Taking your boat out on open water any time soon? Already there? You’ll want to weather life’s inevitable storms by keeping your anchor and flares aboard at all times. If an emergency strikes, you will need something to hold you steady, and lights can summon help. In this tender follow-up to her 2007 bestseller, Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup weathers her own storms—the sudden death of a spouse and the inevitable departure of a child growing up—and calls upon her work as chaplain for the Maine Game Warden Service to help in her most personal ministry, her family.  

What is hope? she asks, and finds it in one bereaved mother’s ability to carry on after her son drowns, frozen in a pond until spring. What is love, if not the embrace a law officer gives to the dead man’s grieving, deadbeat dad? Does prayer work? she asks in despair, and finds the harder answer lies not in its outcome but in its usefulness, in the love it evokes. 

Suddenly widowed with four young children, Braestrup has had occasion to question everything. Her late husband, a state trooper, was leaning toward the ministry when killed, and she follows his path. As chaplain to the game wardens, she helps both rescuers and victims, providing “spiritual triage” for those in need. 

Now her firstborn has decided, at 17, to enlist in the Marine Corps while war erupts in Iraq and Afghanistan. With earthy humor and humbling honesty, Braestrup strikes a balance between the necessary letting go and the enduring parental instinct to protect. 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Barton Swaim read a column by his state’s governor, he promptly sat down and wrote him, “I know how to write, and you need a writer.” He got the job, but his writing skills went to waste as the governor insisted on a “voice” that bore only a slight resemblance to proper English.

Fortunately, Swaim puts those skills to good use in The Speechwriter, a highly readable account of his three years in the governor’s employ. Part All the King’s Men and part Horrible Bosses, it’s fascinating and almost impossible to put down.

For reasons of his own, Swaim does not name the man behind the curtain. He’s “the governor,” or “the boss.” But as sure as Myrtle Beach has miniature golf courses, it’s Mark Sanford, the maverick governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011 who made “hiking the Appalachian Trail” a euphemism for pursuing an extramarital affair in Argentina. 

Swaim’s lofty approach to the job is undercut early on, when he is told “Welcome to hell” by a co-worker. Not surprisingly, the governor is a difficult man to work for, and readers who have had to answer to unreasonable, demanding and slightly unhinged bosses can relate. It’s hard to defend such a man, and Swaim wisely doesn’t try.

Things come to a head with a crisis over the governor’s refusal to accept the federal stimulus package, followed by the Appalachian Trail fiasco. By the end, Swaim has had enough—but fortunately, he ends with a rumination on politics: “Why do we trust men who have sought and attained high office by innumerable acts of vanity and self-will?”

That’s a good question, and perhaps one to ask “the governor” (now a U.S. congressman) at his next news conference.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, July 2015

Ah, alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems (to misquote “The Simpsons”). In Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola reveals the ugly side of addiction with humor and honesty. She writes gracefully of blackouts, junk food binges and unnerving sexual encounters. Along the way, she touches on loneliness and cats and hangovers and alternative weeklies. Although she claims that alcohol made her fearless, her true bravery emerges in this memoir’s witty candor.

A petite woman who can hold her liquor, Hepola’s drinking life is punctuated by gaps. How did she get home from the bar? Who is this man in bed with her? What did she say to make her friends so angry with her? A blackout is simply the hippocampus shutting down the long-term memory function in a drinker’s brain—which is why your drunk friend repeats the same story six times at the end of a long night. They may still be standing upright, but they won’t remember any of it tomorrow. Hepola proposes a “CSI Blackout” show for piecing together the night before; a junk food wrapper or a missing purse is a clue to the drunkard’s progress through the lost portions of the night. 

While Hepola claims not to enjoy the part in sobriety memoirs where the narrator stops drinking, her own sobriety is as funny and fearless as her drinking days. She’s particularly good on the weirdness of dating while stone-cold sober, and the subtle process of recalibrating her friendships. Hepola is an admirable addition to the distinguished line of “drinkers with writing problems,” and Blackout is a rollicking and raw account of binge-drinking, blacking out and getting sober. 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Joseph Luzzi’s new memoir, In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love, transforms unthinkable tragedy into literary gold. In November 2007, while Luzzi was teaching at Bard College, his beloved pregnant wife Katherine was in a car accident: She died later that morning at the hospital, shortly after their daughter Isabel was born. In the space of a single morning, Joseph Luzzi became both a father and widower.

Luzzi’s previous memoir, My Two Italies, sketched the duality between the southern region of Calabria, where the Luzzi family hails from, and Florence, home of the Renaissance. He calls upon his two Italies once again to help him endure the electric anguish he experiences in the wake of Katherine’s death. His return home to Rhode Island and his fierce Calabrian mother Yolanda allows for baby Isabel to be brought up in the bosom of a southern Italian matriarchy, while his reading of Florentine exile Dante helps him journey through the dark woods of grief.

