You may not have heard of Stephen Westaby, but in the medical world, he's internationally renowned as a brilliant heart surgeon. Based in Oxford, England, he's a pioneer in artificial heart technology and recently retired from active surgery after more than four decades in the operating theater.

Westaby's highly readable Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table is part memoir, part how-to (perform open-heart surgery, that is) and part All Creatures Great and Small-style reflection, with stories throughout about cases he's encountered during his journey from eager medical student to seen-it-all senior physician.

Some vignettes tell of smashing successes, such as the chapter about Peter Houghton, the artificial heart recipient who lived for over seven years after becoming the first person to be given an artificial heart for permanent use rather than as a bridge to transplantation. Others recount tragic failures, such as the death of an 18-month-old patient followed almost immediately by his mother's suicide. Westaby relates these cases in a matter-of-fact tone—a tone that he makes clear is a necessary survival mechanism in a profession in which death is a constant companion.

The focus of this book is on the patients, and rightfully so, but Westaby allows us a few glimpses into the mind of a doctor at the top of the profession, “desperate to do some good.” He knows it's time to get out when not only is his hand gnarled from handling surgical instruments, but when he finds empathy taking over for that all-important objectivity. England's famed National Health Service is also a source of frustration, featuring countless bureaucratic battles and the necessity of relying on charitable funds for risky surgeries. But frustrations aside, Open Heart is a heart-tugger, and a fascinating read.

Jen Waite’s memoir of betrayal and infidelity has hit a cultural nerve. Offering up every woman’s nightmare, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing expands on the story Waite originally offered in viral blog posts: While she was in labor with her daughter, her husband was on the phone with his girlfriend. When she fled to her parents’ house in Maine to recover from the birth, her husband checked out new apartments with the woman Waite calls “Croella.” When she confronted her husband, he denied it all. And then, as Waite obsessively checked her husband’s email, phone records and social media, she discovered that he’d been a womanizing, pathological liar all along.

Waite’s full-length memoir is like a car crash the reader can’t look away from. Yes, the husband is on the psychopathic spectrum; yes, he is incapable of empathy; and yes, he is a “bad man.” But this reader, at least, longed for a little more self-reflection on the part of the narrator. Her obsessive rifling through her husband’s email and phone records, Uber receipts and Netflix movies, is unhealthy and compulsive at the very least.

Waite’s marriage only occurred in 2014, so this is still fresh material. One wonders how she will continue to process this frightening story in the fullness of time. The resolution here indicates that Waite is now in training to become a therapist specializing in recovery from abusive relationships. Suspenseful and gripping, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing documents the dynamics of an abusive marriage and is sure to spark important conversations.

Get out that vintage bike—or imagine the one you always wished for—and join award-winning Sports Illustrated writer Steve Rushin on a wild ride through his ’70s boyhood in fast-growing Bloomington, Minnesota. Once the proud owner of his own Sting-Ray bike, Rushin was born just in time to watch the first man land on the moon. Sting-Ray Afternoons takes it from there in this fiercely funny memoir about family, sports, music, food and fads.

Rushin is the middle child of a frequently traveling, hardworking 3M salesman and a stay-at-home mom who somehow remained sane and mostly in control of four brawling boys and an unflappable daughter. A candid observer of his own troubles—sleepwalking, night terrors and sibling wars among them—Rushin adds wit with a comic’s timing to his tales. Meanwhile, the Sears Wish Book catalog promised grand Christmases, the new Weber grill delivered backyard barbecues, and the Vikings went down in Super Bowl defeat an ignominious four times. Pringles were pretty new, and who knew that their creator would someday ask to be cremated and buried in a Pringles can? Rushin is a wealth of such odd facts.

Mixing in more sports and popular trivia than any board game can provide, Rushin offers up a time capsule of the 1970s. The affection he bestows on his family—foibles and scars notwithstanding—colors the details of their times together. “Childhood disappears down a storm drain,” Rushin concludes. “It flows, then trickles, then vanishes. . . .” Sting-Ray Afternoons does its best to ensure the devil in those details lives on.

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

Naoki Higashida is a nonverbal, autistic young man whose first widely translated memoir, The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, was received with acclaim and incredulity. Acclaim because it detailed the vivid inner life of someone who had, before his mother’s intervention with what they call an “alphabet grid” (a modified QWERTY keyboard), seemed unresponsive, and incredulity because it seemed impossible that someone who was genuinely autistic and working independently could compose such coherent and artful prose. Since writing The Reason I Jump, Higashida has become a celebrity in Japan and the second most widely translated Japanese author behind Haruki Murakami.

