Tag archives: memoir
On a lark, Michael and Gabriella Salsbury walked into Madame Rosinka’s fortune-telling shopfront on Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. Rudderless and adrift on the open ocean of unspeakable parental sorrow, the couple were emphatically not looking to Madame Rosinka for the answers that had otherwise so eluded them. The Salsburys were not seekers after the […]
The veteran experience is also a jumping off point for The Hardest Year: A Love Story in Letters During the Vietnam War, a just-published memoir by author-poet Carole Wagener and her husband, William Wagener, that has been called a personal snapshot of the turbulent ‘60s as framed through the hearts of two souls divided by […]
Santa Barbara, not surprisingly, is the most expensive city to be happy in the U.S. An Australian-based money exchange service, S Money, has ranked the most costly cities in America based on data from a 2018 Purdue University study on the relationship between happiness and income to find the price of happiness in every metropolis. […]
John Holman – U.K. expat, adventurer, programmer, grandson, and nephew of a storied horse-trader and Royal jockey, respectively – has written an affecting and often hilarious memoir of his youth in a tiny, post-war West Sussex village. His bittersweet memoir of village life in rural England is called A Horse in My Suitcase, and will […]
On a sultry August evening in 2018, Linda Goldbloom was struck in the head by a line drive foul ball at Dodger Stadium. She died four days later. Seated next to her husband Erwin in the loge section of the storied ball field some 200 feet behind and above home plate, she never saw it […]
In the wee-hours and pitch darkness of a howling January morning, a mountainside loosed itself and descended like a wave of stone on the sleeping, forested village of Montecito. Moments before, awakened by the roar of rain jackhammering the roof of the Cantin home, Kim and husband Dave had thrown back the sheets and hurriedly […]
Veteran travel writer Mary Tonetti Dorra has just published her double memoir, Two Lives on Four Continents. Mary, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, and Gourmet magazine, celebrated the occasion with a boffo bash at the Granada penthouse of Dan and Meg Burnham. “I’m a Texas girl who happened […]
Veteran journalist and author Robert Whiting is one of only a few Western writers to have written a regular newspaper column in the Japanese language. The author of several highly successful books on Japan and the city where he has lived on and off for more than half a century include the best-selling You Gotta […]
Movie lovers might only know Cheryl Strayed from the film version of her bestselling memoir Wild, which starred Reese Witherspoon in the adaptation of the book that offered alternating harrowing and hilarious stories from Strayed’s solo 1,100-mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail as well as the personal journey that led her there. But the […]
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American born British-Libyan author Hisham Matar won the coveted award for The Return, his 2016 memoir about his journey to Libya to find out what happened to his father. An exiled opponent of the infamously brutal Gaddafi regime, the elder Matar was kidnapped in Cairo and flown back to Libya, where he […]
There is a new book just published about Ganna Walska by her niece Hania Tallmadge called Portraits of an Era. The book was meant to coincide with an exhibit at Lotusland. But while we’re all still operating under stay-at-home orders, doesn’t mean we can’t take a moment this spring for some fresh Ganna Walska/Lotusland appreciation. […]
Montecito’s singer-songwriter hero is logging his time during the pandemic. Kenny Loggins is staying at home during the shelter-in-place era as the COVID-19 pandemic stopped everything in its tracks. Actually, make that homes. The 72-year-old singer-songwriter, who began scoring hits back in the early 1970s in a duo with Jim Messina, found fertile ground with […]
Radhule Weininger, Ph.D., and Diana Raab, Ph.D., are teaming up once again to offer a three-hour training in Mindfulness Meditation and Journaling this weekend. Raab, a longtime Montecito-based memoirist, poet, essayist, blogger and speaker whose latest book is titled Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life, and Weininger, […]
If you are the goddaughter of Talullah Bankhead, a child actress and gifted writer, you have quite a tale to tell. If you are also the goddaughter of the famous and stunningly beautiful children’s book author Dare Wright, known not only for her bestselling books that relied on simple storytelling, posed stuffed animals, and extraordinary […]
The amazons were out in force when Santa Barbara stock broker Monica Timpe threw a bustling bash at her Anacapa Street home for English author friend Deborah Richards, who debuted her first book, Shift & Shine, which took her ten years to complete. The memoir, a mixture of pathos and humor, chronicles dealing with trials […]
Santa Barbara author Myra Mossman, a federal criminal appeals attorney, has debuted her first book, My Random Death: A Memoir, a riveting true crime story with courage triumphing over evil, after rewriting it three times over the past 21 years. Mossman, who has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, took writing courses at City College […]
Victoria Riskin’s life would be plenty worthy of an autobiography. The 30-year Montecito resident, who is married to filmmaker-writer-producer David W. Rintels, has had a storied career as a practicing psychologist, screenwriter (My Antonia, The Last Best Year) who served as president of the Writers Guild of America West, and director of Human Rights Watch, […]
