The Chancellor by Kati Marton Continue reading
Tag Archives: biography
Sample Saturday – nonfiction picks
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – nonfiction picks
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
Catching up on reviews
I’ll keep it short… Continue reading
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Prior to reading Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, my knowledge of the Troubles was limited, and was essentially informed by three things:
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- Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard (I read this multiple times as a teen)
- a brief visit to Belfast in 2001
- Lost Lives by David McKittrick et al. – a book that I bought second hand after my Belfast visit. It lists the story of every life lost during the Troubles (3,630 people were killed between the late 1960s and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ). Continue reading
Sample Saturday – essays, a memoir, and a biography
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – swimming, Wallis, and brushes with death
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. This week, all three books were included in Six Degrees chains. Continue reading
Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives by Helen O’Neill
Fraud, sham, or the definition of ‘reinvention’? I’ll get to that…
Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives by Helen O’Neill is unquestionably a beautiful book. I’d go so far as saying it’s one of the loveliest books I own. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – marriage, Princess Margaret, and a patriarch
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein
This book. Wow.
Harrowing. Courageous. Repulsive. Compelling. Heartbreaking. Uplifting. Fascinating.
The Trauma Cleaner, like its star, Sandra Pankhurst, is genre-defying. Author Sarah Krasnostein shadowed Sandra over a number of years, observing her day-to-day activities and recording the story of her life before she was a cleaner. And that story is remarkable – Sandra was a husband and father, drag queen, sex reassignment patient, sex worker, businesswoman, and trophy wife. As a ‘trauma cleaner’, Sandra cleans places others dare not go – homicide, suicide and death scenes; meth labs; homes of hoarders; and places ravaged by water, mould and filth.
Sandra knows her clients as well as they know themselves; she airs out their smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes. She does not, however, erase these people. She couldn’t. She has experienced their same sorrows. Continue reading