternal grandparents took custody of him because they were concerned about the goings-on in his mother’s home. His mother would disappear for weeks or months at a time, sometimes sending Jarrett letters, but rarely visiting. As Jarrett grows older, his grandparents become more honest with him about the challenges with his mother — she is a heroin addict and has been in and out of prison his whole life. Jarrett, who spent years struggling with who he was and where he fit in, grew even more distant from his mother. Then, one day, his father sends him a letter. As Jarrett moves through adolescence, he must balance his own growing up, his mother’s struggle with addiction, and a new family he never knew he had. 

I was incredibly taken by this book — I read it the very day that I got a copy. It stayed at the top of my bag throughout the Expo and I found myself continually being happy to be standing in line so that I could get back to this book. It was an easy read in that it is aimed for the younger set, and Krosoczka's graphics are really great. It has a consistent color scheme, which I feel helps to set the story for the reader. In fact, as I was in line for another children’s book, I found myself extolling its virtues to a children’s librarian. Here’s the gist of what I told her. 

This book is vitally important for younger children. It’s a middle grade book, so sure, maybe its reading level isn’t quite elementary (although I would have read it as a fourth or fifth grader). But it should be on school library shelves. At one point in the book, Jarrett discovers that one of his classmates also has a mother who is an addict and he never knew. These kinds of secrets can tear children up, and with the amount of children in this country dealing with an addicted parent, it is so very important that these kids realize that they are not alone. One addicted person leaves at least a dozen affected people in his or her wake, and I am always amazed to find out how many of my friends either haven’t felt the sting of loving an addict or remain in denial about it. 

Krosoczka has published a deep, meaningful, and important work for young people that lets them know that they aren’t alone in dealing with hard stuff. The more we avoid talking about addiction, the more power we give the shame surrounding it. We cannot forget that those who love an addict are affected as well, and this includes even the smallest children. I originally picked up Hey, Kiddo for my son, because while he won’t be reading it for a while, I intend to be honest with him about our family’s struggles with addiction. We will not give power to the shame of an illness that affects so many, and I am thankful to Krosoczka for producing a beautiful, open-hearted piece of work for that purpose. 

Small Animals: Parenthood In the Age of Fear

The second I heard I heard about Kim Brooks' Small Animals: Parenthood In the Age of Fear, I knew I had to get it. It's not just because I am a new parent (well, kind of new), but also because I have strongly felt for some time that in our current time we parent through fear rather than through a desire to lead out kids to be self-determined. (See The Self-Driven Child, if you will.)

Just a couple of years ago, Kim Brooks ran a five minute errand into Target in a suburb of Virginia and left her four year old son in the car. It was a mild to cool day, she could see the car from the store, and he didn’t even notice how long she was gone since he was engrossed in his iPad. That one choice would lead to a years-long fight with the court and child welfare  systems from several states away that ended in Kim not being prosecuted but serving many hours in parenting classes. All because a “Good Samaritan” watched her, filmed her, and phoned the police over an action that is not, in fact, against the law. 

This begs bigger questions in our society about fear-based parenting, the motherhood competition, and how we now view parenting as a cross between a competitive sport and a job. In the first chapter, Kim lays out her story. In the second, she explores deeper questions of why we live in a parenting culture of fear, beginning in pregnancy. It is a fear that grips mostly women, and this theme travels into the third chapter which focuses on the history of that fear and how it primarily affects mothers. The rest of the book explores these themes in more depth as well as the outcome of her own case, including the second-to-last chapter in which Brooks comes to the conclusion that all of this fear-based parenting is creating a generation of guinea pigs -- we don't know how people will turn out when a generation of helicopter parenting has prevented them from ever taking risks. (I can hypothesize on this, and it's not pretty.)