Higashida’s new collection—comprised of blog entries, poems, a short story and an interview—brings readers up to speed with the author, now in his early 20s. His thoughts on neurological diversity are riveting: “My brain has this habit of getting lost inside things. Finding the way in is easy, but—like being in a maze—finding your way out is a lot harder. I want to exit the maze right now, but I’m forced to stay inside it. This applies also to time and schedules. They constrain me.” Higashida’s accounts of thinking in images, feeling compelled to make repetitive movements and the difficulties and pleasures of communicating make this book totally captivating. Translator and bestselling author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) introduces the volume with an account of the dismay he felt when Higashida’s work was dismissed by critics as fraudulent. Mitchell points out that he has witnessed Higashida’s composing firsthand, and that, moreover, Higashida’s prose has changed the way he perceives—and interacts with—his own autistic son. Mitchell writes that bringing Higashida’s writing to a larger public has been the most important writing task of his life.

Readers will find this older Higashida not only eloquent and thoughtful, but also wise, measured and, most of all, kind.

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

In 2000, Pia de Jong and her husband, Robbert Dijkgraaf, eagerly welcomed their third child, a daughter named Charlotte. Five years earlier, the couple had moved into a 17th-century brick canal house in Amsterdam. A sign above the door gave the construction date: 1632.

De Jong felt welcomed by the house—and the colorful cast of characters in the neighborhood: There’s a young, blonde prostitute doing business in the alley who can guess that de Jong is pregnant just by looking at her; Mackie, an angry man who watches over not only his aging mother, but the entire neighborhood; and across the canal is Rutger, an old, sick man who tells de Jong, “That house belongs to you. It was waiting all these years for you to move in. I should know. I’ve lived across from it all my life.”

When newborn Charlotte arrives, she is embraced by her parents and two older brothers, as well as by this odd, eccentric community. But it is clear from the first that something is wrong. The midwife finds an unusual bump on the baby’s skin that when touched turns blue. Charlotte has congenital myeloid leukemia. Informed that the prognosis is poor, de Jong and her husband, with the support of their compassionate oncologist, choose to actively watch and wait rather than subject Charlotte to potentially deadly chemotherapy.

With a novelist’s sense of story and characters, de Jong paints a vivid picture of Charlotte’s first year. Even when we don’t see the neighbors, we feel their concern cradling the family, and especially this small, brave baby, who keeps fighting—and eventually goes into remission.

Several cases of spontaneous remission have occurred, and “watchful waiting” is now a standard protocol for this type of leukemia. The subject of this inspiring, heartfelt memoir is now a healthy teenager living with her family in Princeton, New Jersey.

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

In old Latvia, Inara Verzemnieks tells us, people believed that the dead returned home once a year to see how everyone was doing. The living couldn’t see them, but they felt their presence, maybe even talked to them. It was a source of great comfort.

After decades of upheaval and migration, the traditional beliefs have gone underground. But Verzemnieks, the Latvian-American granddaughter of a refugee, understands their value and finds her own comfort through the personal journey she recounts in Among the Living and the Dead.

Verzemnieks’ grandmother Livija fled Riga, Latvia, with her two children during World War II, making her way to a displaced persons camp in Germany. She was joined there by her war-wounded husband. After much struggle, they were resettled in the United States. As the family adjusted, Livija’s relatives overseas in Latvia were undergoing their own torment: They were exiled by the Soviets to Siberia for years, returning only to find that they had lost their ancestral farm.

Verzemnieks was raised largely by her beloved grandparents, who existed somewhere between the U.S. and their memories of rural childhoods. After her grandmother’s death, Verzemnieks visited Livija’s sister in the old village in an attempt to unravel family mysteries.

Verzemnieks is an exquisite writer who weaves together tales of old Latvia and her own discoveries in lyrical prose. Slowly, carefully, she coaxes her great-aunt into talking about Siberia. She learns more about her grandparents, though troubling uncertainties remain.

Her descriptions of the years on the “war roads” and in the displaced persons camps are particularly heartbreaking. It becomes evident that her father, outwardly a successful professional, was permanently affected by an early childhood of deprivation and fear. But the revelations also bring understanding. The dead and the living mingle and reconnect.

