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.

In the poem she wrote for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day,” Elizabeth Alexander asked, “What if the mightiest word is love?” In The Light of the World, her memoir about the sudden death of her husband in 2012, the poet, essayist and playwright renders her own exquisite response. Using her medium of words, she illuminates and lyricizes the life of her mate—the painter and political refugee Ficre Ghebreyesus—and the shattering grief that follows his death at age 50. Her tool is the brush of poetic sensibility, casting her words through the filtering lenses of the African diaspora, the couple’s Eritrean and African-American ancestors, and her own sustaining community. Alexander creates an intimacy that coaxes a transformative empathy from her reader, and she rewards with a profound understanding of love and loss.

Yet, as sudden as Ficre’s death is, Alexander describes her grieving as mercifully graded, an evolution that allows her and their two young sons time to retrieve Ficre’s essence. First, there is the gut-wrenching physicality of the moment of his death, all senses erupting as she sees her lover leave his body behind. In the aftermath, she looks for him in what was once the familiar: Ficre in his garden, among the peonies he planted to bloom on her birthday; Ficre in his studio, where brushes still hold his touch; Ficre in the dishes he created as a popular chef. These comforting remainders—intensely sensual—carry her through that first aching year of widowhood. Finally, she moves her family from suburb to the city, not to flee memory’s hold in the house they all had shared, but to resume the plan the couple once had for their future.

Ficre too will live on because, as promised in Alexander’s poem, “Love beyond marital, filial, national . . . casts a widening pool of light.”

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

So-called “blended” families are a complex ecosystem, where kids can play adults against one another and even the goldfish gets a say about who does what on the chore wheel. It’s therefore not so unusual that one family was thrown into disarray by a possessive mutt. Enter Eddie, the Stepdog of the title.

For Mireya Navarro, it was easy to fall in love with Jim—both were successful reporters at the New York Times, and they had much in common. Mia could work well enough with Jim’s two kids, but Eddie seemed to have her number. Defying every command, ecstatic to see Jim or the kids while he barked at Mia, Eddie made it clear how he felt about the newcomer. When her attempts to befriend the dog fell flat, she began scheming to get him out of the picture.

Navarro’s story is ostensibly about the dog, but go beyond that and you’ll find a layered tale of family love. Mia and Jim know they’re right for one another, but her relationship with the kids never becomes “parental” despite living with them half the time. Jim loves Eddie in large part because he loves Jim unconditionally, a rarity when juggling the needs of so many humans. And Eddie? Mia’s psychological read on his behavior—that the dog is jealous—gets turned on its head by a canine counselor, who helps the two form a friendship of sorts.

Stepdog is fun and often funny, but it will be of special interest to anyone with a blended family life. It’s a powerful reminder that all you need is love, and possibly kibble.

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

The frequent surprises in Oliver Sacks’ guardedly self-revelatory autobiography begin with the book’s cover photo. There we see a buff, leather-jacketed Sacks astride his new BMW motorcycle in Greenwich Village in 1961. Who knew that the genial, gray-bearded, best-selling writer-neurologist once portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings (1990) was such a hunk in his late 20s? Or a state-champion lifter on Southern California’s Muscle Beach? Or a physician addicted for a while to amphetamines? Or a closeted gay man who had sex during the week of his 40th birthday and then not again until he fell in love at 75?

Revelations like these will keep a reader turning the pages of On the Move. But Sacks’ book, self-effacingly subtitled “A Life,” actually has much more to say than these headline grabbers would indicate. The book is a kind of reckoning, a summing up, of Sacks’ growth as an intellectual and a writer. Born in England to a prominent Jewish family, Sacks was from an early age a ceaseless letter writer and journal keeper; he draws liberally on those writings to give readers a sense of who he was as a younger man. Many of this autobiography’s 12 chapters offer the backstories to Sacks’ books, known for illuminating the curious workings of the human brain. Sacks also writes with feeling about his immediate family, almost all of them doctors, as well as his lasting friendships with the likes of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick and the poet Thom Gunn.

In fact it is an early Gunn poem that provides the title for this book. And what an appropriate title it is! In these pages, Sacks is always on the move, leaping adroitly from one topic to the next. We are swept along by the velocity of his account of a long and eventful life.

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

Janis Heaphy Durham walked into the bathroom of her home one year to the day after the death of her beloved husband, only to stare in amazement at what appeared to be a handprint on the mirror. This was just one of many strange things that had happened since Max’s premature death from esophageal cancer at age 56. Was Max trying to contact her from beyond the grave? In her gripping new book, The Hand on the Mirror: A True Story of Life Beyond Death, Durham reveals her own awakening to possibilities beyond the material world.

Durham is the former publisher of the Sacramento Bee, which earned two Pulitzers during her tenure. She relies on her background in journalism to investigate the supernatural events following Max’s passing, though that very background also prevented her from sharing her experiences for many years. Afraid of losing her credibility as a newspaperwoman, she talked about the events with only a few friends. After she realized how many people had had similar experiences, she began to be more open about what had happened to her.

Durham spends much of the book describing her encounters with leading parapsychologists as she tries to decipher the messages she believes Max is sending her. Whether or not the reader accepts her story as true, Durham’s book is a moving account of how we deal with loss and how many of us hope for reunion in the next life. Particularly touching is the account of her mother’s decline and death, which demonstrates the possibility of change and the power of forgiveness, even at the very end of life.

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

Not long after his family moved from Memphis to rural Mississippi, young Harrison Scott Key began to notice how out of step he was with his surroundings. Willing to rise at 4 a.m. to accompany his father and brother on hunting trips, he nevertheless preferred to read, or bake, or simply not shoot things. With The World’s Largest Man for a parent, though, those options often took a backseat to a day spent in camouflage with gun at the ready.

Key’s memoir is frequently hilarious. His storytelling pulls no punches: Pop was physically abusive, somewhat racist and entirely sexist, and while Key is different in many ways, some of his father’s worst behaviors are handed down and threaten his own marriage. Yet this material is all fodder for stories that balance wit and gut-punch delivery. When a Thanksgiving dinner is blown off course by Pop’s ruminations on breastfeeding, Key muses, “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve just started shooting everyone, to save the world from us.”

Like Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, The World’s Largest Man is about a willful Southern father, a wife trying to eke out a little sanity for the family and the kids who nevertheless bear the scars of such an upbringing. And as was true with Lawson, Key continues to look for the familiar in his adult life. When his creepy neighbors in Savannah, Georgia, burn trash in the yard and tear out all the landscaping with a truck, his annoyance is clearly tempered with some nostalgia.

Both laugh-out-loud funny and observant about the ways we become our parents while asserting ourselves, The World’s Largest Man is a wise delight.

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