Among the many outstanding books reviewed in this week's issue, we showcase memoirs galore! In What Have We Here?, actor Billy Dee Williams delivers "a priceless showbiz record" of his trailblazing years in Hollywood; and Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez "cracks open the 'bootstrap' narrative" of the U.S. in My Side of the River. Although YA author Walela Nehanda's cancer memoir, Bless the Blood, "ain't a john green novel," it is instead a "lucid" consideration of "self-realization and determination to survive."
In The Writer's Life, Sheila Heti explains how she wrestled her meticulous and experimental new memoir, Alphabetical Diaries, into submission through an editing process that took nearly a decade and a half!
--Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness