I’m sorry this was delayed getting out. For those who have visited our store in recent decades you might want to know that our little Bichon Frise, Aurora (“Rory”) who we’ve had for almost 18 years, died a few days ago. It’s been a hard week in many ways…

This was going to be my last BookNotes of 2024 but I thought otherwise, then, and did that post about the incarnation, the humanness of Jesus, and the like. We don’t have that many customers who order theology books from us that often, so it was fun to feature a few important ones alongside the easier-to-read practical ones and have a number place orders. Thanks. It was important.

In this first BookNotes of the new year I want to feature some of the best memoirs I read this past year. Most were released in 2024 but a few are older but were new to me. Scroll down to the very end to see them all. You can easily order by clicking the link at the end.

As I’ve often said, there is much entertainment value and much wisdom to be gained by reading memoir. To learn how people narrate their own lives, how they search for meaning, how they do or don’t live well, it all is so colorfully interesting. To show how very committed we are to this genre, here is a list we published previously of about 50 great memoirs that we recommend. Enjoy.

Here, then is my list of just some of my favs in this genre from 2024. ALL ARE 20% OFF.

Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music Charlie Peacock (Eerdmans) $32.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39

Okay, may I list this as a 2024 read? It just came out, but oh yeah, rock on and flash the hook ‘em horns concert symbol — I read an advanced manuscript in 2024 so I’m laying this down, here, now. It just released a month early and we have a big stack. Did I say rock on? We sent out our pre-orders a day ago. Hooray.

Charlie Peacock is a performing artist (across a multitude of genres as you’ll see), a good writer, thinker, advocate for the arts, lover of books, and friend of Hearts & Minds so I’ll tell ya that I’m biased. I like books about the music industry and I like books about the arts and culture-making. This is tremendous insider pop music book (with fabulous blurbs from the likes of Dylan’s old pal T-Bone Burnett to abstract visual artist Mako Fujimura to the hip young artist known as H.E.R.) so if you enjoy name-checking oodles of household names — from Jackson Browne to Bono to Amy Grant) you’ll have a blast turning these pages. There are a few sections that may prove a tad tedious to those not in the know about pop session musicians or studies (or gear! Oh, there’s a lot about gear) but even casual fans should have a go at this. It is one of the most captivating books I’ve read in a while.

And some parts are simply exquisitely written. So good.

I heard Charlie speak at a small conference more than a decade ago, an event sponsored by Square Halo Books in Lancaster, PA. He contributed to their It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God and as he spoke at that event, years ago, about being an artful rock performer and creative record producer he told this marvelously crafted story about growing up in Yuba City in Northern California. About how his sense of place colored how he saw life and shaped his story. No simplistic Christian cliches, no inspirational verses, but just a great bit of performance art, lecturing about God’s creative call by way of telling his story. And man, I was surprised (he’d been reading Wendell Berry, I realized) and delighted. I find out now that some of that early rumination on his own place, his family tree, his family systems and DNA, really is vital. This is a storytellers story and it is brilliant.

I loved his early, innovative work in the hey-day of an alternative music scene in what has come to be known as CCM. (Think Exit Records or the new wave band Vector and the legendary 77s.) Hardly a thing anymore, CCM was once a huge industry and, like other music movements, had both the bland and the beautiful, those who were artful and those who were copycats. Decades ago sales reps would try to sell us on a given album release saying this hip, modern gospel singer “sounds just like  the Indigo Girls or Tears for Fears or Michael Jackson.” Well, they were often wrong about the similarities, and, anyway, how in the world is that the way to promote a talent stewarding their God given talent? Charlie resisted that cheap “Christian” world the best he could from the get-go.

Peacock — a stage name, by the way — came up in the West Coast almost punk scene but before that was taken with jazz. His great, great grandfather from Louisiana was a fiddler. His dad was a high school band leader, and good at it. We learn that young Charlie, who married his high school sweetheart, Andi, when they were still teens, was reading On the Road and The Dharma Bums and was serious about drugs and drinking; he was a truly ambitious and multi-talented kid and grew and his telling of listening to TV shows like Shindig, American Bandstand and Soul Train. One of the first songs he wrote that got sold went to the producers of The Monkees. He was into Dylan and James Taylor and Jackson and eventually would  perform with and eventually produce some of the edgiest artists of musical integrity the CCM scene ever saw. (They had good equipment, too — Richie Fury, a born-again Christian who left Buffalo Springfield, noted that one of the soundboards Charlie was working on was the one on which they cut For What It’s Worth.  Stop children, what’s that sound, indeed.

And, eventually, others; many others.  He rubbed shoulders with many of the greats from many genres — as white as he seems, he’s got some deep and lasting soul connections. One brief story tells of him pressing the great Al Green for a better vocal for which Charlie was doing takes. Yikes!

The book recalls his coming to faith in one of the very best conversion narratives I have ever read. With intellectual acuity and personal, raw honesty and keen insight into the cultural baggage he explains how he came to embrace the gospel and profess Christ. Testify! His respect for and commitment to principles of sobriety discovered in AA is wonderfully drawn. His honesty is at times raw — more than once he airs some unpleasant feuding with other artists — which is refreshing without being maudlin or gossipy. He has seen some ups and downs and he has matured in ways that have allowed him to mentor many young artists in various settings.

