I’m a writer and editor and specialize in reviewing books written for adults and writing educational standards-based books and articles for kids and teens. My work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian, Publishers Weekly, and other publications.

Insightful, Personal Books Explore the Ongoing Fight for Gay Rights

Fifty years ago, on June 28, 1969, New York City police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The violent clash between the cops and patrons incited fierce protests around the country. It was an explosive turning point in the gay rights movement. A lot has changed since then. In September 2011, “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed, allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, making it legal in all 50 states. But, … [Read More...]

Featured Reviews: Adult Books

Death, Revisited: ‘Where Reasons End,’ by Yiyun Li, and ‘The White Book,’ by Han Kang

  There is no shortage of books about coping with death. Joan Didion’s devastating account of the year following the demise of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, comes to mind. Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her then-55-year-old mother’s death on Christmas Day in 2008 from metastatic colorectal cancer, is equally profound and heart-wrenching. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air — each written from a medical professional’s perspective (and in Kalanithi’s case, also as the dying patient) — pushed the boundaries of our collective understanding about what it means to confront and even learn to embrace … [Read More...]

Featured Reviews: Adult Books

The Parade by Dave Eggers

  If you’ve read any of Dave Eggers’ fiction in the last few years, you’re probably well aware that straight-up family-drama novels are not really his shtick. In the past decade, amid works of narrative nonfiction, children’s novels, and various long-form articles for such media outlets as the New York Times and the New Yorker, he’s churned out a quasi-allegory about the disgruntled and economically disintegrating middle-class America via a story about a man going through a midlife crisis (A Hologram for the King); an analysis of the boundaries (or lack thereof) of privacy, ethics and personal freedom in the age of the Internet via a young woman’s foray into working for a powerful social media company (The Circle); and a particularly ardent message-driven novel … [Read More...]