Gisèle Pelicot is the French woman whose husband of 50 years spent the last decade drugging and raping her and inviting strangers to repeatedly do the same while he recorded it. All of which she recounts in her memoir A Hymn to Life because this woman, who survived years of degradation and brutality without any memory of it, had the strength to confront it in graphic detail via ... Read More...
Rabbit Heart
But doubting our terror is what we’ve been trained to do. Imagine being eight years old and awakened on what should be a normal school morning by your father and older brother sitting on the side of your bed. They tell you that your mother has been kidnapped and your father cries. This is where the memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story begins and the ... Read More...
April Reading Recap
Is it the year? The authors? Me? Or some depressing combination of all three? I don’t know, but my April reading was as hit or miss as the Seattle weather. Just when you think you’ve read every horror story about the opioid epidemic there’s more. Prescription for Pain is an investigative look into the life of Paul Volkman, a doctor turned pharmacist who at the peak ... Read More...
In Light of All Darkness
The Polly Klaas kidnapping and murder in California was thirty years ago, but is still known today as the event that changed how the criminal justice system responds in child abduction cases. Kim Cross documents the aftermath of the Klaas kidnapping alongside the actions of investigators, police, and the FBI in her new book In Light of All Darkness. It was 1993 and 12-year-old ... Read More...
The Many Lives of Mama Love
It's a picture-perfect Saturday in Northern California with soccer parents lining the field and watching their kids play. As the game winds down most mothers go to retrieve their young, but Lara Love hangs back. And surreptitiously lifts cash out of a wallet in one of the handbags left behind in the stands. She moves onto the next before joining her friends and her children. ... Read More...
The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
I love books about art, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction so Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief was an easy reading choice. It’s the true story of a modern day art thief in France and is a heady combination of both fiction and nonfiction in that it’s true, but reads with the pace and plot twists of a thriller. Stéphane Breitwieser was not a man who would stand out in person or ... Read More...