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

A skeleton in your family closet can be challenging enough to exhume and investigate. But try researching your genealogy and solving an ancient murder while you simultaneously serve as historian, tourist, travel guide and of course, since it is Italy, food critic. Helene Stapinski does all that in Murder in Matera, bringing to life the customs, passions and people—dead and alive—of Southern Italy. With refreshing wit and endearing respect for the generations of shoulders she stands on, Stapinski has resurrected her great-great-grandmother, Vita Gallitelli, and follows her tragic journey from Matera, Italy, to Jersey City.

Gallitelli died in Jersey City in 1915, but her infamy as a “loose woman” and alleged murderer lived on in stories told by Stapinski’s mother. Her family was further blemished by the bad behavior of modern relatives, such as a cousin who rigged bingo games to enrich his mother and Grandpa Beansie, a former inmate. These facts led the author to fear that her own children might inherit a tendency toward crime, with the help of a genetic defect possibly passed down from Gallitelli. She needed to know the truth about her great-great grandmother, and so began a 10-year, trans-Atlantic research project. Did Gallitelli in fact kill someone, and if she did, why? Was she a “puttana” who slept around, scandalizing her Italian hometown? Why did she become one of thousands of emigrates fleeing their homeland in the 19th century, and what happened to one of her children on that miserable ocean crossing to New York?

Such questions drove Stapinski to leave her own family behind in America and seek answers in Matera. The truth lay deep in the oral and documented history of the poverty-stricken province and, when the truth is revealed at last, it changes everything, including her perspectives on family, marriage, motherhood and, above all, the destiny-changing courage of immigrants like Vita Gallitelli.

We all recall one momentous event in our lives that dramatically altered our direction and violently shook our sense of self, shaping us in myriad ways. In his absorbing and lovely The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Benjamin Taylor recalls such an event, using it as the tantalizing entry point to his memories of growing up gay and Jewish in Texas.

Early on the morning of November 22, 1963, 11-year-old Taylor gets to shake President John F. Kennedy’s hand in Fort Worth, Texas. Later that day, he hears the news that Kennedy has been assassinated. In achingly gorgeous prose, Taylor reflects on the incongruity of these two moments, which leads to childhood remembrances of making and losing friends, his discovery of a love of politics and playwriting, and his halting lessons in the ways that families sometimes fall apart. He writes about his family with a clear-eyed vision: “The hue and cry at our house was against disorder, bedevilment, despair.”

In this memoir, Taylor pulls his family and his young life from the shores of forgetting, and he tells us he’s heaped up this “monument because my family—Annette, Sol, Tommy, Robby too—have vanished and I cannot allow oblivion to own them altogether.” Although his memoir sometimes moves confusingly between 1963 and 1964 and the present, Taylor nevertheless captivates with his vibrant recollections of immense moments and the life that grew out of them.

“The beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on.” Nina Riggs, who died in February, realized this truth during a mundane moment: While teaching her son to ride his bike, she stumbles and releases him. As Benny rides forward, he shouts behind him, checking on his mother.

It’s a simple moment, but to Riggs, whose triple negative breast cancer had been deemed terminal, it encapsulated so much more. When she was diagnosed at age 37, doctors expected her disease to be curable. It was one small spot of cancer, that was all. But it metastasized and, by age 38, Riggs knew the disease would kill her.

Riggs’ husband, John, longs for a return to normalcy. “I have to love these days in the same way I love any other. There might not be a ‘normal’ from here on out,” she responds. “These days are days. We choose how we hold them.”

As she endures chemotherapy and radiation, Riggs faces those days with a clear-eyed determination to fully live. Riggs, herself a poet, examines her impending death through her own lyrical perspective, informed by the writings of her great-great-great-grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and French philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

Part of living, though, is death. Riggs must face it even before her own cancer is deemed terminal: Her mother’s multiple myeloma is fatal. The family concludes her mother’s funeral with an open-ended moment of silence, which Riggs struggles with. Shouldn’t they sound a gong or otherwise give those gathered permission to leave?

No, her brother says. “It’s about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying. It’s unsettling—and that’s okay.”

Through this warmhearted memoir, Riggs writes her way to accepting her own death and the uncertainty that follows it. The Bright Hour is an introspective, well-considered tribute to life. As Riggs’ famed ancestor Emerson writes, “That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World.”

