Tag Archives: book-reviews

Bearded Man On A Bus – New Book Recommendation

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http://www.amazon.com/Bearded-Man-Bus-Immigrants-Privilege/

A friend and Buddhist mentor, Daniel L. Smith, has written a new book: Bearded Man On A Bus and it’s the perfect book for me right now as I live out my new life as a recovering romantic. His book is filled with wandering wisdom and gave me some fresh insights for my life journey. Specifically:

  • “Trailways red and white – and – lost all over” p.9
  • “Backwoods Alabama – born here, raised here, still feels she doesn’t belong.” p.31
  • “Wondering if enough is sufficient, if enough is in the right direction, if enough means loving just one person, enough? P.41
  • “Wrens migrating after the storm, down from Ontario for the summer; unaware of the tumult a world away.” p.75
  • “She sits in front of her all too honest mirror, as a thousand times before, one thought away from last week’s fantasy, another from this week’s fleeting memory, just one ahead of the nothingness, she fears.” p.82
  • “Tonight you end right quick, right here at table, Momma stirs her sauce with a long knife.” p.88
  • “Toils and tears of some creator we see as absent, but intuit in the present moment, moss underfoot or sandy shore, we find forgiveness in the sky.“ p.92
  • “Yet, it’s communion we’re really after, isn’t it? Not conversation, not community, but true communion at source – all light and insight.” p.99
  • “It is difficult, this staying in tenderness, this wanting to be” p.102
  • “What follows in the darkness, all a fantasy anyway, there’s not much real about any of it, but she, she goes on and on, almost as if there is no beginning and no end” p.107

My thanks to author Daniel L. Smith who approved the sharing of his words above. If you’d like to read more of his “wanderer’s spiritual journey … a collection (of) hopeful poems, possibly, because life continues, nothing is permanent, and breathing is such a fundamental right to exploring the conditions necessary for happiness in all humans, regardless of origin, journey, or destination.” check out his book available on Amazon.

Memoir Analysis #4: Sloane Crosley

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http://www.amazon.com/Grief-People-Sloane-Crosley

“A best book of 2024 “, GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE by Sloane Crosley is the fourth book and author selected for memoir analysis. It’s a heart-wrenching memoir that addresses the theft of family jewelry AND even more devastating, loss of a best friend to suicide.

Here are a few quick observations:

  • “Is it wrong to say that a memoir about loss and grieving is fun to read? If so, I’m in trouble, because I enjoyed every word of this book. I also ached and suffered along with Sloane Crosley: Her portrait of mourning after the suicide of her best friend is gutting and deeply engaging.” Susan Orlean, author of The Orchard Thief,
  • It has approximately 57k words spread over 8 chapters.
  •  “Like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Grief Is for People takes us through the ordinary, awful, and never-quite-ending experience of loss. It also made me laugh very hard, many times. I can’t stop thinking about it.” — John Mulaney

Unlike the three books previously reviewed, Crosley’s book offers a poignant, gallows humor, tale of two emotional losses in 2019 which were further exacerbated by the pandemic that hit the world and her NYC lifestyle.

While all our worlds were severely disrupted by Covid 19, Crosley’s, foggy upside-down, world began some six months earlier and still defines her life five years later. Perhaps time does heal but not nearly as fast as we would hope. This book is definitely worth reading now and in the future.

More successful memoirs will be reviewed in the weeks to come.