Poet Stephen Kuusisto faced a crisis when he lost his job as a poetry professor in upstate New York. Kuusisto has been legally blind since birth, and he now needed a new job—and a new way of navigating the world. It’s a journey he explores in Have Dog, Will Travel.

Growing up in the 1950s, Kuusisto’s parents taught him to never show others his blindness, to live actively and try to ignore his limitations. He writes, “My parents thought disabled kids were victims of a nearly unimaginable fate, a predatory darkness.” Incredibly, he rode a bike, marched in Boy Scout parades and read with books pressed against his face. But he also faced endless bullying and was forced to live in a carefully circumscribed world that he navigated by familiarity and step counting. “Faking sight is like being illiterate—you pretend to competence but live by guesswork,” he writes. Nearing 40, he finally decided to stop pretending.

Kuusisto met with a representative from the New York State Commission for the Blind, who was hardly encouraging and doubted Kuusisto would find work. He referred Kuusisto to a company that manufactured plastic lemons for lemon juice, saying they sometimes hired blind people.

Yet he did not let this less-than- heartening meeting deter him from seeking assistance. Enter Kuusisto’s first guide dog, a yellow Labrador named Corky. Their “arranged marriage” expanded Kuusisto’s world by literal leaps and bounds, and their relationship forms the heart of this enchanting, enlightening book. As Kuusisto describes, having a guide dog “doesn’t feel like driving a car. It’s not like running. Sometimes I think it’s a bit like swimming. A really long swim when you’re buoyant and fast.”

Before long, Kuusisto is navigating the streets of New York City with Corky, experiencing a sense of freedom he’d never felt before. And in the years that followed, Corky not only liberated this poet but also ushered him back into the world, opening up his life in ways that he would never have imagined. Have Dog, Will Travel is an illuminating memoir of mobility, ability, delight and discovery.

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Former Marine and current college writing instructor Matt Young relives his grueling Marine training and his three deployments to Iraq in this searing memoir. His months in the desert are a fever dream of fiendish insects, extreme temperatures, tedium and terror.

Young enlists in the Marines without much forethought, walking into a strip mall recruitment center after drunkenly crashing his car, drawn to the belief that “the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war.” He leaves behind his “broken and distant” family and a young fiancée who is just heading off to college. He, at 18, is also just a kid.

For the most part, Young sidesteps any direct judgment of the war, but his writing makes clear the toll the war took on him personally. Young describes a tumbling Humvee that hits an improvised explosive device; a liquor-soaked 96-hour leave during which he struggles to talk to his family about anything other than combat; shooting dogs while on patrol, then being haunted by that act. “It’s important to remember our boredom and lack of sleep and anger and sadness and youth and misunderstanding and loneliness and hate,” Young writes.

And that is the uncompromising essence of Eat the Apple: Young is unflinching, even slightly removed as he examines the most brutally personal moments of his years in service. Sometimes he writes in the first person, sometimes in the second. He incorporates sketches of his body along with self-diagnoses of his physical and psychic pain, which are insightful rather than self-indulgent. And he pays tribute to those he served with, including those who came home broken or didn’t come home at all: “We didn’t die, but there are those who did, and regardless of who they were as men they should be remembered.”

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Francisco Cantú’s quietly heartbreaking memoir The Line Becomes a River explores the reckless contours of the U.S.-Mexico border, a place Cantú first knew through memory (as the grandson of a migrant), then through higher learning (as he studied international relations in college), then through his profession (as a border patrol agent) and finally, through poetic recounting (as a witness to and chronicler of the border). The Line Becomes a River, comprised of journalistic dispatches and lyrical descriptions of troubling dreams and landscapes, is both intimate and unforgettable.

The memoir opens as Cantú enlists in the border patrol. His mother, part confidant and part prophet, warns him of the dangers of associating with the institution. She doesn’t understand Cantú’s attraction to the role; she is uneasy and fearful. Cantú, both brash and compassionate, argues in favor of the career: As a Spanish speaker, he can be of real service to the migrants; as someone curious about the border, he can finally peer into the everyday confrontations that unfold there.

But the everyday confrontations are horrible and mundane: a dead man’s body left to decompose overnight, dope hauls and the attendant paperwork, starry skyscapes that hang uneasily over enemies hiding from each other in dark mountains. Cantú is forever changed by this work, and while he becomes good at it, he finds he cannot see it through. Even after he leaves, he is haunted. He writes, “I often recognized the subtle mark left by the crossing of the border, an understanding of its physical and abstract dimensions, a lingering impression of its weight.” This memoir—already much acclaimed and the winner of the prestigious Whiting Award—helps readers see the border as Cantú does, a place full of ambiguity and danger, a place hidden in plain sight, a place Americans should try to see.

