Tag: #Memoirs

Posted in #History

The Bad Guys Won!

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

A season filled with brawling, boozing, and bimbo chasing. It showcases championship baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the rest wearing a New York uniform. They might be the best.

“Jeff Pearlman has captured the swagger of the ’86 Mets. You don’t have to be a Mets fan to enjoy this book—it’s a great read for all baseball enthusiasts.”—Philadelphia Daily News

Award-winning Sports Illustrated baseball writer Jeff Pearlman takes us back to an innocent time. The city worshipped a man named Mookie then. At that time, the Yankees were the second-best team in New York.

It was 1986. The New York Mets won 108 regular-season games. They won the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. The team was led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez. The young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry joined him. Along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin’s left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake. They damaged hotel rooms and charter planes. There was also a bar in Houston, and most famously, Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.

This book features an unforgettable cast of characters—including Doc, Straw, the Kid, Nails, Mex, and manager Davey Johnson. It presents an affectionate look at this exciting season. However, it is also critical. It celebrates the last of baseball’s arrogant and insane teams. These teams were rock-and-roll and partied all night. It explores what could have been, what should have been, and what never was.


Editorial Reviews

Review

“The Bad Guys Won is designed to delight any Mets fan—at least the less prudish ones. Pearlman…keeps a tight focus on the championship season.” — New York Times Book Review

“Pearlman has done his homework: he breaks down the wall that separates the ballplayer from the fan.” — Newsday

“As a reminder that most of us know absolutely nothing about the people we cheer for, except that they wear our hometown colors, this is a worthwhile read for any sports fan.” — Sports Illustrated

“Baseball aficionados, especially Mets fans, will enjoy this affectionate but critical look at this exciting season.” — Publishers Weekly

“Everything a diehard Mets fan…could want.” — Daily News

“A great read! Jeff Pearlman skillfully takes you deep into the silly and goofy and gross and slightly scary world that was the New York Mets clubhouse.” — Rocky Mountain News

“Jeff Pearlman has captured the swagger of the ’86 Mets. You don’t have to be a Mets fan to enjoy this book—it’s a great read for all baseball enthusiasts.” — Philadelphia Daily News

About the Author

Jeff Pearlman is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books. He is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer, a former ESPN.com columnist, and a former staff writer for Newsday and the Tennessean. He is a regular contributor to Bleacher Report and CNN.com.

Posted in #non-fiction

To Climb a Distant Mountain

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

One woman’s inspirational tale about expressing joy amid loss and suffering.


To Climb a Distant Mountain:

A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Diabetic Mother

by Laurisa White Reyes

Genre: Historical True Memoir



In 1974, at the age of twenty-six, Cynthia Ball White was diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes. Today, it is estimated that 1.25 million Americans suffer from what is now referred to as Type I diabetes, compared to 38 million who have Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes. It is a merciless disease that often leads to blindness, neuropathy, amputations, and a host of other ailments, including a shortened life span.

Despite battling diabetes for forty-five years, Cyndi beat the odds. Not only did she outlive the average Type I diabetic, but until her last week of life in 2021, she had all her “parts intact”. Her daughter often called her a walking miracle. But more impressive was Cyndi’s positive outlook on life, even in the midst of tremendous loss and suffering.

The author hopes that in sharing Cyndi’s story, others may be inspired to face their own struggles with the same faith, courage, and joy as her mother did.

 

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I’m going to tell you about my mother. Yes, that is the story I will tell. No other story really matters. I know that now. Funny, how you can spend a lifetime conjuring up magical tales of dragons and enchanters and heroes who will never exist except in your own head and on sheets of paper, when the stories that matter most happen every day all around us. I’ve spent most of my life making up stories. It’s what I do. But now that Mom is gone, I have no stories left. At least none that I care about more than hers.