This book is so very important reading for every single person in this society, be you a parent or not. I have been flabbergasted since long before I became a mother how fear-based we truly are as a society. The statistics of stranger danger are sobering because so few children are absucted by strangers. As Brooks repeats throughout this book, the probability isn’t nil, which means that it is absolutely a possibility, but we find ourselves more worried about things that aren’t much of a problem to avoid being worried about things that are. This reflects the research; I recently read a paper that clearly found that humans in the western world tend to worry about things that have a small probability of happening but are in control of humans, such as kidnapping and terrorist attacks, but tend to not think often of things that are more likely to happen through chance and the environment, such as hurricanes and fires. The things I find myself most concerned about for my own child are choking, lead, and subway crashes. (I admit the last one is a bit less probable than I think, but it IS the MTA.) 

I find myself in Brooks’ camp. On one hand, we know better so we do better — with things like car seat safety, SIDS, early allergen exposure. But that doesn't apply to everything. Brooks discusses the child abduction craze of the 1980’s, which I not only remember well, but has had shape my own fears and anxieties. Because it was brought so publicly to the forefront, we tend to over-rationalize stranger abduction and ignore more important statistics such as according to RAINN, 92% of minors who are sexually abused know their abuser. This is convenient to forget when it’s someone we know and trust. We also underestimate actual risks, such as car accidents. People are so afraid of things that are plausible but not likely and less concerned about the fact that over 1600 children each year die in car accidents and another 2.35 million are injured or disabled. You are far more likely to be in this situation than someone taking your child from a parked vehicle. However, everyone has an anecdote, now, don't they?

I find it so interesting how my husband and I have described our parenting with all of these adjectives: lazy, ignorant, hands-off. When you put it in the context of the over-vigilance that is expected in 2018, where our children are never supposed to be left alone and they need to be monitored so that they never get hurt at the expense of exploration and adventure, it’s downright neglectful. But we are far from it. We just expect that our child will be independent, playful, adventurous, and brave. So far, so good. 

However, when I explain this to people who are around us, including my own parents, what they say and what they do are different. Thy say, “That’s so great,” and what they do is helicopter my kid. They say they love our attitude, but then they say, “Watch his head!” Or, “He’s stuck!” Or, “Can he do that?” In theory they like the idea of my child learning for himself, but in practice we have become an overbearing, controlling society regarding children. I find myself more frustrated with the need to control my child's every move than I am with the fact that my child is stuck in the first place. We call it hands-off parenting, and it really, really, really bothers most people.

This book is so very important for everyone to read, and I will add it to my arsenal of books that I send off to my new-parent (and hell, maybe even my old-parent) friends. Along with The Gardener and the Carpenter, The Scientist in the Crib, The Importance of Being Little, and The Self-Driven Child, this is one of the best books on parenting I can recommend. If you want your child to be smarter, put down the books that claim to make them so -- they are bullshit. What will make your child smarter is allowing them to explore, create, and just be.

Will I be a free range parent? You betcha. 

All Happy Families: A Memoir

At Book Expo this year I only had a couple of books on my list that I desperately wanted, so it opened me up to exploring what new works were coming out that interested me. I happened upon Jeanne McCulloch's memoir All Happy Families and was wowed. 

The weekend of Jeanne’s wedding — her mother’s day which she says they will get through with grace even if it kiss them — her father suffers a massive stroke after her mother’s insistence that he be sober for the wedding after decades of alcohol. As he lays in the hospital, Jeanne says her vows to her husband. Her father never wakes. The decision to move ahead with the bwedding reverberates throughout the lives of everyone, including her in-laws. As Tolstoy says, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This book wasn’t initially on my list to grab at Book Expo, but it sounded interesting so I thought, why not? After picking it up and reading it closely, I thought it would be a great read right away, and was I ever right. McCulloch’s story is, from start to finish, devastatingly beautiful. From her incredibly wealthy family (she can see Park Avenue from her penthouse growing up) to her down-home in-laws who lovingly call her “city girl,” McCulloch’s world in the 1980’s comes alive on the page through those she knows best. Her loving portraits of her father and her mother, as well as her beloved mother-in-law, are more than kind. They are deep, full-bodied, and show the level of care that she feels toward each of these guides in her life. 

