Category: biography
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Book Review: Fight Forever by J.J. McGee
Full disclosure: I know absolutely nothing about wrestling aside from whatever one of my best friends has shared with me. This same friend has a friend, and that friend wrote this book. So, of course, I’m going to have a secondhand-fangirl moment and have a great time learning about one of my friend’s favorite people…
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Top 5: Favorite Nonfiction Reads of 2025 (so far)
I’ve read a fantastic assortment of fiction books this year, but I think my nonfiction reads have surpassed those. It was difficult to build this list…
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Book Review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone
Elizabeth and William Friedman were renowned codebreakers who got their start in the early 20th Century. Until modern times, it was William who got a lot of the glory for his career, largely thanks to his wife’s persistence to put him in the history books. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s contributions were left as quiet footnotes. In this…
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Book Review: The House of My Mother by Shari Franke
I hadn’t heard of the Franke family until the news of Ruby Franke’s arrest went viral. The more that came out about her children’s situation, the more heartbroken I felt. While the idea of family vlogging never quite sat right with me personally (hence why I was out of the loop), I didn’t have a…
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Book Review: From Where to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough
Elvis Presley has been a staple in my household and extended family for my entire life, but I’d never known much about his family outside of a couple of trips to Graceland. My most recent trip was in October of 2023. Even though it was several months after Lisa Marie Presley’s death, it was a…
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Book Review: A Pope and a President by Paul Kengor
As soon as I heard about this book I knew it was too intriguing a subject to let sit it on my TBR shelf for any length of time. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going into it as I’ve never given any thought to which U.S. presidents were in office while Pope John…
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Book Review: Travels with Stephen by Stephen Gunzenhauser
Right from the subtitle I wanted to learn more about Stephen Gunzenhauser. In this memoir, he discusses his life, career, and background in music. I consider myself a casual fan of classical music and I attend the symphony on occasion so I was curious to learn more from an inside point of view…
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Book Review: The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum by Margalit Fox
I’m always curious to learn about different people, places, and periods in history that I have little to no knowledge of. In the case of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, I went in with absolutely no foreknowledge. In general, I’m not super well-versed in the era of the 1800s…
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Book Review: The Incredible Life and Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen by Sara Jordan-Heintz
My monumental excitement for this book had me convinced that I was going to devour it in a matter of days. Instead, it exceeded my already high expectations and I found myself waiting for proper reading sessions where I could take my time and jot down annotations along the way…
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Book Review: Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre
I somewhat blindly picked this book up after reading Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre. Though it was quite interesting, the subject, Ursula Kaczynski codenamed ‘Sonya’, covered so much of the WWII-era Europe that I struggled to keep track of it all…