PositiveForewordLuminous ... Complex and colored with songs, myths, and legends, Pearl is an exquisite novel that transforms darkness into light.
Priyanka Kumar
PositiveForeword ReviewsLuminous ... While it reflects concern with the ravages of climate change and humanity’s part in the crisis that the planet is facing, Conversations with Birds also points to a solution: forming a deep, personal relationship with the natural world and its creatures—one strong and vital enough to impel immediate action on their behalf.
Norman Lock
PositiveForeword ReviewsThe book’s cameo appearances by luminaries including President Abraham Lincoln (seen sitting up half the night wrapped in his old shawl) are moving and humane, contrasting with the harsh realities of the postwar period. They help to make Voices in the Dead House a stunning historical novel that brings history and literature together to share a singular perspective on the Civil War.
Cristina de Stefano, tr. Gregory Conti
RaveForeword Reviews... intimate, comprehensive ... The book’s absorbing narrative shows independent, determined Montessori facing health challenges; the effects of war; longing for her distant child; lack of adequate funds; and harsh criticism of her methods ... Bolstered by rare access to Montessori’s unpublished diaries, personal letters, notes, and texts, The Child Is the Teacher is a deep, comprehensive biography that rewards both intellect and emotion.
James Campbell
PositiveForeword ReviewsJames Campbell\'s Just Got Down to the Road is a humble and humorous memoir about the youthful pursuit of literary success...Just Go Down to the Road brings an exciting time in the world and literary history to life...It\'s a remarkable travel account that began with the simple suggestion: \'Just go down to the road, Jim. You\'ll get a lift.\'
Bernd Brunner, tr. by Jefferson Chase
PositiveForeword ReviewsPanoramic ... Extreme North, in showing that the idea of “North” was, from the very beginning, an invention, also reveals that the north’s pristine white expanses provided a blank canvas upon which the human heart revealed its own true intent.
Anne Liu Kellor
PositiveForeword Reviews... intimate and revealing ... Kellor is attentive to the legacies of war, famine, secrecy, and betrayal that are held in the silent, cellular memories of her ancestors. As the book progresses, she learns to accept that the only place she can truly belong is in her own essential nature. A story about love and loss, Heart Radical is a memoir that also expresses willingness to be broken open and vulnerable.
Charles Hood
RaveForeword ReviewsIn essays at once wry and hilarious, Charles Hood shares his delight in the overlooked, obscure, and downright ugly parts of nature ... With a poet’s sensitivity, Hood shows himself to be as in love with words as with what he sees around him ... his essays will charm, delight, and bring attention into high gear so that even a walk through an empty city lot will reveal treasures for the mind and heart.
Shiori Ito, Tr. Allison Markin Powell
PositiveForeword ReviewsIto narrates as though she’s still in shock ... Black Box is unforgettable as it exposes how patriarchal cultures and codes of silence deprive rape victims of justice.
Antonio Michael Downing
RaveForeword ReviewsDowning’s narration is compelling and disturbing ... The book relates the dark side of Canadian life and the difficulties of learning to be a man without a guide. Downing, struggling to overcome the lasting effects of colonialism, parental abandonment, and the shame of sexual abuse, took refuge in his music and hid his vulnerability beneath a series of personas. Eventually, he came to realize that he was, in some sense, all of them, and more ... an eloquent memoir about Anthony Michael Downing’s experiences as an immigrant in a minority population; it centers his resilience.
Chaney Kwak
RaveForeword Reviews... with its bare-bones honesty and dry, cynical humor, reveals that when all is said and done, it’s the little things that matter: small acts of courage and kindness, words of love, and gratitude for the gift of another day.
Ben Hopkins
RaveForeward ReviewsThe riveting story of the lives and motivations of cathedral builders: of humble serfs turned quarry workers; of visionary artists; of those who collected the harsh taxes and arranged the bequests that funded cathedral-building efforts; and of kings, emperors, and popes, each with their own motivations and purposes for building, which often had little to do with honoring the divine ... Cinematic in color and scope, the tale begins in 1229, in the Rhineland town of Hagenburg, where a young serf determines to use his carving skills, and money from Jewish lenders, to purchase his freedom ... the gripping narrative unveils a \'network of barterings, promises, investments, and gambles\' that twist and shape the lives of the young carver and fifteen others.
Philip Mansel
RaveForeword ReviewsPhilip Mansel’s King of the World chronicles Louis’s seventy-two-year reign ... Comprehensive and eminently readable, the book is enlivened by surprising facts about Louis, including how his voracious appetite in infancy (he is reported to have thoroughly exhausted eight wet nurses) foreshadowed his cult of self-glorification. And it lays the cause of the French Revolution to his having left behind a faulty financial system that prioritized palace building and continual warfare over the needs of French citizens ... Enhanced by lavish, full-color illustrations and meticulous notes and references regarding France’s turbulent history and the lifestyle of its royal court, Mansel’s book reveals both the glory and depravity of Louis XIV’s reign.
Julia Zarankin
PositiveForeword Reviews...moving, and often hilarious ... The book reveals that it was the wonder of the birds themselves that helped Zarankin heal, opening her eyes and her heart to a whole new way of being in the world.
Marc Petitjean, trans. by Adriana Hunter
PositiveForeword ReviewsThe book paints an intimate, unforgettable portrait of a brief but transformative time in Kahlo’s life and of the turbulent beginnings of France’s Surrealist Movement, which claimed the iconic Mexican artist as one of its own. Behind it all lies one of Kahlo’s most powerful paintings—a tortured, confrontational work that speaks of pain and transformation, abandonment and betrayal, in a voice of quiet dignity.
Jennifer Croft
RaveForeword Reviews... a tender, disturbing memoir of sisterly love that penetrates the insular world of childhood to reveal its secrets, loyalties, and fears ... [a] fine-spun narrative ... In this marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable, Croft follows Amy’s tortured path as she asks how far, and in what way, we are responsible for how loved ones’ lives play out. In her struggle to answer such questions, Amy learns the extent and limitations of love’s power.
Behrouz Boochani, Trans. by Omid Tofighian
RaveForeword ReviewsBehrouz Boochani is a young Kurdish journalist, poet, and refugee imprisoned on Australia’s Manus Island, and that his astonishing memoir No Friend but the Mountains exists at all is a miracle and a testament to his resilience ... As war, crime, famine, and civil disruption result in growing numbers of asylum-seekers, Boochani’s deeply disturbing memoir introduces readers to hard realities and reveals the wounded hearts of captors and prisoners alike.
Robert Matzen
RaveForeword Reviews...sensitive and deeply moving ... Matzen’s book reveals Hepburn’s grace and courage under fire through meticulous research that includes Hepburn’s own recollections, interviews with those who had known her during the war years, diaries, Dutch archival records, and never-before-seen photographs. A master storyteller, Matzen has given us a great story—intimate, intense, and unforgettable—that carries us not only into the heart of battle but into the heart of a great human being.
Michael Schumacher
RaveForeword ReviewsIn The Contest, Michael Schumacher not only covers the events that made headlines in 1968 but takes an intimate, moving, and often surprising behind-the-scenes look at the major players who made it a pivotal year in American history ... a rigorously researched and detailed book that not only conveys all the volatility, rage, intrigue, and belief in the possibility of change that characterized the election of 1968 but provides a deeply human record of the lives of the powerful figures whose decisions would chart the course of history.
Jason M. Colby
RaveForeword ReviewsColby shines a light on how little we understand of these magnificent creatures. His book gives a glimpse into a mysterious yet strangely familiar world, brought to life in a story that\'s tragic, heartbreaking, and finally hopeful.