I was both horrified and intrigued that the wedding went on as scheduled. I couldn’t even imagine being in a place in my life where it would be more socially acceptable to continue on than to hold. There is a scene where her mother phones the hospital and tells the doctor on call that if anything happens to her husband that night to not call the house — they are having a party. That is so beyond my realm of understanding that it fascinated me. The show must go on, especially when appearances matter. 

The second and third parts of the book are equally unpredictable yet make sense. It’s almost as if this is a perfectly plotted work of fiction, but as we know, the truth is in fact stranger than fiction. The narrative arc is so perfect that it’s almost unbelievable. Jeanne’s in-laws have the perfect marriage while her own parents were wonderful old birds. No one would have guessed that her in-laws marriage would fall apart so spectacularly. How true Tolstoy’s quote is; it turns out that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, and you never know what that unhappiness looks like behind closed doors. 

Guest Blogger Charlotte - The Glass Castle: A Novel

Hello!

Anytime I asked my friend for a book recommendation, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls was the only book she would tell me to read. So, after a few months, I finally decided to pick up the book she continually raved about.    

The book is a memoir of Jeannette Walls’ more than dysfunctional life from childhood to adulthood. Growing in up in poverty with an alcoholic father, unpredictable mother, and her three siblings, Jeannette retells her different experiences. The story begins later in Jeanette’s life with her on the way to a get-together when she sees her homeless mother digging through trash on the streets of New York. After this shocking start of the book, the audience is drawn in as she goes back in time to her being three years old and from there the story is written in chronological order, with each chapter being a moment in her life. 

The story is heartbreaking, encouraging, and completely stunning as she experiences events that do not seem possible, such as hospital trips, lack of food, and homelessness. The Glass Castle opens the door to a perspective that is often overlooked. I spent the entire time rooting for Jeannette and her family as they encounter many setbacks caused by a number of variables, whether it is family members or outside sources. It is a story of human life and human nature as the characters grow and continue through life. You may love and hate different characters, but I felt that most of the time I simply saw the characters as real people doing their best to figure life out. 

The writing itself is also captivating. There was not a moment when reading the book that I felt disconnected to the characters or the story. It was as though I was living through the eyes of Jeannette, feeling devastated whenever a bad event happened to the individuals in the story and ecstatic when the characters finally caught a break.

As soon as I finished reading the story all I could do was sit and call my friend who had recommended the book because I had loved it so much. I would say this is definitely a book to put on everyone’s to-read list as it makes you cry, think, and laugh. Overall it is an extraordinary story written in a unique and impeccable manner.

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

Right up my alley and fascinating to boot, Barbara K. Lipska's The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery was a read that I couldn't put down. 

Barbara was a prolific researcher on the neuro-origins of mental illness and the director of the brain bank at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her life's work served as the greatest irony when she began losing her mind in the prime of her life. At first she loses sight in the corners of her eye, and she knows -- it's a tumor. Her breast cancer metastasized to her brain, which was the ultimate cruelty. She has it treated and has confidence in her recovery, but she slowly changes from the loving, caring mother and wife that she has always been to someone she doesn't even understand. Her work can't save her. 

You know me and brain stuff -- I love it. Can't keep my hands off of it, except for maybe when I read murder and mayhem. I was fascinated by Lipska's journey from researcher to the researched, and I found myself overwhelmed by her experience. I love that she opened the book with a particular point in her journey, when she found herself dying her hair and then going for a run, but not realizing she still had dye in her hair and then losing her place in her neighborhood. None of it phased her as she didn't even realize what was happening. It was fascinating to read, and then to jump into her journey from her beginnings in Poland and her journey to the United States. Her research was profound and an incredibly important contribution to the mental health field, and her description of her work at NIMH was amazing.

Then the worst happens, which is the growth of metastatic tumors on her brain. I felt her panic as she realized that she couldn't see out the side of her vision, and her I understood her denial of what was happening even as I was screaming to her that she needed to get to the doctor now. The devastation she felt at having to put her life on hold was acute to me, and her journey was arduous and palpable. I will say that her writing felt a bit stilted, but I chalk that up to a background in academic writing which doesn't particularly lend itself to writing for the masses. (I know this well, as I can be pedantic myself if I don't watch it. See? I just used the word pedantic unironically.) However, her story was so fascinating that I was willing to look past the sometimes awkward narrative voice to dig deep into the heart of the story. 

