Structured around Gwendolyn Brooks’ seminal poem We Real Cool and a bus ride where Brian Broome observed a young Black boy named Tuan interacting with his father, this autobiography in essays is a profound, powerful examination of the life of a gay black man growing up in late 20th century America. Born and raised in …
Tag: Autobiography
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/18/punch-me-up-to-the-gods-a-memoir-by-brian-broome/
Apr 20 2021
Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir by Eloise Greenfield & Lessie Jones Little
Background on why I picked up this book: apparently, it was one of the three selections available to my 10 year-old for an autobiography reading assignment he had for school. I’m not sure how he wound up with this book instead of the other two, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/20/childtimes-a-three-generation-memoir-by-eloise-greenfield-lessie-jones-little/
Nov 15 2020
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I read Between the World and Me a lifetime ago, in early summer when it was strange to leave the neighborhood again after so many weeks of stillness. It is a hard book, not because of the difficulty of language or of its concepts, but because of the hardness of its subject: how to live …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/15/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/
Sep 30 2020
The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story by Thao Lam
This powerful picture book is a wordless recreation via metaphor of the author’s family’s journey from Vietnam to Canada at the end of the Vietnam War. Only two at the time, Thao Lam remembers little of the events themselves, but has taken her mother’s story and crafted it beautifully for this children’s book. Working in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/30/the-paper-boat-a-refugee-story-by-thao-lam/
Aug 28 2020
The ChildThat Books Built by Francis Spufford
The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford’s second book, published six years after his first, raises a publishing question that I have long been interested in, but one that I suspect does not have any firm answer. How does an editor spot someone whose first book or two are strong but who is likely to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/28/the-child-that-books-built-by-francis-spufford/
Feb 11 2020
M Train by Patti Smith
I loved Just Kids — it was one of my very favorite books of 2014 — so why didn’t M Train do much for me? Smith gives a bit of a warning in the book’s very first line, “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” (p. 3) The speaker is a cowpoke who is in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/11/m-train-by-patti-smith/
Nov 26 2019
More Becoming by Michelle Obama
“Becoming Us,” the second part of Michelle Obama’s memoir tells how two very different people, two nearly polar opposite people in fact, came not only to love and cherish one another but to build a life and a partnership that would work from Chicago to the whole world. One of their first social functions together, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/11/26/more-becoming-by-michelle-obama/
Sep 21 2019
Schellingstrasse 48 by Walter Kolbenhoff
For all that it is a Millionenstadt, Munich can also be quite a small town. Literary and artistic Munich even more so. Thus it’s not very surprising that in Schellingstrasse 48 (48 Schelling St.), Walter Kolbenhoff’s memoir of the Nazi era, POW internment in America, and early post-war Munich, other authors from the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/21/schellingstrasse-48-by-walter-kolbenhoff/
Sep 20 2019
Lines Composed a Few Yards from Schlachtensee, With Apologies to W.W.
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I read These pages, rolled from their printing-press With a rotary hum.—Once again Do I behold those last and polished drafts That many a wild scene describe, Acts the more connected to themes And th’ arguments of the plays. The …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/20/lines-composed-a-few-yards-from-schlachtensee-with-apologies-to-w-w/
Jun 19 2019
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Becoming really is that good. Here’s a lengthy excerpt from the beginning. There’s a lot I still don’t know about America, about life, about what the future might bring. But I do know myself. My father, Fraser, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, Marian, showed me how to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/06/19/becoming-by-michelle-obama/
Al Singh
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Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire