Tag: #Memoir

Indie Spotlight and Review: The Empty Side Of Our Bed by Bill Beckett

BonnieReadsAndWrites16 Comments

**Indie Spotlight is my effort to help Indie authors share their books with others. You can help too by sharing this post with all of your social media followers. Together we can help Indie books succeed. Below is my review of an honest and very personal story of loss and grief by author Bill Beckett.

BOOK REVIEW

The Empty Side of Our Bed is Bill Beckett’s story of the loss of his beloved wife Bonnie to cancer, and his painful journey forward. Beckett makes it clear that there are no easy answers and no step-by-step guidelines to cope with losing the love of your life. Instead he shares his emotions from the beginning of his journey until the present. His description of heartache as an actual, physical pain is so real, and he describes the darker times when he was overwhelmed with the physical agony of it, along with the mental anguish. At the same time, he shares happy memories with Bonnie and stresses the simple moments that we should all embrace to the fullest, because they are the ones he misses the most. He shares how he has learned to live with grief, and he honors his late wife and his love for her.

This is a wonderful tribute to the author’s wife, and at the same time, a deeply honest story of experiencing grief and moving slowly forward.

I received a free copy of this book. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Beckett is a former IT and digital forensics professional who turned to writing after the loss of his wife, Bonnie. He is the author of Love, Family, Cancer, a heartfelt account of their journey through illness. His current project, The Empty Side of Our Bed, is a deeply personal memoir about grief, healing, and rediscovering identity. Bill writes with raw honesty, offering comfort to fellow widowers and anyone navigating profound loss. He is a father, grandfather, and storyteller who believes in the quiet power of words to help us carry on.

PURCHASE LINK

Click on the cover to purchase on Amazon

BEFORE YOU GO

**If you read the book, please be sure to leave a review on Amazon. It helps Indie authors so much. A review does not have to be a masterpiece. Just a sentence or two about how the book made you feel will make an author’s day and help their books succeed.

Audiobook review: Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon

BonnieReadsAndWrites12 Comments

BOOK DESCRIPTION

A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot’s genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother’s kitchen.

“Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and one wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.”

In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who lost everything and everyone—her house, her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends—everything but the memories of her mother’s kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart in the 1970s, killing millions of her compatriots. Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this emotional and poignant but also lyrical and magical memoir that includes over 20 recipes for Khmer dishes like chicken lime soup, banh sung noodles, pâté de foie, curries, spring rolls, and stir-fries. For Nguon, recreating these dishes becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother.

BOOK REVIEW

Slow Noodles is Chantha Nguon’s memoir of her life before and after the Pol Pot regime devastated Cambodia. She describes a life of plenty which suddenly turned to nothing, and then the difficulties of being a Cambodian refugee in Thailand. One thing she held onto was the memory of her mother’s recipes, and she shares those recipes along with her story.

As she begins to relay the pain of her journey, she asks us to close our eyes and imagine losing everything we have, piece by piece, including family and even food. This book is a reminder to treasure the things that really matter. The story is both heartbreaking and uplifting, and the recipes sound wonderful. Especially poignant is the fact that Nguon used the recipes as a way to keep her family traditions alive even in the midst of so much loss.

Although I received a free audio copy, I also ordered a hardcover copy for myself. This book and these recipes are meant to be saved and cherished.

The audiobook narrators, Kim Green and Clara Kim, do a wonderful job of portraying the loss, pain, devastation, and death, but also the ray of hope that remains in the form of family recipes and traditions. The whole audiobook production just swept me away to this difficult time and place.

I received a free copy of the audiobook from Hachette Audio. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

PURCHASE LINKS

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | Google | Kobo

Giveaway: Free Indie Book!

BonnieReadsAndWrites5 Comments

Good morning, all you book lovers!

Christine Skarbek is giving away 30 PDF copies of her memoir, Confronting Power and Chaos, on LibraryThing.com this month.  The drawing ends Dec 26th at 6 pm EST. 

So, if you want to read her memoir for free or want to recommend it to folks you know, here’s the link to the giveaway.

Please spread the word about this giveaway among friends and relatives! Christine thanks you and hopes your holiday season is jolly and joy-filled.

Click on the cover above to learn more about the book on Amazon, and my review is here.

Self-Published Saturday/Silent Rise: A City, the Arts, and a Blue Collar Kid

BonnieReadsAndWrites6 Comments

Self-published Saturday is my attempt to help Self-Published/Indie authors. These authors have to do it all, from cover design to editing to marketing and more. Saturdays are reserved for giving them a little bit of help with the marketing side. This week’s first offering is Silent Rise by Rick H. Jones. It is about his life and his path to becoming the Director of the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton, OH. As an additional note, I have stopped putting dates on Self-Published Saturday reviews. I think it’s better that they remain timeless.

BOOK REVIEW

This is the author’s memoir of growing up in Dayton, Ohio, his talent for painting and love for the arts, and the path that led him to become Director of the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton, OH.

I found this book to be part memoir and part “how to” book, as a lot of the mechanics of setting up, conceptualizing, and funding an arts center were discussed in the book. There are a lot of personal anecdotes as well. Jones pays well-earned homage to the leaders in Hamilton who helped him to bring the idea of an arts center to fruition and help it become the center of a thriving community. For anyone interested in setting up an arts center or any kind of nonprofit, this will be a fascinating read. 

Jones mentions his extended family in the “hollers” (or hollows) of the Eastern Kentucky mountains, and I appreciated the beautiful quote he provided about “the definition of a holler,” written by Roberta Stephens. The full article by Stephens is at https://www.marshmallowranch.com/defi…. I completely understood that quote. I grew up in Cincinnati, but my late Mom is from Western Carolina, and we spent summers with her relatives in Bryson City. I will be living in the very holler my Mom grew up in after I retire.

While the author said some of his family and acquaintances in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky were racist, I have not experienced that at all. My Western North Carolina mountain family includes cousins of Native American and African American heritage, not just Caucasian, and I haven’t seen racism there. Cherokee, home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, is just 10 miles away. I can only speak to my experience, but I just didn’t want people to think all of Appalachia is racist, because that is not so.

Overall, this is a detailed memoir about the arts and what they can do for a community. The author’s love and care for his adopted community of Hamilton, OH, are very evident and appreciated.

COVER RATING

Cover Rating is a new feature where I give my opinion as to whether or not the cover will be noticeable when readers are scrolling through millions of offerings on Amazon. It does not reflect in the overall rating of the book review. I asked the author, who is an artist, if this was abstract art, and he said “No. It’s rusting metal.” This is to symbolize the rust belt and Hamilton OH. I thought that was pretty cool! I think the cover is very noticeable, especially for a non-fiction book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rick H. Jones

Rick got his start in the arts when his mother enrolled him in Saturday morning art classes at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. He continued for nearly a decade. With two degrees in painting, having taught college art for six years, and forty years’ experience in arts administration, he is now an exhibited painter, author, and sometimes poet. He has consulted on board development, fund development, grantsmanship, and arts management for numerous arts centers, councils, and organizations. In retirement, he and his family own an art supply and framing store in Hamilton, Ohio. In 1991 he was awarded the Ohio Governor’s Award in Arts Administration.

WEBSITE

*The author’s books and paintings are both showcased here.

BUY LINKS

AMAZON

BARNES AND NOBLE

*If you buy the book(s), please leave reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, as well as anywhere else you review books.  Some people feel very daunted by writing a review. Don’t worry. You do not have to write a masterpiece. Just a couple of lines about how the book made you feel will make the author’s day and help the book succeed. The more reviews a book has, the more Amazon will promote it.

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