My first distinct memory of my mother (I was five or six) was in the hospital. I’d come to know that hospital well. It’s in Panorama City, half an hour from where I live now, half an hour from where I lived then, two different cities—two points on the circumference of a circle with the hospital at its center. It’s where all five of my children were born, where my youngest brother was born—and died. It’s where Mom would spend too much of her life. But not yet. That would come later.

I remember the elevator doors opening and Dad pushing Mom out in a wheelchair. She wore a yellow robe that a friend had bought her when she got sick. She had crocheted me a hat. It was yellow too, criss-crossed strands like a spider’s web, with a green band. She gave it to me there. I wore it often as a child. Somewhere, I have a picture of me wearing it. The hat is in my mother’s hope chest now, the one she passed on to me when I got married. Been in there for years. Decades. It’s still a treasure.

I remember her disappearing back inside the elevator, waving, the doors sliding shut, swallowing her. I still feel sick, tight and hollow inside, when I think of that memory.

In the weeks leading up to that hospital stay, which would be the first of dozens, she’d been sick. She’d lost weight and felt very ill. She thought she was dying of cancer, but she postponed seeing a doctor because she had recently enrolled in Kaiser Permanente medical insurance through Dad’s employer, and she thought they had to wait for their membership cards to come in the mail. By the time she walked into the ER, she was on death’s door.

Her doctor smelled her breath, which Mom thought was an odd thing to do. And then he called in other doctors to smell her breath. It smelled sweet, like decaying fruit. Mom was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which they used to call Juvenile Diabetes. It meant that her pancreas had completely malfunctioned, and she would be insulin-dependent the rest of her life. She learned how to give herself insulin by injecting oranges. She was twenty-six years old.

Mom actually felt relieved because it wasn’t cancer. There was no way to know then what diabetes would do to her, how it would shape not only her life but the lives of her husband and children and grandchildren, how it would gradually destroy her body a little at a time until it finally robbed her of life itself.

 



Last Summer in Algonac

by Laurisa White Reyes

Genre: Fictionalized Family Biography



From the Spark Award-winning author of The Storytellers & Petals…

The summer of 1938 is idyllic for fourteen-year-old Dorothy Ann Reid. She’s spent every summer of her life visiting her grandparent’s home on the banks of the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan. But unbeknownst to her, this will be her last. As Dorothy and her family pass their time swimming, fishing, and boating, they are blissfully unaware that tragedy lurks just around the corner.

Last Summer in Algonac is a fictionalized account of the author’s grandmother and her family’s final summer before her father’s suicide, which altered their lives forever. Inspired by real people and events, Laurisa Reyes has woven threads of truth with imagination, creating a “what if” tale. No one living today knows the details leading to Bertram Reid’s death, but thanks to decades of letters, personal interviews, historical research, and a visit to Algonac, Reyes attempts to resolve unanswered questions, and provide solace and closure to the Reid family at last.

 

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That last summer in Algonac, there was little water play for Father, who was now fifty-seven. Alberta, who had married less than two years earlier and had recently given birth to her first child, had opted to stay in Cleveland. She and Charles had been my grandest playmates while I was growing up, but now they both had new adult lives and families of their own. Even Charles, who was eleven years my senior (Alberta fourteen years), would prove too occupied with his wife Alice and their baby to venture into any games with me. I supposed Father might have played that role with me when I was young, but I was thirteen now, practically a woman, and neither he nor I dared suggest something so childish as to jump into the river for a splash—except for that one last wonderful afternoon.

Looking back, I wish that I had done it every day—that I had taken his hand and walked with him along the bank under the trees, or sat in the grass and taken off our shoes, letting our feet dangle in the chilled, meandering water. I wish that I had had the courage to ask him more about that old rowboat, whether he had ever taken it all the way across the river to Ontario, Canada, where he and his family had come from originally. I would have liked to have been in that boat with him rowing, his muscles taut under his shirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

We wouldn’t have talked much. Father was a man of few words. But I would have listened to the ripples of the St. Clair lapping against the boat, the gentle cut of the oars through the water, the calls of birds overhead. It would have been enough just to be with him, to see his face turned to the sun, the light glinting off his spectacles, and to have seen traces of a smile on his lips.

