A 90-year-old man—or is he 93?—narrates the story of his one summer as a veterinarian with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth during the summer of 1931 in depression-era America. Jacob Jankowski resides in an assisted living home with other elderly people, many of whom require more medical attention than he. He is quite mentally astute for his age, yet because of his age, most of the people in charge of the facility treat him as mentally incompetent, all but Rosemary, a forty-seven-year-old nurse, who treats him and the rest of the patients/residents with the loving care, dignity, and respect they deserve as human beings.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel of survival in post-apocalyptic America. The world as it was no longer exists. Black ash years later continue to rain down on everything. There are no specifics as to what actually happened to cause this apocalypse, but the few clues the author gives us suggest a nuclear bomb: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions … A dull rose glow in the windowglass” (52). A father and his young son, survivors, are traveling “the road” from their home in the north in expectation of reaching the south, where they expect to survive the winter.

(Reviewed By Lee L. Peoples)

A new kind of book`—or at least new to me, as I have not read one like this before–is David Montalvo’s boy with an ‘i’ . It is a “partial fictional autobiography,” told with more than words. A multi-media work, there are eight tracks of art-music and an online photo-album accompanying the journal entries, emails, instant messages, and blogs that tell the moving story of David’s breakdown and recovery.

(Reviewed By Lee Lemon Peoples)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was not at all bothered by all the controversy. Yes, I agree Frey should have called it fiction—autobiographical fiction—because even without being told, I knew that much of what he wrote had to be an embellishment of the truth or just downright fiction. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez notes at the beginning of his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” (He received the Nobel Prize for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

(Reviewed By Lee Lemon Peoples)