He and Andi started a significant ministry of safe spaces for artists of all sorts — Art House, which they’ve poured their life into — and wrote a couple of books calling for a smashing of the lines between the so-called sacred and secular. He was so ensconced in the CCM world (especially when then moved to Nashville) that it was hard to break fully out of that scene himself, even as he started record labels and championed artists across the divides of perspective and genre.

Roots and Rhythm — is he alluding to a line from Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies”? — is a magisterial memoir, a life story of a public figure (the only guy I know who has to attend the Grammy’s sometimes.) It is a study of his roots, his family, a history of the stuff that made him, his faith, and his navigating his sense of calling in the music industry.

The book starts not in his early days (he’ll get to that) but with the sadly published break up of a band duo that Charlie helped mentor and helped turn them into Grammy Award winning major rock stars with the critically acclaimed Barton Hollow. The chapter is called “The Uncivil Wars” and is about the break-up of the band The Civil Wars at the very height of their fame. It is anguishing, really, and a captivating start.

As I stayed up late reading an early copy of this 300+ page book (including pictures and discographies and lists) I knew we had a winner. As I’ve said, I love music memoirs — Robbie Robertson’s Testimony and Bono’s Surrender being two fabulous examples — and I felt like this was almost in that league. In a way, it was even better because Charlie (if not quite in the league of Robbie and Bono) worked in their world; the picture of Bono at their Art House using a borrowed guitar leading folks in “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love” is priceless. The picture of him with Peter Frampton was surprising; his story about a friend who first produced Prince;  man this man wore a big man’s hat. If you care about popular music, you will love this, I’m sure.

But, also, he was a major player in the CCM world that was the backdrop to so many of our best friends and customers and events here at the shop. I loved reading the stories of the world-class famous — he’s friends with Vince Gill,  produced the daughter of Hank Williams, Jr and on and on , but Charlie is also an advocate for greater artistry in the very industry we played a small role in. He’s worked with the best in this subculture, from Mike Roe to Sarah Groves to Sarah Mason to Switchfoot. In this sense, it is simply a must-read for anybody who cares about this scene.

I do wonder if those who aren’t familiar with Nashville record producers or session musicians, who don’t know T-Bone Burnett from Rick Rubin from Margaret Becker from Switchfoot, who don’t even care about Keaggy or Amy Grant, will care much about this. It is a beautifully crafted memoir but even as it says in the promo, it is filled with “geeky trivia.” So it goes.

Yet I want to assure you, dear and gentle reader, that the stuff about his past, his growing up, the influence of his place and his people’s story, are gorgeous and significant. The threads connecting his fabric of faithfulness are well written and even without the geeky trivia this is a memoir well worth having. You will be surprised as he reflects on the influence of the Redbone phrase (and at least two recording artists who used that moniker) and his own racial heritage and just cool stuff — he talks about a retreat on food and farming led, in part, by Ellen Davis, a Bible teacher at Duke and an Alice Water’s trained chef. How intersting!

Here’s my reply to those who might say that they aren’t into the music scene (or books about the sports scene or the political scene or whatever.) I think there is much to be learned by any story of anybody who takes their faith seriously and lives it out in their particular calling, who has an open mind and an open heart, as they try to be faithful to their sense of vocation in the world. That is a gift and you can be inspired for your own particular vocations and occupations.

In Roots & Rhythms Charlie represents, in full color, an example for us all, pushing the limits of the boxes his industry put him in, being an agent of reformation and reform, wondering about the social and “common good” influence of his own career, standing firm despite setbacks, being faithful as best he could alongside his wife and kids, as a family. This “in the world but not of it” transforming vision is illustrated with story after story of somebody being true to their sense of call, their opportunities and limits, doors that opened, doors that slammed shut. From his earliest days — his dad was a music teacher in California — to his introduction to the feisty California music scene, his conversion to radical faith, to his work as record executive and producer, he tells us how it all played out. Even chapters with a few too many tedious names and titles, are delightfully shared under the rubric of chapter titles like “Imagination, Interdependence, and the Bonds of Affection.”

And who knew political figures like Mike Gerson would show up, or that there would be stories about Eugene Peterson or Shara Worden (aka My Brightest Diamond) and her involvement in urban gardening in Detroit.

It isn’t a big part of this decades-spanning memoir, but he and his wife, Andi, did just release a strong collection of pieces — written as letters — that we’ve raved about earlier this year. Called Why Everthing That Doesn’t Matter Matters So Much. It’s fabulous.

Surely his story, in his setting and context, isn’t your own. Maybe you’ve never heard his famous Lie Down in the Grass or his latest jazz compositions. Maybe you’ll skip a paragraph or two about the tech and recording gear (but you will be amazed by the lovely story of finding a long-lost, vintage electric piano in the home of a band he was visiting, decades after the piano had been sold!) I think you’ll enjoy learning about it all, and maybe take inspiration. He’s a hard-working writer and Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music is a book for us all.

