I loved this book because it took me to a world I could never go to alone – inside the world of high-stakes emergency fire and trauma response.
The work of urban firefighters is both more dramatic
and more banal than I ever could have expected. Norton’s writing style is
lyrical and poetic, not at all what I expected from a jaded firefighter writing
about how tough it is to see people at the worst times of their lives.
Minneapolis firefighter Jeremy Norton sent me an advance copy of Trauma Sponges because we went to the same high school in Washington, DC, in the early 1980s. I am glad he did.
Beyond an adrenaline ride or a chronicle of bravura heroics, this unflinching view of a Minneapolis firefighter reveals the significant toll of emergency response
In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead.
From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as…
I
reread The Secret Place because I’m writing my first mystery, and reading
others helps me to study how other writers pull off complex plots and
believable protagonists.
Tana French is an Irish mystery writer with a flair
for complex, engaging characters and an intense sense of place, most often in Dublin. Her characters become as real to me as my own co-workers or siblings.
Her
plots twist and turn with great credibility. Rereading The Secret Place slowly
was a completely new experience – I noticed many details I’d overlooked the
first time I gobbled up this book.
"An absolutely mesmerizing read. . . . Tana French is simply this: a truly great writer." -Gillian Flynn
Read the New York Times bestseller by Tana French, author of the forthcoming novel The Searcher and "the most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years" (The Washington Post).
A year ago a boy was found murdered at a girls' boarding school, and the case was never solved. Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin's Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption:…
I love funny, realistic books
about motherhood. This account of how the author and her husband adopted five
children from Africa (in addition to their four biological children) was
hilarious, poignant, and real.
I laughed out loud in every chapter and cried a
few times. Melissa Fay Greene is a respected journalist, and I loved seeing a
far more personal aspect of her life and writing.
When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia."
Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. But she and her husband…
The Naked Truth explores the aging, sexuality, and self-confidence of women after age 50 through the eyes of
author Leslie Morgan as she audaciously dates five younger boyfriends following
the end of an unhappy marriage.
The intensity of marriage and motherhood, along
with juggling work and family demands, can result in women (and men) losing
touch with themselves.
This book is a
road map on how to find confidence and sexuality again at any age.
