Eavesdropping
10 best books like Eavesdropping (Stephen Kuusisto): Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, Breaking the Surface, Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic, Kicked Out, Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath, My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Nonfiction, An Unfinished Marriage, A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student
Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled
| Author | Nancy Mairs |
| ISBN | 0807070874 |
Everyone: read this book. It takes an ice-pick to the trope of 'pitiful cripple' that many of us carry about.
Mairs is a brilliant essayist and memoirist, writing about her own experiences as a woman with MS, who has lost movement in two legs and one arm and lives in the Southwest. She weaves larger...
Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness
With a foreword by Oliver Sacks
Shortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its...
| Author | Greg Louganis |
| ISBN | 0679437037 |
Beyond the mists of prehistory, back when the 7.5 meter platform was made of giant slabs of rock and the 10m was supplied by the pate of a cooperative apatosaur, this reviewer used to fantasize about making it to the Olympics as a diver when he should have been doing his mat exercises.
One might...
| Author | Nora Gallagher |
| ISBN | 0307592987 |
This taut yet lyrical memoir tells of the author’s experience with a baffling illness poised to take her sight, and gives a deeply felt meditation on vulnerability and on what it means to lose the faith you had and find something better.
One day at the end of 2009, during a routine eye exam that...
| Author | Sassafras Lowrey |
| ISBN | 0978597362 |
In the U.S., 40% of homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ). Kicked Out brings together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth and tells the forgotten stories of some of our nation's most vulnerable citizens. Diverse contributors share stories...
Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath
| Author | Andrew Holleran |
| ISBN | 0786720395 |
Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero, first published in 1988 and consisting of 23 Christopher Street essays from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, was hailed by the Washington Post as “one of the best dispatches from the epidemic’s height.” Twenty years later, with HIV/AIDS long recognized...
| Author | Shawn Decker |
| ISBN | 1585425257 |
I was destined for a life of medical drama from day one," begins this comic memoir with a mission. "I was born in the month of July, and my horoscope sign is a disease (Cancer). The symbol for Cancer? A crab (the sexually transmitted critter). Not only that, my parents named me Shawn Timothy Decker, which...
| Author | Robert L. Root Jr. |
| ISBN | 0321434846 |
This best-selling anthology is a comprehensive and indispensable introduction to the way creative nonfiction is written today. The Fourth Genre offers the most comprehensive, teachable, and current introduction available today to the cutting-edge, evolving genre of creative nonfiction. While...
| Author | Joan Anderson |
| ISBN | 0767908716 |
In this moving sequel to her national bestseller A Year by the Sea, Joan Anderson explores the challenges of rebuilding and renewing a marriage with her trademark candor, compassion, and insight.
With A Year by the Sea, Joan Anderson struck a chord in many tens of thousands of readers. Her brave...
| Author | Elizabeth Stone |
| ISBN | 1565123158 |
One morning, a box was delivered to Elizabeth Stone's door. It held ten years of personal diaries and a letter that began "Dear Elizabeth, You must be wondering why I left you my diaries in my will. After all, we have not seen each other in over twenty years . . ." What followed was a remarkable year in Elizabeth's...
A lighthearted look at how one woman learned to laugh at and cope with her spouse’s “second” passion. When Anita Salzberg marries her husband, Allen, she discovers that she’s also married his “little” turtle hobby. While sports widows merely get dragged to the stadiums or the links, the...
My bias... I am a straight male that views homosexuality as a choice, and a bad one at that with clear undeniably poor outcomes for people who choose it.
That said, I have an open mind, and I read this to try to put myself in the shoes of people on the other side of the ideological divide. This book provided...
| Author | Dale Peck |
| ISBN | 1616954418 |
Novelist and critic Dale Peck's latest work, part memoir, part extended essay, is a foray into what the author calls 'the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic'. Reminiscent of Joan Didion's The White Album and Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday, Visions and Revisions has been assembled from over...