Roots and Rhythm is the play of youth with the wisdom of age merging into a beautiful fireworks show. We all desperately need the sorts of honest, sage stories Charlie tells about the artful life–to see, in ourselves, the merging of the girl in the woman, the boy in the man, simultaneously growing more playful, imaginative, and wise. — Sara Groves, recording artist and cofounder of Art House North, St. Paul, Minnesota

I wish I could communicate all the admiration and respect I have for Charlie with a fraction of the artistry he possesses. He is an amazing, soulful storyteller at all times — as an author with Roots & Rhythm, as a musician, improviser, producer, songwriter –and a man of faith, family, integrity and more. I am so very grateful to know him!  —John Patitucci, Grammy Award-winning bassist, solo artist, educator, and multi-decade collaborator with jazz legends Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter

Lyrically written and richly textured, Roots and Rhythm is the best sort of memoir: captivating, entertaining, and subtly coaxing readers to live their own lives more wholeheartedly. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez,  Jesus and John Wayne

The truest masters always teach over the shoulder and through the heart, inviting others to come alongside and listen carefully to the storied insight of their years. In his new memoir, Charlie Peacock — musician extraordinaire –invites the wide world into his life, sharing about the music and musicians of the modern world as he reflects on the vocation that makes sense of who he is and, why he is, and what he has done. With rare understanding of the nexus of imagination and the marketplace, Roots and Rhythm offers philosophical and theological insight into Charlie’s unique pilgrimage as an artist of unparalleled creativity and surprising generosity, nurturing the hearts and minds of a generation of singers and songwriters who long to learn from the master.   — Steven Garber, Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good and The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work

Between Two Trailers: A Memoir J. Dana Trent (Convergent) $27.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

Beth and I both were nearly breathless reading this complicated story of a girl raised among drug dealing, on-again-off-again, church folks, written in great prose in what Erin Lane calls a “ludicrously good plot.” This coming-of-age story is about trauma and resilience, witty and amazing. The forward is, curiously, by her friend the exquisitely charming and theologically astute Barbara Brown Taylor. My NYC friend Jonathan Merritt says it is a “tough tale to tell but Trent communicates it with a winsome charm.”

Micha Boyett (who recently wrote Blessed Are the Rest of Us) says it is:

“…in the vein of great literary coming of age narratives like The Liars Club and This Boys Life.”

There is so much I could say about this remarkable memoir. Don’t miss it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story Leslie Jamison (Little Brown) $29.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

I want to say that while this may not be for everyone, it was perhaps the most compelling and engaging book I read all year. I cannot believe how moved I was by it, how captivated and interested. It has received extraordinary praise and Ms. Jamison is an extraordinary writer at the top of her craft. She has written literary fiction, memoir, sociological studies, immersive journalism. She is known for writing about recovery in the stunning The Recovering and was world-class famous for a bit after the release of The Empathy Exams. She is a bit postmodern, vivid, at times vulgar, deeply self-reflective, and this memoir looks at some of her life of what Maggie Smith (of You Could Make This Place Beautiful fame) says is “a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life.” Indeed. Wow.

The writing is, as Smith notes, “as sharp and piercing as its title” but it remains a riveting look into a woman and her writing, her sexuality, her marriage and divorce, her grief, and — this is huge — her parenting. I do not think I have read as moving a narrative about mothering an infant and then a toddler, ever. As an artist with a place in the literary world, she, still, has to deal with her deep, deep love for her daughter and it is nothing short of remarkable.

One reviewer said she is “unstinting in her assessment of marriage gained and lost, of motherhood held close, and of loving oneself in the process…” (Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood.)

In this work of stunning emotional depth, she offers “a portrait of rupture that is at once a page-turner about divorce, a romance about parenthood, a mystery of self after splintering, and a promise that however many times we break or are broken, art and love will never fail to mend us.”

As Heather Havrilsky writes, “No one else I’ve read has evoked so powerfully what it feels like to be pulled by too many competing tethers until you’re half a mother, half a writer, barely a wife, hardly a real person…”

“No one else I’ve read has evoked so powerfully what it feels like to be pulled by too many competing tethers until you’re half a mother, half a writer, barely a wife, hardly a real person…”

If you care about any new mothers who have dangerous marriages and hard living conditions, this book will grab your heart.

I wish that some mature and non-judgmental Christian with insight into the cultural mores of our elite, urban artists and who has psychological wisdom might offer a review of this showing how it captures much of a certain zeitgeist and how a normative, Godly perspective might make a difference for those so caught in this sort of mess. Disapprove of some of her lifestyle choices and values, as you may, this book still has a profound and loudly beating moral heart. I will never stop thinking about it, I’m afraid.

My Life in Seventeen Books: A Literary Memoir Jon M. Sweeney (Monkfish) $23.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $18.40

I announced this before but didn’t say too much; one could go on and one about each chapter, but the gist of this clever project is, as you might surmise, a reflection on his life by way of books that influenced him. Karen Swallow Prior’s first brilliant book, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, was just this sort of thing — an idea I had considered doing myself at various points, unless I did rock albums, which could piece together a life story almost as well — and Sweeney’s considerable intellect and generous spirituality shines through. He is a former bookseller, a longtime publisher, and prolific author and he’s not messing around here..