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

Manal al-Sharif’s memoir Daring to Drive opens with a chilling sentence: “The secret police came for me at two in the morning.” Al-Sharif is questioned for hours and then jailed in a filthy, overcrowded women’s prison. Her crime: driving her brother’s Hyundai, because in Saudi Arabia, women do not drive. Without a male guardian, Saudi women can’t rent an apartment, take out a loan, get an ID or register a child for school—and they can never drive, not even to take a sick child to the ER. Saudi religious police enforce a harsh array of laws and customs—women must cover their bodies completely, and unrelated men and women must never mix.

Al-Sharif gives a compelling account of her impoverished, sometimes violent upbringing in Mecca, and of her schooling, where teachers beat students for trivial infractions and religious studies were paramount. She describes the wave of fundamentalist fervor that swept through Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s, imposing increasing limits on women. It is within this rule-bound atmosphere that al-Sharif transforms from fundamentalist teen to a college student studying computer science. She then becomes the first woman in information security at Aramco, the Saudi oil company (originally an American consortium). At Aramco, she interacts with men and lives in Western-style housing. It is her work at Aramco, along with an exchange year in New Hampshire, where she learns to drive and befriends non-Muslims, that leads to her quest to drive in Saudi Arabia and eventually to her calling as a women’s rights activist.

Al-Sharif writes with simplicity, and despite its bleak moments, Daring to Drive moves along quickly. She shares some lovely moments, such as her childhood visits to her rural grandparents, whose lives seemed far freer than her own, and the sports she secretly played in college. She shares her hopeful motto—“the rain begins with a single drop”—which also describes a nation that’s moving forward by the tiniest of increments.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, June 2017

In Theft by Finding, David Sedaris, best known for his eight bestselling books as well as his contributions to “This American Life,” The New Yorker and Esquire, offers a glimpse into the most unruly of writing: his diaries from the years 1977-2002. Sedaris notes in the introduction that he does not expect readers to plow through this 528-page tome in linear fashion, but instead to dip in at random. I suspect he would approve of my own manner of reading the book, which was to see what Sedaris was up to on my birthday each year.

However, his (edited) diaries are too interesting to limit oneself only to birthday entries—I wound up reading the whole thing, laughing frequently and earmarking many memorable passages. These diaries reveal the development of Sedaris’ aesthetic, filled with rich and unfailingly sharp observations—portraits of people he saw on the street, overheard snippets of dialogue, accounts of interactions with everyone from cabdrivers to his irrepressible siblings.

For Sedaris fans, the diaries offer a backstage tour of books like Me Talk Pretty One Day (his initial observations of his French teacher, essays he wrote in response to homework prompts) and Holidays on Ice (accounts of locker-room exchanges between men working as Macy’s holiday elves). There are moments of sadness, such as the unexpected death of his mother and the slow decline of his sister Tiffany, who would later commit suicide. But this is not a sad book; instead, it’s a gloriously weird one. Sedaris lists Christmas presents received every year, shares recipes and constantly suggests to the reader to keep going, just for one more page.

“If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in,” Sedaris writes. This is a diary that shows us how Sedaris’ powers of observation and his intense investment in his own perspective have enriched his life and, by extension, ours.

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

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . ” That evocative first sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s suspenseful novel Rebecca captured millions of readers, including the young Tatiana de Rosnay. A lifelong fan, de Rosnay set out to write a biography of du Maurier, calling it a “novel of a life.” Like du Maurier, de Rosnay has both French and British forebears and is a prolific, mega-bestselling novelist (her novel Sarah’s Key sold four million copies).

Manderley Forever divides du Maurier’s life into five sections, from her London childhood to her last years in Cornwall. While de Rosnay builds the biography from letters, journals and previous biographies, she opens each section by retracing du Maurier’s steps, especially in du Maurier’s beloved Cornwall, the rugged southwestern tip of England. De Rosnay attempts to visit Menabilly, the model for Manderley, the grand house at the heart of Rebecca. Du Maurier discovered the falling-down mansion as a young woman, and, fascinated, even obsessed, she talked the owners into letting her rent and renovate the house, which became her touchstone and muse. Throughout, de Rosnay shares details of du Maurier’s writing—the varied seeds of her novels, her daily writing routine and the way her writing projects grounded and consoled her.

De Rosnay aims for a novelistic style, writing in present tense, often from du Maurier’s point of view. Occasionally the voice and diction feel too modern for an Englishwoman born in 1907, although this may have to do with the French-to-English translation. Still, we get a full sense of the complex du Maurier: She was bold and glamorous yet reclusive and shy, she fell in love with other women but had an enduring marriage to a troubled war hero, and she was a world-famous novelist who yearned for a more literary standing.