More than counselors or pastors, Dante’s Divine Comedy teaches Luzzi about the stages of mourning. The Inferno is charged and electric, while Katherine’s absence is so raw; stumbling through the Purgatorio is challenging, as Luzzi adjusts with difficulty to becoming a father to Isabel. Eventually, the Paradisio emerges: an adjustment to Katherine’s death, Isabel’s needs and the entrance of new love.

More than simply a memoir of mourning, In a Dark Wood is also a deeply felt reading of the Divine Comedy, with excursions through Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Luzzi’s life-experience charges these epic poems with urgency and meaning, taking them from the classroom and into the world. His learned yet accessible discussions of these texts—as they helped him through his grief—will encourage readers to look to these classics with fresh eyes.

In a Dark Wood testifies to the life-giving importance of literature and what it has to teach us.

Blonde, svelte, former Miss America, musical prodigy, successful news anchor on national network with a hot husband: I was, quite honestly, prepared to hate (or at least strongly resent) Gretchen Carlson. But darn it if she didn’t charm me from the first page of Getting Real, her memoir of growing up wholesome in Minnesota. 

Carlson, who hosts her own show on Fox News called “The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson,” grew up in a loving, devout Lutheran family. She emerges as a violin virtuoso by the time she’s 7, paving the way for a lifetime of larger-than-life achievements. She attended Stanford University before taking time away to train for, compete in—and win—the Miss America pageant at 21. 

But Carlson’s saving grace is that she isn’t perfect, and she hits bumps in her road. Overweight throughout junior high and high school, she recalls being mortified when a sales lady called out that she needed a bigger size “for the chubby girl in the dressing room.” As she launches her reporting career, she loses broadcasting jobs and is the victim of sexual intimidation by men in power.

Carlson is frank and open about her struggles (“I was so confused about who I was and what I would face as I moved forward in what appeared to be a really scary world,” she writes about a top television exec trying to force himself on her in the back of a car). But mostly, she conveys a steely determination and clear-headed sense of self-worth that is inspiring and refreshing. She is unapologetic about her drive for success, pursuing ever bigger career goals while raising two small children. She even displays an intriguing feminist streak. 

Carlson may have pageant looks and a megawatt career, but in this memoir, she does indeed get real.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Many of us think of North Korea as a nation of automatons, blindly following Dear Leader over the cliff. If nothing else, Joseph Kim’s memoir of his harrowing childhood during the famine that devastated North Korea in the 1990s will complicate that view.

The Great Famine killed as much as 10 percent of the country’s population. Undoubtedly the central government owns responsibility for this. But instead of “an oppressive, invasive government,” Kim, a young boy living in a small city far from Pyongyang, experienced “something more frightening to a child: a complete absence of authority of any kind.” 

In this far-flung, slow-moving chaos, Kim sees his immediate family split asunder and his extended family collapse. “Kinship melted away in the face of hunger,” he writes. And from the fields bordering their home, Kim observes that first the frogs, then the grasshoppers and finally the grass itself begins to disappear. This is a devastating chronicle of the grinding progress of starvation.

But what makes Under the Same Sky so poignant is that the family’s decline is not a straight slide to hell. At one point Kim’s father rallies, finds work, and the family gets a television, which gives them social power.

Of course, this upturn in fortune does not last. The family falls further into poverty and disarray. Essentially orphaned and now a feral child, Kim survives by joining a gang and developing a talent for thievery, while at the same time struggling to maintain some element of his humanity.

Finally at 15, Kim makes the desperate decision to cross a frozen river into China. It is an act of madness that somehow works. Now in his mid-20s living in New York City, Kim is building a new life. It’s the life of a survivor, filled with determination and deep regret.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From a bicycle trip through Chile and Argentina to a South African journey to report on Nelson Mandela’s final days, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw had no intention of slowing down as he celebrated his 73rd birthday in February 2013. What he didn’t count on was a cancer diagnosis a few months later that would transform the next 16 months of his life into one in which cancer became “the scrim through which all of life is viewed.”

Brokaw suffers from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow’s plasma cells that is treatable, but not curable. A Lucky Life Interrupted is the product of the journal Brokaw, ever the reporter, kept to document his experience. He frankly describes cancer’s physical and emotional toll as his treatment proceeded, but he leavens that often sobering account with vivid reminiscences from a career that helped earn him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

With a loving family that includes an emergency room physician daughter as well as access to world-class specialists at leading hospitals, Brokaw realizes that his good fortune in health didn’t desert him in sickness. But even with those advantages, he takes some pointed shots at a health care system in which the efforts of his team of doctors were poorly coordinated at times and where a single chemotherapy pill cost $500.