From Tagor’s Gitanjali to Buber’s Hasidic Tales he has been influenced — carried, as he puts it — by many sorts of books. He has written about Merton, himself, and his chapter on Furlong’s Merton bio (which he took on his honeymoon!) is a great chapter. His piece on Wendell Berry is lovely.  His piece about acquiring a nearly controversial, small book about Saint Francis — he was deep in an obsession at the time, writing a lot about him professionally — is fabulous.

Sweeney makes it clear in the beginning that these are not his favorite books, really, not even the most influential in his life. They are, as he puts it, books he carried. Some of this is sheer magic (or as the back cover says,” ‘enchantment.” What does he mean by having “carried” these? Take up and read and you’ll find out.

Somehow: Thoughts on Love Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books) $22.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

I adore the writing chops of this upbeat and thoughtful writer, an old bohemian who came to Christian faith in a colorful manner years ago and has held a space for many of us who appreciate her open-minded soulfulness and her utter candor. Her book about birth and parenting as a single mom, her book about writing (Bird By Bird) and her many collections of essays all strike me as more interesting and vivid than her acclaimed novels. This new collection of storytelling is generally on love. More specifically, it tells of her own falling in love later in life and her recent marriage.

This wonder of a book is about love. She has plenty to say. You will enjoy it and maybe learn a bit, shaking you up and giving you new hope. You will smile along the way, belief me.  She’s right, you know: “One day at a time, and somehow one hour at a time, love will be enough to see us through.” Don’t you need a reminder?

“Full of the compassion ad humanity that have bade her beloved by millions of readers, Somehow is classic Anne Lamott: funny, warm, and wise.”

Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practicing of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway Stephanie Duncan Smith (Convergent) $26.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

I earlier highlighted this, perhaps more than once, announcing that it surely is one of my votes for a best book of 2024. I love creative memoir and this captures so much, so well. Duncan Smith is a very fine writer and here vulnerably shares essentially a year in her life, a year of miscarriage and loss, of living into the church calendar, of new joy and hope. My, my, what a lovely, poignant, and well-told story. She is a writer to know and to watch.

Called (by therapist and writer J.S. Park) “a soaring memoir” he goes on to suggest it is “a meditation on birth and death, a reassuring theology that does not rush or reduce… Even After Everything is a special work written from both impossibly hard experience and intimate brushes with heaven.” Yes!

Kayla Craig, who has the handsome book for family to do devotions around the church year (Every Season Sacred) called it “expansive” noting that it “beckons us to reflect on our own experiences of time, self, and the One present in every beautiful, broken season.” I am sure that is one of the reasons I was so taken with it, her sense of wonder even admits hard stuff.

Hillary McBride, author of The Wisdom of Your Body and Practices for Embodied Living: Experiencing the Wisdom of Your Body, says, in regard to her own miscarriage and other embodied hurts, writes,

“I have been longing for words that contain the wordlessness of these experiences I found the words I needed in this book, each page undoing my aloneness, creating a choreography of connection to the rhythm of the cycles of nature, and inviting me even more deeply into the sacredness of the path of living as a body. I never wanted the book to end.”

Ghosted: An American Story Nancy French (Zondervan) $28.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

I have “hand sold” this to more people than perhaps any book this year, pressing it on anyone even vaguely interested in the art of memoir or anyone even vaguely interested in the conflict among us in these United States, these days. Nancy French tells of her Appalachian upbringing, her legalistic and emotional religion, an abusive situation in college, her meeting the charming but reasonable lawyer and thoughtful Christian apologist, David French, who believed in her. They fall in love and eventually become, together, legendary Christian operatives within the rising Republican Party; she finds herself as a ghost writer (having worked with very well known names of the right-wing of previous decades.)

Ghosted is at times fun and humorous but it is also a complicated and agonizing story — as I’ve written before it is just so gripping — but when they wouldn’t back Trump in his first Presidential bid they became disillusioned with some on the far-right, especially religious friends. More than a few of their Trumpian friends and colleagues were brutally outspoken against them and the story quickly turns harrowing.

Nancy and David were Christians, first, and couldn’t abide Trump’s degrading abuse of women or his dishonesty or his narcism or his cluelessness about the gospel, and, further, they were principled conservatives who couldn’t abide Trump’s odd-ball lack of virtue-based, conservative policy. After a stint in the Army serving in Iraq (a moving section of the book) David stopped writing for the National Review, they experienced ugliness of the sort one can hardly imagine (some of it blatantly racist; they had adopted an African child and the alt-right got grossly involved in trolling them) and, as this story continues, were in the middle of firestorm as Nancy advocated for abuse victims from the country’s largest evangelical camping program. It is a heck of a read.

