“Running a totalitarian regime is simple: tell the people what they’re going to do, shoot the first one to object, and repeat until everyone is on the same page.” Such was life in Ukraine for young Lev Golinkin and his family, and it might have been tolerable had he not also suffered daily beatings in school for being a Jew. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the family fled to Austria where they lived in a refugee hotel before immigrating to the U.S. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka is the story of that journey and of Golinkin’s struggle to reclaim his identity.

When the family finally makes it to the America extolled in folk songs and held out as their greatest hope, assimilating is as hard as you might imagine. Golinkin’s father, an engineer in the Ukraine, spends eight months sending out resumes in order to land an entry-level job in his field. His mother, a doctor, struggles with the language barrier while pulling espresso shots as a barista. Lev and his sister Lina are the family’s great hope, but while she studies, he struggles to dismantle his internalized anti-Semitism.

Golinkin writes with dry humor about his experience but connects emotionally when describing how a lengthy stint doing charity work in college finally led him to investigate his past and the people whose charity made his own life not just better, but possible at all. A friend in Vienna steered them to Indiana so they wouldn’t be lost among refugees in Brooklyn, and the efforts expended to get the children into college were heroic. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka blends memoir and history into an intimate tale of personal growth.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A few years ago, I taught Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in a college freshman writing class. I thought the story of Chris McCandless, who turned his back on civilization to hike into the Alaskan wilderness, would resonate with undergraduates. Chris’ tragic journey may have ended with his death, but his quest for purity and adventure was inspirational. Or so I thought.

Apart from one lone hippie idealist, the other students condemned Chris for his selfishness: How could he turn his back on his parents after all they had done for him? As it turns out, many other readers felt the same way. But they didn’t know the whole story of the violent dysfunction that Chris was escaping in his bid for freedom. Now his sister, Carine McCandless, has written a brave and sensitive memoir that fills in the gaps.

In The Wild Truth, Carine depicts their father, Walt, as a violent, controlling abuser. While still married to his first wife, Marcia, he began an affair with Chris and Carine’s mother, Billie. Marcia had six children, and Billie had two—Chris and Carine were technically illegitimate. None of this was explained to Chris and Carine as children, though they spent time with their half-siblings.

But their father’s violence and their mother’s denial of it were perfectly clear. Although Chris tried to protect his little sister, there was no denying the level of physical, emotional and verbal abuse and manipulation in the house. Carine’s description of this dynamic is even-handed and the more horrific for it. And the manipulation continued after Chris’ death in the way Billie and Walt handled his revenue-generating afterlife.

Carine, writing with the full support of her siblings and Krakauer, has succeeded in bringing grace and truth back to her brother’s story.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Most non-poetry-reading Americans first encountered Richard Blanco in 2013, when he was the presidential inauguration poet. On that occasion, his moving poem “One Today” made passing reference to his Spanish-speaking mother who rang up groceries for 20 years and his father who cut sugarcane so Richard could move ahead in the family’s new country.

Blanco, a gay Latino from Miami’s Cuban community, has now beautifully repaid that debt with The Prince of los Cocuyos, a loving memoir of his boyhood among exiles.

We follow young “Riqui” from his childhood into the larger world of school and El Cocuyito (The Little Firefly), the grocery store where he worked. His tone is fond but clear-eyed: As a boy who loved fairy princesses, he was a puzzle to his relatives. His grandmother was particularly harsh, always badgering him to be more masculine. She was frightened of what might happen to him otherwise.

Indeed, the fear that comes with an unfamiliar language and culture is a running theme: his aggressive abuela flummoxed in a Winn-Dixie; his proud parents treated with contempt during a traffic stop. And Riqui himself was initially frightened by his sexuality. He only slowly integrated his personality—gay, Cuban, American—with the help of fellow Cubans, straight and gay, and an elderly Jewish woman who taught him that living among different worlds could be great fun.