When John Lewis Mealer set out from the hollows of the Georgia Blue Ridge in 1892, it was to escape warring moonshiners and lawmen, and to find work in the exploding, inviting West. Young, unmarried and intent on making something of himself, he wanted a fresh start. Almost a century later, John’s grandson and author Bryan Mealer’s father, Bobby, left his steady but dead-end job at a chemical plant near Houston for the oil booms and busts of Big Spring, Texas, taking a big chance on oil with his mercurial cousin Grady. Married and the father of three, Bobby too was looking for a fresh start.

In between these familiar quests rolled a near-century full of heroes and heartbreaks, world wars and depressions, dust storms, droughts and drugs—all rigorously described in this sprawl of a story that entwines family and global history. God, like Texas oil, was a constant threat or promise; church was as all encompassing—and sometimes oppressive—as family. The Mealer men were wannabe kings, hoping to claim the throne that an oil boom promised—or to at least own their own land.

The Kings of Big Spring is a family tree that offers no shade for its errant members. Violent, luckless husbands; unfaithful, hapless wives; and abandoned, wayward children are plentiful here. Their tales are told with the straightforwardness of a seasoned journalist, though Mealer seems justifiably wary of some of them. Like the Mealers, Big Spring crashed and reinvented itself, again and again. Weather was an endless cycle of killing winds. Pestilence was a curse. The economy was dependent on vulnerable crops and volatile markets. Oil helped to power two world wars and the Korean conflict, then transformed itself via petrochemicals.

Mealer says of his family, “We drew our strength from the power of our own flesh and blood.” The same could be said of Texas history, then and now.

In this voice-driven memoir, Dawn Davies tells her story in a fragmented way, moving through time in great leaps—childhood, young adulthood, single parenthood, post-divorce love, baffled-but-game mother of the bride. An early essay recalls her childhood spent trying to feel at home but getting uprooted repeatedly: As soon as she gets the hang of upstate New York, she’s uprooted to Florida, starting over while her parents’ marriage disintegrates. An essay about her young adulthood begins like a short story: “Once, when I was twenty, I went on a date with a man I met at the Army Navy store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” This date goes terribly wrong, but in a most unexpected way. She also recounts a difficult pregnancy through the lens of an interminable dinner party, punctuated by her awful morning sickness and others’ drunkenness.

Some of these essays are harrowing, describing intractable medical ailments, sudden poverty, a husband who bails out. But Davies is also a funny and vivid writer. In a lighter essay she imagines the men she might have slept with, a strangely compelling list that includes Doc Holliday, John Irving and Jon Hamm. She also does a funny takedown of the bizarre realm of soccer moms, implicating herself and her own fixation on her little athletes.

These essays surprise, illuminating odd corners of parenthood. Perhaps most surprising is the heartbreaking title essay, which examines the rigors of parenting a child through multiple medical emergencies and mental illness, but she intersperses these episodes with sections in which she imagines herself as a mother of an ancient Spartan warrior, asking a parent’s most difficult questions. But because the book’s previous essays have very little to say about her son’s difficulties, this essay, late in the book, comes as a shock. Still, Davies’ voice is compelling, and one worth following.

Jennifer McGaha and her husband, David, were living the American dream in North Carolina: big house, private school for their kids—and debt. Mountains of debt. David, an accountant, shielded Jennifer from just how dire the situation was. But when the government came knocking for a staggering amount of back taxes, Jennifer and David had no choice but to foreclose on their dream home and move to a family-owned cabin in an Appalachian holler.

“Cabin” might actually be a charitable description for the barely inhabitable place in which they find themselves. Abandoned for years, the leaky structure is overrun with mice, snakes and other critters. Deep in the mountains, the surrounding area is starkly beautiful but dark and damp from a nearby waterfall.

The shell-shocked couple sets about making the house into a home and learning how to live off the land. Still reeling, Jennifer flees when a temporary teaching job materializes at a college in Illinois, where she faces her crushing (if unfair) disappointment at David’s inability to rescue their finances. “On the one hand, you know you and your husband are having trouble paying the bills,” she writes. “On the other hand, you believe this is not actually a problem, that the money is there somewhere and your husband just needs to look harder to find it. And when the money doesn’t materialize, you are astounded, your fantasy world obliterated.”

She returns at the end of the semester determined to make life in Appalachian North Carolina work. Enter chickens, then goats, as Jennifer and David work to produce their own food. While the first half of the book finds the author in a state of paralysis, the second half reveals her efforts to first reconcile herself to and then find simple pleasures in her new life. She learns to make cheese and soap, to help a goat give birth, to forgive her husband and herself.