I recommend this to anybody who loves a good tale, who appreciates the glories of the art of memoir. I recommend this to anyone who is disillusioned with the Christian right as it explores how they did or didn’t manage to keep friends once they shifted away from that stained ideology. And I recommend it to anyone who still holds sway for conservative evangelicalism and/or the MAGA right. It illustrates how some in your circles have treated well-intended, decent, folks, and you owe it to yourselves to realize how bad some of this has gotten; you need to read this so you can work to distance your movement from the sorts of evil harassment and vile mistreatment they faced. Like them or not, this is a book to read and ponder. I encourage you to read it now.

I didn’t know writing could be this haunting and hilarious, heartbreaking and exhilarating all at the same time. I did not want it to end. This tour de force of storytelling and sense-making is one of the most gripping and beautiful memoirs in a generation. In these pages, Nancy French takes us beyond this confusing American moment right into the soul of our shared human condition, full as it is of gore and glory. You will not close this book the same as you were when you opened it. — Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America

I picked up Ghosted only once, not putting it down until I had read every page. This is a captivating account of a child, a girl, and then a woman buffeted by unthinkable betrayals who withstood despair and surrender and remained true to her values. Her uncommon character and integrity educate and inspire. — Mitt Romney

Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found Mike Cosper (IVP) $24.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

This stunning book came out last February and I have highlighted it often. It tells the painful story of Cosper’s drift from his church-planting circles, a growing sense of disappointment and even betrayal as he realizes that some in his community had become — how to say this? — taken with ideologies of the far right and beholden to funders who did not want to speak about racism or nationalism for fear of being considered woke.

Cosper has published with Crossway, written about orthodox faith and serious worship, and was a leader in an evangelical church planting network, so the shattering of his dreams (and his artsy evangelical ministry among bohemians and other hipsters in his Midwest city) was a shock, a hard, hard shock. He did not see this coming or the emotional toll it would take.

Two things that make this honest reflection a stand out read: it tells what it is like to go through the doubts and confusions when one feels in some sense exiled from one’s own faith tradition and home. That his pain led to symptoms of burnout is not surprising, nor is his sense of being adrift, a sojourner. This well written story is a glimpse that many of us may benefit from and I very highly recommend it.

Secondly, though, as I have noted before, this is superimposed on, or given shape by, a series of every-other-chapter pieces of Bible study set on the ground of the holy land. He literally goes to the land of Jesus and reflects on that place, to give a counter-balance to the narcism and crisis of leadership he was observing in some high-profile evangelical communities.

You may know that Cosper was behind one of the most talked about podcasts of recent yearsThe Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. You may have heard of his brand new book, The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement which we have also commended. Through all this study of the dark side of evangelicalism, he is not a cynic and he is a caring critic. Land of My Sojourn tells his backstory and it is important and captivating.

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden Camille Dungy (Simon & Schuster) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I wrote about this last year, naming it as one of the Best Books of that year, but it has been released in paperback in 2024 so I am delighted to highlight it again, if only briefly. Beloved by many, this memoir is mostly about a black woman — a college literature professor and esteemed poet — re-doing her yard in Fort Collins, Colorado. The only person of color on her street and the only one turning her downtown lawn into a wilder garden, a natural habitat for native species and critters, it has an edge of drama to it. (Not everyone is at first pleased with her seemingly unusual plantings and yard design.)

So, yes, there are themes about racism and ecology, digressions on environmental racism, rants about uniform lawns, info on invasive weeds and natural history, upbeat encouragement about gardening and important reporting on black history and resilience. And more — written in a usually heartwarming style. Mostly, it is an inspiring book about a black woman (and her husband and child) who learn to love, again and again, their soil.

I love how one advanced review said,

“In Soil, Dungy plants poems next to memoir next to critical analysis next to environmental history next to African American history.”

Upbeat fellow gardener and poet Ross Gay says it is “brilliant and beautiful memoir.” Enjoy!

Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White American Julia Lee (Holt) $26.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Wow, this is a memoir that (in the words of Phuc Tran, author of the great Sigh, Gone, set right here in central Pennsylvania) “that brims with wit, intelligence, vulnerability, and delicious rage.” He continues, saying it is a “firm manifesto of ‘an angry little Asian girl’ that delivers on so many levels.”

Lee’s mentor, the world-famous Jamaica Kincaid (the book title is a line from a Kincaid story) says it is “vivid, powerful, and empathic.”  It is by turns tender, academic, full of insight and rage and a bit of hope.

Yes, Julia Lee is a good writer. And yes, she has a stunning story. But throughout she features not only her own experience as an Asian-American girl becoming a young woman and professional scholar, but shifts to social analysis, cultural studies, American history, and the nuances of experience that many Asian Americans feel growing up “between black and white.”

I love these kinds of books that offer both personal memoir and searing social commentary. We learn a lot about (an) Asian American [Korean] view on all sorts of things making up recent American history — she came of age in LA during the awful uprising caused by the Rodney King verdict — and reflects about her own experiences of racism (even if somehow different than racism against blacks.) The relationship of blacks and Asians (not to mention Latinx and First Nations peoples, which she explores at length, ashamed of how little she knew about indigenous people and how little — even as an outspoken progressive activist in her older years — she cared.) Kimberly Jones (an anti-racist writer) notes that it is both fearless and vulnerable.