Blanco used the same material in his first poetry collection, City of a Hundred Fires, and he approaches the memoir as a creative artist who shapes his narrative, making clear that it is “not necessarily or entirely factual,” with memories “embroidered.” It doesn’t matter: Blanco’s touching reminiscence has a deep emotional truth.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Suki Kim, author of the highly regarded novel The Interpreter, went to North Korea to teach English under doubly false pretenses. Her fellow instructors at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) were evangelical Christians pretending to be nonreligious teachers. (“North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world,” she writes.) To be accepted into the program, Kim pretended to be an evangelical pretending to be a nonreligious teacher. She feared exposure on all sides.

Maybe that fear explains the sharpness of her observations in Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite. Her nuanced account is loosely chronological, covering the two semesters she taught at PUST between July and December 2011, based on secret journals she kept with great care, and informed by the heartrending stories of her family members split asunder by the Korean War. Readers will find her experiences and reactions surprising in many ways.

Kim’s 19- and 20-year-old students, all male, came from the elite families of North Korea, one of the most opaque societies on earth. Sharing three meals a day, classes and endless, if sometimes awkward, conversations with her students, Kim developed a strong affection for them, and they for her. At the same time, she was “struck by their astounding lack of general knowledge about the world.” Her subtle attempts to expand their awareness often backfired, her students withdrawing into a rote formulation of their nation’s superiority. Kim’s book illuminates “the inherent contradiction of a country backed into a corner, not wanting to open up, but needing to move toward engagement to survive.”

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Norman Lear wants to show you his scrapbook, and—after 92 years—it’s a pretty thick one. Although he established himself as a comedy writer at the dawn of television in 1950, writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lear didn’t really become a public figure until the 1970s. During that golden decade, he revolutionized TV with such socially conscious sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time.” Unlike the comedies that preceded them, these series explored such touchy subjects as racism, ethnic prejudices, homophobia, women’s rights, abortion, sex education and single parenthood.

In recounting how he built these cultural landmarks, Lear also provides glimpses of the actors who brought the episodes to life. Carroll O’Connor, who played the iconic bigot Archie Bunker, fought with Lear over every script but was so perfect for the role that Lear has nothing but praise for his acting skills. Jean Stapleton (Edith Bunker) and Bea Arthur (Maude) were dreams to work with, as was Rob Reiner (Archie’s “meathead” son-in-law, Mike), whom Lear had known since he was a 9-year-old next-door neighbor. Lear would later back Reiner in the classic “rockumentary,” This Is Spinal Tap.

Born into a lower-middle-class family in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear recalls being sent to live with relatives when his father served time in prison for a financial scam. Clearly, Lear has spent much of his life trying to justify his worth to his largely self-centered parents. He speaks frankly here about his three marriages and his weaknesses as a husband and father. And he explains how his political bent led him to found the liberal lobbying group, People For the American Way. Age has not diminished Lear’s gifts as a storyteller.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a stunning coming-of-age story that tracks New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s rise from a poverty-stricken childhood in Louisiana to the respected journalist he is today. An introspective and poetic memoir about race, masculinity and sexuality, it also reckons with the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the core of his identity.

The youngest of four sons, Blow is devoted to his mother, who struggles to support the boys on her salary as a home economics teacher. Her commitment to education and newspaper reading is a positive influence on young Blow, a corrective to his father’s drinking and emotional manipulation. The summer Blow is 7, his older cousin comes to stay with the family, and offers at first the attention the child is hungry for, an attention that swiftly turns abusive.

Blow’s portrait of the psychic and spiritual aftermath of that abuse is intensely honest. He describes the severing of body and spirit, the self-blame and self-doubt. As he grows older, he shows how the experience lay behind his drive to become invincible, a popular boy. But the legacy of abuse is subtle and pernicious, and in his role as fraternity president at college, Blow presides over hazing rituals, which are no less sadistic for being traditional. The moral conflict he experiences and choices he makes offer him a first step toward untangling his childhood experiences and moving into his future.