“I’ve had a life rich in personal and professional rewards beyond what should be anyone’s even exaggerated expectations,” Brokaw writes. He’s clear-eyed about the challenges that lie ahead, but no doubt he’ll face them with a renewed appreciation for his good life and a determination to live whatever remains of it to the fullest.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bob Morris may have disappointed, infuriated and befuddled his parents along the way, but he loves them enough to keep trying to get it right. In Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents, a memoir that offers few sentimental excuses while laying bare his big, if often misguided, heart, Morris does an unforgettable job of trying to redeem himself. He even manages to share the humor in it all. Anyone who has ever had to survive that heart-piercing time when the parent becomes the child, the child finds himself a most reluctant caregiver, and both are miserably needy, will see themselves in this familiar familial tale. As NPR’s Scott Simon recently said about his own memoir, Unforgettable, “There are some lessons that only grief and responsibility can teach us.”

When Morris’ mother lies dying after a years-long decline, her son—a successful writer and happily married, middle-aged gay man—questions how well he has done by her. Could he have made her days and agonizing death easier? Yet his name is the last word she utters when he finally, reluctantly reaches her deathbed. Now is the time to commit to being a better son for his father’s remaining years. No easy task: His father is as eccentric as he is lovable, and not one to go calmly anywhere. Soon the octogenarian has a long-distance girlfriend and a longer list of needs, as his health rapidly fails. When the son can manage to overcome his own impatience and annoyance, they have quite the time together. It is a painful, comical push and pull as together they navigate through to that final hour.

Exclaiming “Wonderful!” as he gives up the pump keeping him alive, the father achieves a dignified death. Morris takes this final word as a blessing due a good son. He combines it with his mother’s last word to create the title that begins this story of memorable endings.

Years ago, as a small-town newspaper editor, I spent a night riding along with an officer on patrol. The shift began with a potential car dealership break-in and ended with an encounter with a drunk stumbling along the side of a lonely road. That night―as memorable as it was―pales in comparison to the drama that Steve Osborne shares with readers in The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop.

Now retired, Osborne spent 20 years as a NYPD street cop, and afterward began recounting his experiences on “The Moth” radio show to much acclaim. This collection of 14 essays is a nonstop ride-along with a guy who always wanted to be a police officer, and who was told upon entering the police academy, "Kid, you just bought yourself a front row seat to the greatest show on earth."

Indeed, that seems to be the case. Not only was Osborne an excellent policeman (he retired as a lieutenant and the commanding officer of the Manhattan Gang Squad), he's a fabulous storyteller, crafting his memories into well-honed tales filled with drama, humor and heart.

In “Think Fast,” he remembers being a rookie in his squad car in Washington Square Park and witnessing a man whip out a knife, ready to stab another man. With no time to shout a warning or fire a shot, in a split-second reaction, Osborne "hit on the gas pedal and nailed him with the car." With this seemingly bizarre act, not only did he save the victim's life, he prevented a crime that would have sent the aggressor to prison.

Bystanders, however, having no idea what had transpired, suddenly turned into an angry mob and began throwing bottles at Osborne's brand new squad car. In these days of widespread public scrutiny of police actions making regular headlines, it's useful to hear from an officer like Osborne, who reminds us that things aren't always what they first appear to be.

Osborne shares a variety of compelling tales of fumbles, fun, triumphs and tragedies. “Big Day” recalls the excitement he felt as he was about to close a major narcotics investigation, and the incredulity he felt as everyone's priorities abruptly changed that horrible day of September 11, 2001.

“End of Tour” describes Osborne's last night on the streets before retirement, which he hoped would be peaceful. Instead, two brothers refused to stop fighting and one punched him, sending him to the ER. "God never wanted me to be an astronaut, or a doctor, or a lawyer," Osborne writes. "He put me on this earth to be a cop. And from the first day to the last, I did my job."

Luckily for his readers, Osborne survived to tell his many wonderful tales.

Willie Nelson was born to be a rambling man, but he was also born to be a gifted songwriter and storyteller. In his rambunctious and meandering memoir, It’s a Long Story, Nelson regales readers with stories of his life, from his childhood in Abbott, Texas, to his now-famous run-in with the IRS over back taxes in the 1990s.

Nelson attributes both his love of music and his penchant for the peripatetic life of a singer to Ernest Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, whose candor in crooning the blues made a deep mark on the young Nelson. By the time he was 7 or 8, he received his first guitar and began to realize that music and emotions could be combined; as a result, Nelson was motivated to keep writing poems, to learn to play his guitar with “crazy precision” and to use songs to overcome his shyness.

Although fans may be familiar with many of the stories here, they will nevertheless be entertained as Nelson recalls his first night in Nashville—where he lay down in the middle of Broadway—or his efforts to save a guitar case full of pot from a house fire. He also discusses his three marriages and his relationships with musicians from Ray Price and Johnny Cash to Waylon Jennings and Leon Russell. Above all, the music is the thing for Nelson: “Love every style. Love every musical thing. . . . You will become a part of everything. And everything will become part of you.”

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.