As Jones puts it, “this is the book my heart that wasn’t my story to tell, so I’m elated that Lee cracked open her heart for us to travel with her.”

Memoirist Kiese Laymon (of Heavy) calls it “phenomenal” and “a lush treatise on the politics of expectation.”

She is vulgar and passionate, at times frustratingly immature and other times heroically insightful. It’s a great read. Her mother is a character (a first generation immigrant from Korea, born in the North) and, like with any captivating memoir, you are drawn into her family’s drama. Her discussion of her uncomfortable years at Princeton are shocking. (I had no idea that the “Southern most Ivy League school”, as it is often called, was so racially-fraud, so full of caste and class.) Her expose of the dining clubs and frats and ethos there was hard to read, even if at times bitingly snide, and an important part of her story. For anyone that works in higher education, this book is illuminating.

David Chang (of Momofuku) says it is “awe-inspiring.”

Chang continues,

“…this book is a must-read for anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of Korean han, the Asian American experience, and the power of resilience.”

1974: A Personal History Francine Prose(Harper) $27.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

I thought this was going to be a fun, broadly conceived study of this mid-70s year that was important for me, and for the country. I graduated from high school in 1972; fell in love a couple of times in college, got more serious about my Christian calling, worked with the handicapped, met Beth and married after college in 1976. Why wouldn’t I want to read this cool memoir? I was told it was “spellbinding.” I was up for that.

I had no idea. No idea at all. And I will tell you now that while it may not be for everyone, it is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. For surprise and intrigue and candor and weirdness and power, it is almost as good as the stunning What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (set in El Salvador) by poet Carolyn Forche. 1974 has the same urgency, the same political vibrancy, the same revolutionary energy. It feels to me, not unlike Forche’s, that it would be set a bit earlier. Its plot line starts, most directly, in 1971 when the Pentagon Papers were released.

Yes, this is, as one reviewer put it, “a stunningly alive portrait of the artist as a young woman, set during that dizzying time when the hopeful loveliest of the ‘60s morphed into the murky violence of the ‘70s.” It is, as Caroline Leavitt continues, “Heartbreaking, hating, and indelible.” Prose is a writer, artist, professor, and her story is important for anyone interested in the creative arts and integrity as a writer.

Yet, the heart of the book is — to put in simply — her friendship (and romance, sort of) with one of the two men that published the infamous Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg is a hero to many of us, and his name is well known. Tony Russo, however, did not become as well known, even though he was the one of them that did horrific jail time for his part in being a whistleblower against the lies of the U.S. Government. Tony Russo, once released (and with Ellsberg and his wife distancing themselves from him) was obsessed. He was emotionally distraught, paranoid, perhaps (okay, more than perhaps.) As Prose tells it, she herself didn’t quite know what to make of it all. Russo certainly exemplified at least one aspect of the early 1970s and the aftermath of the anti-war efforts. How could she ever move on after having known him?

Russo saw first hand the horrors of what we did ( and what we covered up) in Viet Nam. The torture, haunting, gross stuff,  all of it. He came back outraged and committed and, soon enough, crazy, maybe. His telling of the tale is vital for us all, now more than ever. Her coping with this wounded warrior of the anti-imperialist left, her loving this unstable man, her effort to be a writer amidst the hard politics (and his own grievances) makes this a book I will never forget. I swear I will never forget.

The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing (And How I Got Out) Tina Nguyen (Atria) $28.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

Back after 9-11 when we all learned about jihadists and suicide bombers many of us read several memoirs or stories about those who were, as we put it, “radicalized.” How did it happen, often ordinary Muslim folks turning viciously anti-American. Some of it was so extreme it wasn’t just an awareness about American militarism or injustices. Something deeply serious was happening as people changed their entire worldviews.

I do not at all mean to suggest (I do not!) that those hoodwinked by the MAGA ideology and the dishonesty at the heart of the Trump movement are like evil suicide bombers. Not at all. I only start with that recollection to say that I have long found it helpful to read books about people explaining why they’ve come to believe as they do. Tina Nguyễn does this in plain but vivid prose, telling her story of growing up in political and socially conservative circles, landing a job in right wing media, coming to know, well, just about everybody in those heady tea-party years. As an Asian American woman she had a certain uniqueness and she only occasionally comments on the racial aspects of her growing disillusionment with the far right ideology she so fully embraced for decades.

This is at once a coming of age memoir — an immigrant’s daughter, striving as many Asian American families do, her ending up in debate and college journalism. What a story — I also love stories about college life and this is a good window into her experiences as a minor (and politically-active conservative) in higher education. She went to the legendary Claremont McKenna College and was involved in the Salvatori Center. (If you don’t know their orientation and vision, get this book immediately!)

Her job search and coming into the adult years is fabulously told. Her first job was with a little known gent named Tucker Carlson. She goes on to Grover Norquist, ReasonTV, dinners with Peter Thiel, “conventions that rival Coachella” and working at The Daily Caller and eventually with the likes of Breitbart and Bannon.

