The Still Point of the Turning World
10 best books like The Still Point of the Turning World (Emily Rapp): Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir, Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, The Long Goodbye, The Heavy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Diet—a Memoir, Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World, We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter, Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son, Fields of Grace: Faith, Friendship, and the Day I Nearly Lost Everything
Fans of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will embrace Poe Ballantine's Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere.
Poe Ballantine's "Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel" included in Best American Essays 2013, and for well over twenty...
| Author | Lauren Drain |
| ISBN | 1455512427 |
NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER You've likely heard of the Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news, the members holding signs with messages that are too offensive to copy here, protesting at events such as the funerals of soldiers, the 9-year old victim of the recent Tucson...
| Author | Rod Dreher |
| ISBN | 1455521914 |
THE LITTLE WAY OF RUTHIE LEMING follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community...
| Author | Meghan O'Rourke |
| ISBN | 1594487987 |
What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record...
| Author | Dara-Lynn Weiss |
| ISBN | 0345541340 |
For readers of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Bringing Up Bebe, a mother’s unflinching memoir about helping her seven year-old daughter lose weight, and the challenges of modern parenting.
When a doctor pronounced Dara-Lynn Weiss’s daughter Bea obese at age seven, the mother...
| Author | Roger Rosenblatt |
| ISBN | 0062084038 |
“There is indeed life after death, and Rosenblatt proves that without a doubt.”
—USA Today
From Roger Rosenblatt, the bestselling author of Making Toast and Unless It Moves the Human Heart, comes a poignant meditation on the nature of grief, the passages through it, the solace...
| Author | Serene Jones |
| ISBN | 0664234100 |
This substantive collection of essays by Serene Jones explores recent works in the field of trauma studies. Central to its overall theme is an investigation of the myriad ways both individual and collective violence affect one's capacity to remember, to act, and to love; how violence can challenge...
We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter
| Author | Rachael Hanel |
| ISBN | 0816683468 |
Rachael Hanel’s name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn’t at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family’s business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they...
| Author | Richard Lischer |
| ISBN | 0307960536 |
This poignant love story of a father for his son is at once funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful. In it a young man teaches his entire family “a new way to die” with wit, candor, and, always, remarkable grace. This emotionally riveting account probes the heart without sentimentality or self-pity....
| Author | Hannah Luce |
| ISBN | 1476729603 |
A remarkable true story of hope, survival, and faith lost and found . . .
On May 11, 2012, a small plane carrying five young adults en route to a Christian youth rally plummeted into a Kansas field. Only two survived the crash: twenty-seven-year-old ex-marine Austin Anderson, who would die the...
| Author | Buzz Bissinger |
| ISBN | 0547816561 |
A remarkable memoir from the best-selling author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August.
Buzz Bissinger’s twins were born three minutes—and a world—apart. Gerry, the older one, is a graduate student at Penn, preparing to become a teacher. His brother Zach has spent his life...
Leslie Brody, a newspaper reporter and mother of two, thought her life was finally heading in the right direction when she married Elliot Pinsley, a romantic, funny and brilliant editor with three kids of his own. But six years after their wedding, they learned that Elliot, only 55, had pancreatic cancer...
Zen Under Fire: How I Found Peace in the Midst of War
| Author | Marianne Elliott |
| ISBN | 1402281110 |
I am about to be left in charge of the office.
I'm not sure I'm ready for the responsibility, so I double-check with my boss. He reassures me.
"You'll be fine, Marianne. As long as no one kills Amanullah Khan, you'll be fine."
By midday, Amanullah Khan is dead.
Marianne Elliot is a...
| Author | Christa Parravani |
| ISBN | 0805096531 |
A blazingly passionate memoir of identity and love: when a charismatic and troubled young woman dies tragically, her identical twin must struggle to survive.
Christa Parravani and her identical twin, Cara, were linked by a bond that went beyond siblinghood, beyond sisterhood, beyond friendship....
| Author | Martha Grimes |
| ISBN | 1476724083 |
From the opening paragraphs of Double Double:“We were sitting in a coffee shop talking, looking at the view of downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. This was ten years ago, and we had both been off alcohol for more than a decade. We were disagreeing about the best way to stay sober, when my mother said,...
| Author | Patti Callahan Henry |
Heartbreaking, inspiring, and totally true—this e-original short non-fiction story sets the stage for New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry's novel And Then I Found You.
Patti Callahan is one of three sisters, a member of a close-knit Irish American family. Yet as happy...
Circles Around The Sun: In Search Of A Lost Brother
| Author | Molly McCloskey |
| ISBN | 1844882691 |
“My abiding wish was that my brother would quietly, miraculously, and without causing pain to anyone, as though he were simply ascending into heaven, disappear,” (Circles around the sun, page 6). How does a mother visit a son that has completely changed from the one she raised. How does a sister...
| Author | Bonnie Bader |
| ISBN | 0448464608 |
Who was Alexander Graham Bell by Bonnie Bader was a fantastic book. I really liked how he created the telephone and got a patent but other people/inventors still tried to say that they invented the telephone. I also liked how he helped people who were deaf use sound waves to start listening.
Aleck...
| Author | Shelby Smoak |
| ISBN | 1611860695 |
I am Caucasian, five foot eleven, have sandy brown hair, blue eyes, and am a tender slip of bone. And I am at the hospital. A coming-of-age memoir for modern times, Bleeder is the incredibly compelling tale of author Shelby Smoak. A hemophiliac, Smoak discovered he had been infected with HIV during a blood...
Stories for Boys: A Memoir
| Author | Gregory Martin |
| ISBN | 0983477582 |
In this memoir of fathers and sons, Gregory Martin struggles to reconcile the father he thought he knew with a man who has just survived a suicide attempt; a man who had been having anonymous affairs with men throughout his thirty-nine years of marriage; and who now must begin his life as a gay man. At a tipping...
| Author | Sara Connell |
| ISBN | 1580054102 |
In February 2011, 61-year-old Kristine Casey delivered the greatest gift of all to her daughter, Sara Connell: Sara’s son, Finnean. At that moment, Kristine—the gestational carrier of Sara and her husband Bill’s child—became the oldest woman ever to give birth in Chicago.
Bringing...
| Author | Susan Spencer-Wendel |
| ISBN | 1444762184 |
In June 2011, Susan Spencer-Wendel learned she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)--Lou Gehrig's disease--an irreversible condition that systematically destroys the nerves that power the muscles. She was forty-four years old, with a devoted husband and three young children, and she had...
In the opening of Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, Monica Wesolowska gives birth to her first child, a healthy-seeming boy who is taken from her arms for “observation” when he won’t stop crying. Within days, Monica and her husband have been given the grimmest of prognoses for Silvan, and they must...
The Day My Brain Exploded
| Author | Ashok Rajamani |
| ISBN | 1565129970 |
After a full-throttle brain bleed at the age of twenty-five, Ashok Rajamani, a first-generation Indian American, had to relearn everything: how to eat, how to walk and to speak, even things as basic as his sexual orientation. With humor and insight, he describes the events of that day (his brain exploded...
Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-of-the-Box Thinkers
| Author | Todd Rose |
| ISBN | 1401324274 |
In the seventh grade, Todd Rose was suspended—not for the first time—for throwing six stink bombs at the blackboard, where his art teacher stood with his back to the class. At eighteen, he was a high school dropout, stocking shelves at a department store for $4.25 an hour. Today, Rose is a faculty...
