by Josiane Behmoiras | May 7, 2019 | Books for the Journey
Fred Smith is no ordinary Australian diplomat. In postings served in the Uruzgan Province of Afghanistan, he built relationships with tribal leaders while continuing his side-career as a folk musician. Smith, who has written about his experiences in a book, The Dust...
by Josiane Behmoiras | Apr 18, 2019 | Books for the Journey
“In his book “Memoir: An Introduction,” from 2011, the scholar G. Thomas Couser argues that we go to the genre not so much for detail or style as for “wisdom and self-knowledge,” for what the main character, who is always the author, has learned. Sometimes,...
by Josiane Behmoiras | Apr 18, 2019 | Books for the Journey
“In his astonishing book At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities (1980), Jean Améry devotes a chapter to intellectuals in the Nazi camp. An essayist and novelist himself, he focuses on how writers made sense of their...
by Josiane Behmoiras | Mar 30, 2019 | Books for the Journey
“Jenny Erpenbeck’s magnificent novel “Go, Went, Gone” (New Directions, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky) is about “the central moral question of our time,” and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are...
by Josiane Behmoiras | Mar 30, 2019 | Books for the Journey
“This arresting autobiographical novel pulls no punches; rather, it lands them on the reader as frequently as fists descend on its subject. The Eddy of the title is a child born to below-the-poverty-line parents in an isolated village in rural northern France in...
by Josiane Behmoiras | Mar 30, 2019 | Books for the Journey
“When her elderly mother is hospitalised unexpectedly, Vicki travels to her parents’ isolated ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help her father. She has been estranged from her parents for many years and is horrified by what she discovers on her arrival. Her...