She dated a guy who grew darker and darker, with connections in the growing neo-Nazi movement — this is an important part of the story… As with other thoughtful evaluations of the election-denying, Trumpian extremists, she notes that much of her own conservative formation happened before the Trump thing happened and her own libertarian and principled conservative (she can argue about political philosopher Leo Strauss!) social concerns seemed increasingly foreign to the wild new MAGA movement and their Groypers and QAnon allies. That she is now a critical reporter of Trump’s policies — it took a while for her to get a legit job at mainstream media sources — is quite the conversion story.

One big take-away — and she explores this with passion once she leaves the fold of the MAGA faithful — is how she was enfolded into the movement, mentored, given many (many!) opportunities for networking. She goes to a summer “right wing camp” and assumes this is normal. The think-tanks and financial grants and scholarships and communal housing and paid internships are just everywhere in the right wing ecosphere. Later, she was aghast that Democrats, for instance, have little vision for creating an upcoming generation of well-informed young adults, mentored and guided to a career track in changing the world. There is, clearly, a thought-out, systematized on-ramp for young Republicans to enter the world of new right politics.

This is hugely informative for anyone wanting a glimpse at how the extreme right operates these days (and she spills the beans, in passing, about what billionaires fund what think-tanks, from AEI to Cato to The Rockford Institute to Heritage to the American Action Forum to IHS at George Mason to the National Journalism Center to the Charlemagne Institute (and money from Koch, Bradley, et al.) The footnotes with further documentation — I had never heard of the Bradley Foundation’s influence — is worth the price of the book if you want to know what’s up and who helps play a hidden role in the radicalization of decent conservatives. Besides the scary details, it’s a great read, a fun memoir about a witty woman’s journey finding her way (with her mom looking over her shoulder much of the time. Yep, there’s lots of that, giving it a good feel.) I think The MAGA Diaries is a book we should know.

Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness Carrie Sheffield (Center Street) $29.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Wow, this is one of those books that if you pick it up you won’t want to put it back down. There are a number of reasons why this is an important read and I might revisit it eventually. There is much to say, much to ponder, much to care about as a book like this can create not only greater empathy within the hearts of readers, but offer insight on how some parts of our broken world works.

And what grace looks like.

She says it is a story about sabotage. Wow.

This is one hell of a story, the memoir of a woman raised in a family of what some have called “Mormon fundamentalists” or extremist polygamists who have broken away from the fairly staid Latter Day Saints. The LDS church long ago renounced polygamy and other raunchy aspects of their odd cultish legacy. But there are those who with the radical zeal of extremists everywhere take it upon themselves to found a new cult, more authoritarian and wild-eyed than even Brigham Young. (One of the latest fundamentalist Mormons says he is the Holy Spirit and Father of Jesus; they recently left Utah to Montana.) Carrie Sheffield’s family were part of this dangerous tribe of fundamentalist Mormons, akin to the infamous Ron and Dan Lafferty and other “School of Prophets” folks written about so compellingly in Jon Krakauer riveting Under the Banner of Heaven.

Sheffield’s toxic family was not only caught up in a web of cultic religiosity but were, in some cases, mentally ill. Her brother tried to rape her. Her father was dangerous. Etc. They lived in tents, sheds, a motorhome, always on the run. As the fifth of eight children she saw it all.

Her story is hers to tell and she tells it well. Motorhome Prophecies isn’t as violent as Under the Banner but makes Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy or even Tara Westover’s great Educated: A Memoir look like kid’s stuff. Her journey out of abuse and weirdness is nearly miraculous. She ends up at Harvard, involved in conservative politics, struggling with post-traumatic stress and yet becoming a well-loved, positive individual. But there’s more.

Here’s the very short version. She comes to understand traditional Christian faith, attending — get this! —-both Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian (a culturally-savvy but theologically conservative PCA congregation of some fame in Manhattan) and was in part mentored by the gracious and charming, then-presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA, Rev. Michael Curry. (His book Crazy Christian and the sermon he preached for the Royal wedding a few years back touched her deeply.) Rev. Curry baptized her and, she told me, they love talking about their differences in theology, social policy, politics and more. She loves that sort of civil diversity in the church. I figure that if she knows Curry (and he has a rave review on the back of the book) and Tim Keller, she has my attention.

It isn’t every book that has a great blurb on the back from Amy Chia (Yale Law School professor and author if Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) and Dr. David Brat of Liberty University. And Deepak Chopra.  (He writes that her “spiritual transformation from exploited, angry skeptic to a full embrace of God’s transformative, healing power is a powerful witness to the world.”

Bratt writes:

The story of Motorhome Prophecies is a universal one: Jesus heals. Carrie Sheffield’s horrific abuse at the hands of people who should have protected her shows the brokenness of humanity. But Carrie’s story also illustrates our capacity for redemption and renewal by walking with God and trusting in His justice and sovereign grace. Carrie illustrates the heart of God: leading by loving our neighbors who believe differently than us.