Flat Broke with Two Goats is a brave book written in beautifully unflinching detail. McGaha lays bare the flaws in her marriage, the poor choices that led them to rock bottom and how they found their way to a new definition of home.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, February 2018

This stunning, poetic memoir from Terese Marie Mailhot burns like hot coal. I read it in a single feverish session, completely absorbed and transported by Mailhot’s powerful and original voice. Mailhot’s story—which extends from an impoverished childhood on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia through foster care, teenage motherhood and mental illness—could seem a painful litany of misfortune were it not for the transformative alchemy of her art.

Sherman Alexie, in his introduction to this memoir, calls Heart Berries “an Iliad for the indigenous,” and recognizes Mailhot as a striking new voice in First Nation writing. The strength of her writing comes from Mailhot’s fearless embrace of emotional darkness and in her depiction of the psychic cost of living in a white man’s world. For example, after Mailhot’s mother has an intense epistolary love affair with convicted murderer Salvador Agron, her words and memories are used by the musician Paul Simon for his musical The Capeman, in which her character is reduced to an “Indian hippie chick.” Mailhot herself falls in precipitous love with her writing teacher, a passion that initially lands her in a mental ward.

Although diagnosed with bipolar II, post-traumatic stress disorder and an eating disorder, Mailhot links her illness to something she calls “Indian sick,” which is as historical as it is individual. There is “something feminine and ancestral” in her illness, which requires an acknowledgment of the generational trauma of First Nation people. Storytelling, Mailhot feels, is a first step toward healing both the individual and her people.

Situating her physical and psychic pain in context with a multigenerational focus, Mailhot crafts an intensely moving story about mothers and what they pass down to their children.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pietro Bartolo runs the sole medical clinic in his homeland of Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia that has become the gateway—and graveyard—for an unending stream of refugees trying to escape the varied horrors confronting them in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Bartolo’s Tears of Salt, written with Italian journalist Lidia Tilotta, is equal parts memoir, celebration of his birthplace and report from the front. Above all, though, it is a plea for compassion.

Bartolo begins his narrative by describing how, at age 16, he nearly drowned in the icy Mediterranean after falling unnoticed from his father’s fishing boat. The sensation of going under, gasping for breath and feeling left behind, provided him with a template for understanding the terror of countless others who have suffered the same fate—but without the happy ending of survival. Now he treats the living and anatomizes the dead who reach Lampedusa’s shore. By his count, he and his medical team have treated nearly 300,000 refugees over the past 25 years.

But it’s not the massive numbers that give Bartolo’s account its emotional impact—it’s the attention he focuses on individual survivors, such as the teenage brothers Mohammed and Hassan. Because Mohammed, the eldest, is paralyzed, Hassan carries him on his back all the way from their native Somalia to Libya and then vigilantly guards him against further injury throughout the perilous ocean passage. Once ashore, he fiercely resumes his burden. Bartolo tells many such stories of courage and sacrifice.

“Whenever I see images of migrants being callously deported in their thousands, forced to return to the hell they have escaped, I am outraged,” Bartolo writes. “What kind of person has the nerve to seal the destiny of all these people with a mere signature on a piece of paper, then smile about it to the cameraman and pose for photographs?”

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Clifton Fadiman had two paramount passions: savoring the best wines and obliterating his Jewishness. He wasn’t what is commonly called a “self-hating Jew.” It was more pragmatic than that. Like so many other first-generation American Jews, he saw his cultural heritage as an impediment—even a reproach—to the refined, upper-class WASP life he aspired to. Although clearly a doting daughter, Anne Fadiman is not an uncritical one as she examines her relationship with her father in The Wine Lover’s Daughter.

Born in Brooklyn in 1904 to Russian parents, Clifton Fadiman worked his way through Columbia University and achieved a sterling academic record. He might have joined the English department there had he not been told, “We have room for only one Jew, and we have chosen Mr. [Lionel] Trilling.” Thus rebuffed by academia, he used his formidable literary knowledge to become a public intellectual. By the time he was 28, he was editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and a year later the book critic for The New Yorker. At 34, he began hosting the popular radio quiz show “Information Please.” From that point on, he was a bona-fide celebrity, one who would extend his genial wit and wisdom well into the burgeoning television age.

Anne Fadiman points out in great detail her father’s sexism and snobbery and marvels at the fact that—even when he was 80—he still asked her not to mention he was a Jew in the profile she wrote on him for Life magazine. Much of her chronicle is given over to her father’s informed obsession with wines and her attempts—ultimately unsuccessful—to become a wine enthusiast herself. Clifton Fadiman died at 95 in 1999, no doubt comforted in the fact that his children had gone to Harvard—which had been off limits to him—and that his daughter married a WASP.

