I don’t remember how I first heard about Coop, but I’m glad I found it. Author Michael Perry, a native of Wisconsin, tells the story of being on 37 acres of farmland with fallen fences and overgrown fields, wanting to raise pigs and chickens. In the midst of all this, his pregnant wife has plans of delivering their baby at home.

By trade Perry is a writer — the contributing editor to Men’s Health, with articles appearing in other publications, as well. This, as he says in the book, is his "bread and butter." While working on Coop, he was busy writing; occasionally performing in his band; trying to raise his own chickens and pigs; but above all, being a good husband and father.

I love the way Perry writes about his childhood — the many children his parents took in to raise in addition to their own; their simple life on the farm; and the quiet faith that gave them a solid grounding. One example that stands out in my mind is "Sunday Popcorn." Mike’s mother would make popcorn in a pan on the stove while the family gathered around the kitchen table to help with passing plates of food, mixing up Kool-Aid, and salting the popcorn. During the second part of this Sunday night tradition, everyone was allowed to bring a book to read at the table (prohibited at any other time). Even today, members of the grown families still return to their parents’ house to participate in "Sunday Popcorn."

Perry seems like a down-to-earth, "real" person; he doesn’t put on airs, writing about both his mistakes and his achievements. Once in a while he throws in words I’d never heard before (like "tatterdemalion"), but he covers mundane things, as well as humorous stories — being bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig, accidentally killing one of his chickens by dropping a whole bale of chicken wire on top of it, and explaining how his father once drove home with a "giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon."

Coupled with his writing from the heart, covering topics such as the birth of his daughter, and the death of a good friend, Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting is a title you won’t want to miss.

Michele Happel – Miller Branch

I don’t usually read memoirs, especially ones about recovery. I don’t watch docudramas about medical or emotional trauma either. I tend to become horrified and depressed, instead of edified and entertained. However, Cooking & Screaming: Finding My Own Recipe for Recovery found its way onto my reading stack…I think it was a combination of the clever title and bold cover. This fascinating and honest book might even have converted me into reading other memoirs (but not watching them).

Just before graduating from UC Berkeley at age 21, author Adrienne Kane suffered a major stroke. In this memoir, Kane recounts the frustrations of physical therapy and her gradual reintroduction to independence. As she takes the reader through her road to recovery, she mixes family anecdotes, California atmosphere, and medical prognoses into an upbeat concoction, all about a strong-willed woman facing life’s challenges.

Each chapter begins with a recipe, which relates somehow to the chapter’s theme. The first chapter opens with a pasta and zucchini dish (which I have copied to try myself) from Kane’s college days. Throughout the book, recipes vary in complexity from basic spaghetti sauce to a duck dinner made in memory of Julia Child. It was fascinating to see how each recipe reflected an important chapter in the author’s recovery.

Kane discovers her passion for food and feeding people as she copes with her disabilities. Cooking and sharing her thoughts about food come to define her vocation, almost by accident. This was a delightful read…the author’s voice is highly personal, the topic astounding on many levels, and the meals mouthwatering-ly inspiring.

Kristen Blount – Administration Office

Author Helene Cooper is the White House correspondent for the New York Times. Prior to her current assignment, she was a diplomatic reporter and assistant editorial page editor for the same paper. The House at Sugar Beach chronicles her youth and coming-of-age.

Helene’s paternal and maternal ancestors were among the free blacks who emigrated from the U.S. to Liberia during the early 1800s. Helene was born and spent her first 14 years there. She and her siblings lived a relatively well-to-do life. Both of her parents were educated abroad, and her family owned homes in Monrovia and Spain. She attended private school and enjoyed regular family trips to the U.S. and other countries. Her story seems to be one of privilege as a member of the "Congo" tribe that was in power in democratic Liberia. Her family even took in Eunice, a "poor" girl from the Bassa tribe. Eunice, a few years older, became an "adopted" sister and confidant to Helene and her younger sister Marlene.

Excerpt:
Our house at Sugar Beach was a source of pride and of pain. It was a testament to the stature of my family in a country where stature mattered, sometimes above all else. Liberian society rivaled Victorian England when it came to matters of social correctness. In Liberia, we cared far more about how we looked outside than about who we were inside. It was crucial to be an Honorable. Being an "Honorable" – mostly Congo People, though a smattering of Country People were sometimes pronounced educated enough to get the title – meant you were deemed eligible to hold important government posts. You could have a Ph.D. from Harvard but if you were a Country man with a tribal affiliation you were still outranked in Liberian society by an Honorable with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee. Daddy was an Honorable with a proper college bachelor of science, but being Hon. John L. Cooper Jr. was a hell of a lot more important than whatever degree he got in America.

However, a coup in 1980 shattered the somewhat serene life of the Cooper family. Soldiers enter their home, and the unthinkable happens to Helena’s mother. War is hell. Once you start reading about this remarkable journey, you will continue until it is complete. Ms. Cooper’s memoir has rekindled my interest in learning more about the history of Liberia.

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to grow up in a family with a multitude of siblings, 12 to be exact? The constant chaotic vying for attention competes with the everpresent clutter of clothing, mismatched socks, and mounds of school books – not to mention the unending hum of major/minor squabbles. James McBride’s poignant memoir The Color of Water offers a panoramic view – from the Depression through the turbulent 60s and beyond — inside the life of one such remarkable family.