What the Taliban Told Me Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster) $29.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

I know that not everybody looking for an inspiring and entertaining bit of literary memoir wants to dive into a somber and heady read about the war in Afghanistan. But, frankly, this is an anguishingly beautiful book, compelling and wise. It is hard to read at times but it seems somehow very, very important. Matt Gallagher (who wrote the highly-regarded Kaboom about “a savage little war”) says that What the Taliban Told Me is not only beautifully told (“with rare honesty and seeking”) but that it “introduces Ian Fritz as a powerful moral and literary voice.”

Fritz was an airborne linguist tasked with listening in on suspected Taliban communications and he grew to know them intimately. He perhaps understood them better than most — their wants, their fears, their hopes and dreams. Gallagher suggests that this “transcended the normal boundaries of war.” What that means is the thrust of this book, how a service member deployed to a war zone might come to transcend those boundaries.  Not only does it put a human face on the energy, it tries to actually understand them.

Look — I have little sympathy for Taliban extremists. I do not think Fritz does, either; this is not a book suggesting they really are decent guys. HIs two tours of duty, monitoring on the ground conversations in real time, allowed his fellow soldiers to do deathly battle. In a memorable line he says that much of this book came from “listening to the dead.” He saved lives in some cases, and he caused much death and destruction, people and villages he was listening to, often just moments before they were blown to bits.

As the flyleaf cover tells us, he started his first deployment with the Air Force with great pride. After realizing his role in so much death he ends “with near-suicidal despair that he’s been instrumental in destroying the voices he’s heard in service of a war he and so many service members know is lost.” This is an intimate reckoning, to say the least.

We were involved in this war for twenty years or more. The memoir offers a stark moral perspective, starting with understanding these Afghan rebels and their faith and their desires, and, eventually, coming to learn much about himself. It is, as the publisher notes, “a coming of age memoir in a war that is lost.”

PRE-ORDER Pilgrim: A Theological Memoir Tony Campolo (Eerdmans) $23.99  / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19 // not yet released – due February 2025 

Oh my goodness, how can I tell you how much I appreciated this, how much I enjoyed it, how many memories it brought back. I could tell you how it made me feel — recalling Campolo’s powerful sermons, his great oratorship, recalling his fun conversations behind the prominent (and not so prominent) stages where I had the privilege to hang out with him on occasion. We did some projects together and while we were not good, good friends (even though he always treated me with enthusiasm) I cared for him deeply. I’ve got a few little stories. So, yes, this book means a whole lot to me.

After his passing this past November (and having lost Ron Sider last year) it feels like the end of an era for me and Beth.

But, frankly, I think I’d have enjoyed this fascinating story and would have been moved by it (even if frustrated by a bit of it) no matter if I had never heard of him or sold his many good books.

Anybody who was part of the evangelical world of the last generation, trying to help it become more social conscious (or maybe then resisting the push and pull towards social engagement) will love his telling of his role in some of what I might call the first battle — when traditional evangelicals thought cultural engagement with the arts and sciences, let alone working to liberate the poor and oppressed, was second-level stuff, not so important as evangelism and praising the Lord; you will love hearing Tony recounting his efforts to meld evangelism and social concern. Hooray for this. He pulled it off and many of us were very glad for his feisty proclamation of the Lordship of Christ over all of life, including his advocacy to alleviate poverty and world hunger.

Secondly, then, once evangelicals did get out of the pews and intro the streets, there was what I might call the second battle; namely, the question of how we do social action, what cultural renewal looks like, what role philosophy and theology and political science and sociology might play in the reformation of ideas and society. How do we “think Christianly” about the implications of the coming reign of God? How do we serve the Kingdom of God within the kingdoms of this world? We were glad when evangelicals conceded that public theology might be important, that we should vote, even.

Yet were distressed when they worshipped money-making and so-called American progress. They backed violent dictators in El Salvador and Chile and Iran and the Philippines. That evangelicals applauded when Reagan cut the budgets for the poor and funded excessive militarism and mocked concern about ecology. The development of the religious right became one of the largest socio-political stories of the last fifty years and Campolo wasn’t having it. He was in it deep and Pilgrim tells some of the backstory of what he did and the price he paid.

How did a young man from a fiery Baptist home end up working with Albert Einstein, run for office as an evangelical, anti-war candidate, and come to do pastoral counseling with a sexually-sinful President of the United States? How did he start and mission group and raise so much money for the disadvantaged? How did he go from being one of the top speakers on the evangelical conference circuit to becoming a persona non grata? How did he feel during all this? How did it effect his wife, his children (who bore the same names as the kids in The Simpsons, a joke almost too good to be true?)

This book elaborates the faith journey of Tony Campolo who was, for better or worse, one of the most lively, entertaining, and influential figures in modern evangelical Christianity. His recent death (November 19th 2024) makes this his last book and will allow millions of those who admired him as a popular speaker to hear him tell his own testimony.

I could hardly put my advanced reader’s copy of this down and swept through all 250 plus pages with ease. I’m sure you will, too. It is not highly crafted, poetic literature and it is not academically dense scholarly prose. It is Tony, after his stroke, talking to his friend Steve Ramey, in the long overdue account of his whole long life. Plain and moving, this is surely a book many will want to get as soon as it comes out. We hope we’ll have it early, before the mid-February release date. Pre-order it now, please.

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