If you’ve read any of A.J. Jacobs’ bestselling books, you have an idea of what to expect from It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree. But if you haven’t, then, you’re in for a treat. Jacobs has established a brand by immersing himself in his subjects. There was the time he read the encyclopedia (The Know-It-All) and the time he took every command in the Bible literally (The Year of Living Biblically). He’s also applied that sort of immersive reporting as a writer for Esquire and as the host of the podcast Twice Removed. Jacobs doesn’t do things halfway.

That’s again the case in It’s All Relative, as he turns his attention to genealogy. It started with an email: “You don’t know me, but you are an eighth cousin of my wife, who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.” This email from Jules Feldman introduces Jacobs to the concept of a worldwide family tree—and, in typical Jacobs fashion, he goes all in.

Jacobs decides to organize the world’s largest family reunion. At some point we’re all related, right? And perhaps seeing one another as family could improve the way we treat strangers. You wouldn’t cuss at your fourteenth cousin twice removed in the carpool line, would you?

It’s an ambitious goal, and one that results in a romp through genealogical history and insight. Readers will meet y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, who weren’t the Earth’s original inhabitants but are those from whom we can trace our origins. They likely didn’t know each other, but their DNA has separately survived the centuries. They’re our eight-thousandth-great grandparents, so to speak.

Readers will delight in Jacobs’ other discoveries, such as his relationship to George H.W. Bush, and his uncertain approach to organizing the world’s largest family reunion. It’s All Relative is another installment in Jacobs’ brand of learning, with a lot of laughter along the way.

In 2011, 29-year-old American Ballet Theatre dancer David Hallberg made international headlines—and history—when he announced that he was joining the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, one of the world’s most prestigious ballet troupes, by the invitation of the Bolshoi’s director.

The first American to join the Russian company as a principal dancer, Hallberg began splitting his time between the Bolshoi and the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York City. He led a stress-filled life of training and travel (his days off were often spent on airplanes, commuting between countries), and the pressure caught up with him in 2015, when foot issues led to his exit from the stage. After two problematic surgeries, Hallberg—devastated—thought he’d never dance again.

In his brisk, beautifully executed new memoir, A Body of Work, Hallberg documents his rise to the top of the ballet world and coping with a career-threatening injury. Born with the perfect ballet physique—tall and long limbed with flexible feet—he began studying ballet seriously at age 13 in Phoenix, Arizona. He was teased at school but supported by his parents, who encouraged his desire to dance.

By the age of 20, Hallberg was living in New York and dancing with ABT. He provides an enthralling inside look at life in the studio—the physical pain, the hard-to-please partners, the struggle to transcend technique and achieve artistry. “Dancing virtuoso steps,” Hallberg says, “can feel like traversing a darkened room trying to avoid a trip wire.”

At the time of his injury in 2015, Hallberg had performance engagements around the world. The road to recovery took two-and-a-half years, including 10 months with the Australian Ballet’s reputable rehabilitation team. In scenes that are emotionally raw and moving, he recounts the painful comeback process.

Performing as effortlessly on the page as he does on the stage, Hallberg, who returned to ABT in top form this year, writes about the technicalities of his craft with clarity and precision. Readers of every taste will find much to relish in his inspiring book (balletomanes will consume it in a couple of sittings). Should Hallberg choose to take it on when he retires, a new role may await him: writer.

Few would disagree that the climax of the 2016 Democratic National Convention was when Khizr Khan, a Gold Star Father, held up his copy of the U.S. Constitution and challenged Donald Trump to read it. It was an audacious gesture that was grounded in firmly held conviction. Regardless of one’s politics, there was something profoundly admirable about this man.

In his eloquent memoir, An American Family, Khan retraces the steps that brought him from his grandfather’s house in Pakistan to the stage of the Democratic National Convention. His grandfather instilled in Khan a compassionate morality that is firmly rooted in Islam. Throughout his life, his grandfather’s wisdom guided Khan. It sustained him through his struggle for an education; his lyrical romance with his wife, Ghazala; his single-minded determination to succeed in America; and, ultimately, his grief at the death of his beloved son, Captain Humayun Khan, who sacrificed his life while protecting others from a suicide bomber.

Khan opens his book by describing his first encounter with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while he was a law student in Lahore, Pakistan. The documents’ assertion of inalienable rights and equality resonated with Khan, who lived in a society that promised neither. He never doubted the promise of the words he read in Lahore.

Khan’s story is both unique and archetypal. Like generations of immigrants before them, the Khans sacrificed in order to achieve the American Dream. They became citizens and raised their three sons to be good men. When Humayun joined the Army, the Khans, although fearful, respected his commitment to his country.

Sometimes it takes a newcomer to point out the beauty that old-timers take for granted. America, more than any other country, was founded upon ideals: individual freedoms, equal protection and due process of law. Khan reminds us that these ideals are worth fighting—and even dying—for. The Khans truly are the most American of families.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.