It is not surprising that the World War I experiences of Norman Thomas (1884-1968) form a major part of Louisa Thomas' new book: This long-lived peace advocate was, after all, the author's great grandfather and a six-time Socialist presidential candidate. Conscience does pay due attention to her...
| Author | Toi Derricotte |
| ISBN | 0393319016 |
The Black Notebooks is a study in contrasts. It is a study written by Toi Derricotte, an award winning poet and university professor, who wrote this book over a period of approximately twenty years. It could be described as a memoir because it is based on Derricotte’s reflections on her own life but...
| Author | Kirk Read |
| ISBN | 0142002992 |
With bold Southern humor, journalist and performer Kirk Read takes readers on a guided tour of his precocious and courageous adolescence. Recalling his years as an openly gay high school student, Read describes how he navigated the hallways with his sense of humor and dignity intact. He fondly recalls...
| Author | Michael Thomas Ford |
| ISBN | 1555834965 |
In That's Mr. Faggot to You, Michael Thomas Ford continues his exploration of contemporary gay life. He does not shy away from personal revelations--he recalls his own traumatic high school experiences but recognizes that, years later, he's happier and, more importantly, a great deal more attractive...
Do-Over!: In Which a Forty-Eight-Year-Old Father of Three Returns to Kindergarten, Summer Camp, the Prom, and Other Embarrassments
| Author | Robin Hemley |
| ISBN | 0316020605 |
Robin Hemley's childhood made a wedgie of his memory, leaving him sore and embarrassed for over forty years. He was the most pitiful kindergartner, the least spirited summer camper, and dateless for prom. In fact, there's nary an event from his youth that couldn't use improvement. If only he could do...
Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise
| Author | Paul Monette |
| ISBN | 0156002027 |
...I've been visiting my own grave for years now--pre-need, as they call it--and I don't require any further vigil from anybody. Unless it is some kind of safety zone. And as long as there's no piety in the gesture. I don't like flowers, but the deer do. Keats and Lawrence and Stevenson all died of their...
Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy
| Author | Thomas Beatie |
| ISBN | 1580052878 |
Thomas Beatie electrified the world in April 2008 with his announcement that he was seven months pregnant and due to give birth in July. The news made headlines across the globe, but it's only one chapter in a fascinating saga. Labor of Love reveals Beatie's unique life experiences; his less-than-idyllic...
| Author | Spalding Gray |
| ISBN | 0679737391 |
For some time now, writer-actor-performance artist Spalding Gray has been carrying around with him a monster: a manuscript of a novel called Impossible Vacation, a book that at last sighting weighed in at about 1,800 pages. Monster in a Box, Gray's latest monologue, is a guided tour between the stations...
The Public Confessions of a Middle-aged Woman
Enter the world of Susan Lilian Townsend - sun-worshippers, work-shy writers, garden-centre lovers and those in search of a good time all welcome. Over the last decade, Sue Townsend has written a monthly column for "Sainsbury's Magazine", which covers everything from hosepipe bans and Spanish restaurants...
Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality
| Author | Thomas Lynch |
| ISBN | 0393321649 |
I love a good surprise book. I don't know where I got this one from, if it was given to me or if I picked it up at a bookstore and put it on the shelf but I recently picked it up and I couldn't have been more impressed.
It's a memoir / collection of essays. He gives his thoughts on life, death, marriage, divorce,...
| Author | Jill Krementz |
| ISBN | 0679450149 |
This book was given to me as a gift by Bill Marshall in August 2014. It contains photos of the workspaces of 56 writers and accompanies them with snippets taken from the writers' discussions of their process as published in The Paris Review. Among these writers is the late John Updike (1932-2009), who...
The Jewel Garden: A Story of Despair and Redemption
The face of British gardening Monty Don and his wife Sarah tell the magical story of the garden they have built over the last decade THE JEWEL GARDEN is the story of the garden that over the past decade has bloomed from the muddy fields around the Dons' Tudor farmhouse, a perfect metaphor for the Monty and...