In writing The Color of Water, the author attempts to explore his Jewish mother’s hidden past. As a result of his persistence, McBride’s mother Rachel tells her story, simultaneously allowing McBride to gain a greater understanding of himself. Rachel was the daughter of a strict, distant Orthodox Jewish rabbi and a loving, meek mother. Years of childhood sexual abuse led Rachel to run away and literally reinvent herself. How she raised her brood with a surprising blend of "chutzpah" and grace was truly amazing to me.

After reading McBride’s latest book Song Yet Sung, I decided to purchase The Color of Water on audiobook. Told from alternating points of view by McBride and his mother (Momee), actors Andre Braugher and Lainie Kazan create an unforgettable audio production.

This memoir had me quietly crying one minute and laughing the next. Pick up a copy of the book or the playaway – I guarantee you will be moved.

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir centers on a subject that might not appeal to every reader — the death of an infant in childbirth. Still, I was drawn to this book, in part because the story vibrates with life. She writes about her painful loss and subsequent grief with compassion and tenderness, yet her lost infant is remembered as a unique person who changed her life forever.

She has an extraordinary story to share — of her romance with the French countryside and her delight in her first pregnancy. She also tells of the incompetence she encounters in a French hospital; her slow, dazed comprehension of her child’s death; and her return to the US and the bonds that sustain her. An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination left me in awe of the way life rattles our cages, turns us upside down or inside out, and then suddenly blesses us with a soft landing.

Ginny Leslie – Miller Branch

Ta-Nehisi Coates

In his powerful childhood memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates skillfully details life in a very unconventional household on Baltimore City’s turbulent west side during the 1980s. His father Paul Coates fathered seven children by four different women – two of whom he married. Coates, a Vietnam veteran and former Black Panther leader, was an indomitable, larger-than-life icon, especially in the eyes of his sixth child.

Reading and research played a pivotal role in young Ta-Nehisi’s life as he watched his father finish college, complete graduate studies in library science, and build Black Classic Press, a successful publishing company — while raising seven children with their respective mothers. The reader also "travels" with Ta-Nehisi as he navigates the often brutal, misguided world of middle school boys from rough-and-tumble neighborhoods. At the beginning of the book, there is a handy family tree and picturesque map of west Baltimore.

The author effortlessly captures the essence of his father, including his attributes and character flaws. His prose is so lyrical that the words quite literally dance off the pages of this book. This is a gem of a memoir that delivers a walloping psychological punch.

Click here to learn what the author has to say about his life and his book.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates and publisher Paul Coates will discuss The Beautiful Struggle. Join us as we welcome this gifted young writer and his father. Books are available for purchase and signing. Register online for this event.

Father and Son:  Publisher and Author
Wednesday, February 11; 7:00 pm
Howard County Central Library
10375 Little Patuxent Parkway
Columbia, MD 21044

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

Doris Kearns Goodwin

As a child, I remember my mother riveted to the broadcast of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Throughout the hearings, my father would arrive home (alas, with no supper in the oven and four hyper kids jumping on the bed), only to hear her rehash the dramatic turns of the trial. So I smiled at Doris K. Goodwin’s recounting of the hearings in her memoir, Wait Till Next Year. The mothers in her tree-lined New York neighborhood were similarly addicted to this extraordinary television event. The trial of a decade, then as now, dominated everyday lives.

In this engaging memoir, Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, draws us into her family life and the lives of her neighborhood family. She describes the excitement as people on her street acquire washing machines and televisions on the way to upward mobility following the Great Depression. And the town itself, with its cluster of neighborhood homes and stores within walking distance, fosters close friendships and communal pride.

In so many ways, her childhood seems blessed. She has a father who instills confidence and a mother whose love of learning and books is infectious; she is also, by nature, an intense observer and recorder of the world around her. In particular, her passion for the New York Dodgers weaves through every chapter. As the Giants defeat the Dodgers in the 1951 National League Pennant, a young Doris, in despair, throws down her treasured red scorebook as the television announcer gleefully cries out, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

There are darker episodes as well—her father’s haunting past and her mother’s serious and chronic illness. She worries about polio and iron lungs, but even more about atomic bombs going off in her neighborhood. And by the end of the decade, race issues “had come home to Rockville Centre.” For baseball fanatics, followers of the fifties, or memoir lovers, this book will charm.

Ginny Leslie – Miller Branch

If you occasionally wish for simpler times, then take a mini-vacation and visit another era with Little Heathens, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Reading it will provide a glimpse into how some people lived during the Depression, without cell phones, DVDs, video games, or computers to interfere with everyday life.

The author’s family (her mother and three siblings) grew up on a farm in Iowa which belonged to her grandparents. Besides walking to school every day in all kinds of weather, the children were expected to help out with chores from milking cows, hauling water from the pump to the house for weekly baths, to bringing in kindling for the stove for the next day’s cooking. Any child who forgot to gather the kindling the night before would be roused from bed and instructed to go get it immediately.

Along with the anecdotes about her life on the farm with her siblings and cousins, Mildred shares some of the family recipes she’s known since childhood. I am hoping to try a few myself sometime, they sound so good- marshmallows, pie crusts, apple candy pie, and applesauce cake.

Something that stays in my mind after reading this book is that when the children did actually have free time, they spent it playing ball with their friends and cousins in a nearby field, making games out of what they had on hand, but never finding themselves bored. For if they did say that they were bored to one of the grown-ups, they would immediately receive a job, like stacking wood for the fire, or scrubbing the porch. I wonder what kids today would think of that?

Try Little Heathens, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. You’ll be glad you did. And it’s only 290 pages, for those of you who may find it hard to squeeze in time to read just for fun.

For more information on the author, her book, and tasty recipes, visit www.little-heathens.com.

Michele Happel – Miller Branch