The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race

I picked up Sara Barron's The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race forever and a day ago, and I finally dove into it while nursing this past summer, and it fit the bill better than any other book I read during that time. I was up at all hours of the night and found that I could only read comedic work. Voila!

This collection of essays explores Barron's world all the way from her childhood and high school experience as a mall worker and hopeful lesbian-wannabe to a college student who cannot handle alcohol but still wants to be a druggie to an adult who desperately wants to adult but still ends up being asked to give business advice on being an escort to her dream man on what she thought was a date. Barron's crazy life is our essay-reading pleasure.

Laugh out loud, snortingly funny. That's how I felt about this book approximately halfway through. I found Barron's wry sense of humor to be absolutely amazing, and I was so grateful for these stories when they came into my world. Barron doesn't take herself too seriously (except for when she does, to our comedic reading pleasure), and her willingness to just simply be herself is a gold mine for us. The time that she strutted down a NYC street feeling like she was the shit while farting is amazing. Her desperate desire to be a lesbian for the cache is wonderfully hilarious. Her dating life sounded suspiciously like mine for the majority of my adulthood.

All of this to say, it felt like I had a spirit animal in Sara Barron. My stories are definitely not as good as hers, but I felt a kinship of epic proportions through her writing. As a younger version of herself she wanted to be something, even if she didn't know what that thing specifically was. She is so easy to relate to if you have ever been young, single, and making mistakes as you find yourself. She is also easy to relate to as someone who just wants to find herself and bases those searches on what she thinks she needs to be rather than who she is. I get that, and I got this book. It was hilarious, and I regret nothing. (Except maybe those fake glasses in fifth grade.)

Guest Blogger Charlotte: Gift from the Sea

While looking for new books to read, I found that Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh kept appearing on suggestion lists, and from its descriptions it seemed like a great way to start the spring.

As soon as I started reading this book, my expectations were completely challenged. From the descriptions I had read, I thought it would be more of a story format, but Gift from the Sea is more of an account of the author’s life. Taking place during her trips to Florida, the book follows her thoughts as she contemplates and reflects on her life and topics such as being a woman, marriage, children, and the different phases one goes through in life.

Pretty early in the book, I began to feel that although the book would be interesting to women of all ages, it was definitely more directed towards women who were older than me, probably married and with children. I sometimes felt that I couldn’t relate to the subject matter. However, I still really enjoyed reading the book as it went through different topics, values, and lessons that can be applicable to all.

I really enjoyed Lindberg’s style of writing and her ability to tie together memories with current experiences. For example, she compares the different stages of her life to seashells, allowing her to then go through the topics applicable to those shells. She discusses the need of people, especially mothers, to recharge in order to be able to live their lives to the fullest. Another point that I loved was her stating that we need to focus more on solitude. I thought this was so interesting because of our constant need to be with people or doing something with others. This is definitely something I hadn’t heard encouraged very publically, so I thought it was meaningful and it made the book feel personal to me.

I think this example is very telling of the book in general. The author speaks about and reflects on topics and conversations that are sometimes avoided in every day life. Every blog shows how we can connect more, take advantage of every opportunity, and be everything we want to be. But Gifts from the Sea gave a bit of a different perspective because it didn’t try so hard to impress. It reminded me that time alone to recharge and to focus on yourself is valuable too.

The only thing that stopped me from absolutely loving this book is that although it was really well written, the book was sometimes almost too cheesy. I had to take a break a few times to reset from the different comparisons. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it had lovely imagery and comparisons, but it could also feel long at times. I felt like some of the metaphors were a bit forced and that the book could have benefited from being a bit more raw from the author’s personal experiences and a bit less crafted to be inspiring.

All in all, this was a sweet and short read for spring break! I would recommend for the author’s more target audience, so I will be rereading when I’m a bit older. Otherwise, I think the topics discussed should be discussed by all age groups, so I definitely think it should be a book to add to your to-read list if you’re looking for a quick, uplifting read.