Blow nests his story within the life stories of other men and boys he knew, gay African Americans who challenged the culture of masculinity and bravado simply by existing, and who were met with community rejection or violence. Their untold stories, reflected in Blow’s, make Fire Shut Up in My Bones an essential work of autobiography.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In most biographies, an epilogue provides the story of what happens after the subject of the book has died or somehow left the scene. It’s a wrapping up, a life-after-life afterthought.

Will Boast, whose Power Ballads: Stories (2011) won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, cannily reverses this usual order by turning the epilogue into the entire story of his life until now. In Epilogue: A Memoir, Boast plunges into the depths of his own heart to probe the ragged mysteries that bring families together, hold them up through the years and cause them to fall apart.

Having already lost his younger brother to an auto accident and his mother to cancer, Boast, at 24, loses his father to complications of alcoholism. Muddling through his father’s papers, seeking consolation in women and wine and generally wondering what life will bring next, Boast stumbles upon secrets his parents had kept from him. He learns that his father had been married, with two sons, before he met and married Boast’s mother. As he attempts to get to know his half-brothers in England, he contemplates the light that these new relationships can shed on the truths of his own childhood, and he imagines rewriting his own family story.

Absorbing and agonizing at the same time, Boast’s narrative refuses to cover raw wounds, instead leaving them open to the fresh breezes of love and renewal that blow into his life after his father’s death.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pioneering journalist Gail Sheehy has lived a life jam-packed with work, love, politics and writing. Best-selling author of 1976’s Passages, which revolutionized the way Americans thought about the phases of their adult lives, Sheehy has spent a lifetime documenting American culture. Now in her 70s, she casts a retrospective eye on the chapters of her own life in an absorbing new memoir.

Daring: My Passages is a “life and times” memoir: It’s as much about journalism, politics and culture as it is about her life. Sheehy had a career-long knack for capturing the zeitgeist in what we now call long-form journalism. Back in the late 1960s at New York magazine, they were calling it “the new journalism,” as famously practiced by Tom Wolfe. For New York, Sheehy put on hot pants and walked the streets with prostitutes in the early ’70s; she wrote about divorce and the Black Panthers; she found herself in the middle of the shooting in Belfast on Bloody Sunday. But she really hit her stride with Passages, which touched a nerve with readers and has been the template for many of her subsequent books.

Sheehy’s on-again, off-again romance with Clay Felker, legendary editor and founder of New York, is the emotional center of this memoir as it was of her life. A powerful and influential figure, Felker was an early mentor for Sheehy, before becoming her lover and, after many years, her husband. Her decade spent caring for Felker at the end of his life offers an unforgettable portrait of the evolution of love over a lifetime.

Sheehy’s theme for her memoir is “daring”; she suggests that the way to thrive is to dare to make changes as we move through adulthood. This fascinating memoir also suggests that our lives mirror our times, and that we flourish by looking outward as well as inward.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2014

“So, really, what’s a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind?” Caitlin Doughty asks near the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, her by turns shockingly gruesome, mordantly funny and, ultimately, richly thought-provoking memoir about working in an Oakland, California, mortuary and crematorium.

It’s an excellent question. Part of the answer, we learn, lies in the death obsession Doughty developed as an 8-year-old after witnessing a child’s plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall in Hawaii where she grew up. One flowering of that obsession was a plan to create a slick, modern, hip—fun, even—mortuary she would call La Belle Mort.

But, Doughty soon discovers that “the day-to-day realities of working at Westwind were more savage than I had anticipated.” And she proceeds to write graphically—and wittily—about those realities: the transportation, embalming and cremation of all shapes, sizes and ages of dead bodies and body parts. Here is one of the less graphic passages: “For those of you who have not had the privilege of smelling Eau de Decomposition, the first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone. Not a fresh, summer citrus mind you—more like a can of orange-scented industrial bathroom spray shot directly up your nose.”

Doughty’s very unsentimental education at Westwind and, later, in mortuary school has turned her into a forceful and eloquent advocate for confronting the reality of death, as readers will discover in the final chapters of this memoir. “I went from thinking it was a little bizarre that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world,” she writes. “Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes offers a path toward that knowledge.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Doughty for Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.