1939, the year Father died, was a big year for America. It was the year the World’s Fair opened in New York, and the first shots of World War II were fired in Poland.  The Wizard of Oz premiered at Groman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California, and Lou Gehrig gave his final speech in Yankee Stadium. Theodore Roosevelt had his head dedicated on Mt. Rushmore, and John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. All in all, it was a monumental year, one I would have liked to have shared with my father. He did live long enough for Amelia Earhart to be officially declared dead after she disappeared over the Atlantic nearly two years earlier, but otherwise, he missed the rest of it.

No child should have to mourn a parent. And if she does, at least things about it should be clear. Unanswered questions that plague one for the rest of one’s life shouldn’t be part of the picture.

Death is normally simple, isn’t it? Someone has a heart attack, or dies in a car accident, or passes away in their sleep from old age. Everyone expects to die sometime, and they wonder how it will happen and why. And when it does, as sad as it is for those left behind, the wonder is laid to rest.

Most of the time.

1939 was a blur. I’d prefer to forget it, quite frankly. But 1938 was worth remembering, especially that summer we spent in Algonac with Grandmother Reid and the family. As long as I could remember, we’d spent every summer on the banks of the St. Clair. As it turned out, it would be my final summer in Algonac. Our last summer together. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, and I’m glad. If I could have seen seven months into the future, if I had known then how the world as I knew it would all come crashing down, it would have spoiled everything.





Laurisa White Reyes is the author of twenty-one books, including the SCBWI Spark Award-winning novel The Storytellers and the Spark Honor recipient Petals. She is also the Senior Editor at Skyrocket Press and an English instructor at College of the Canyons in Southern California. Her next release, a non-fiction book on the Old Testament, will be released in August 2026 with Cedar Fort Publishing.

 

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Posted in #BookTours

A Version of the Truth

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree


Do we spend our lives searching in vain for an answer, 

or do we find a version of the truth we can live with, and live with it?


A Version of the Truth

by Marsh Rose

Genre: Memoir


Over forty years, Marsh and her partner built a life defined by love, devotion, and independence. He supported her when she bought her home in California wine country, when she grieved the deaths of her parents, when she built her career as a psychotherapist, and even when she overcame a lifelong fear of dogs to adopt a rescued greyhound.

They never married or shared a home—by choice. They were lovers and confidants, deeply committed to one another. Yet, they only met on Tuesdays and Fridays.

And then, one day, he vanished.

When Marsh finally tracked him down, she discovered the unimaginable: he had suffered a catastrophic stroke. His memory was gone. He could no longer speak. And he was living with a woman who knew him by a different name.

What was the truth? With him unreachable behind the devastation of his illness, and with the danger that exposing their relationship could cause irreparable harm, Marsh was left to confront a hall of mirrors—plagued by questions, silences, and uncertainty.

In the end, she discovered a universal reality: we all live with some unknowable mystery. The question is—do we spend our lives searching in vain for an answer, or do we find a version of the truth we can live with, and live with it?

 

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Marsh Rose is a freelance writer, psychotherapist and college educator. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including Cosmopolitan Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Carve Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, and New Millennium Writings where she took first prize for creative nonfiction in 2018. She lives in the north San Francisco Bay Area with her greyhound, Adin.

  

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Posted in #BookTours

My Next Breath: A Memoir

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The gripping and inspiring story of acclaimed actor Jeremy Renner’s near-fatal accident, and what he learned about inner strength, endurance and hope as he overcame insurmountable odds to recover, one breath at a time.

Two-time Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner was the second most googled person in 2023… and not for his impressive filmography. His searing portrayals on film ranged from an Iraq-based army bomb technician in The Hurt Locker and a Boston bank robber in The Town to a crooked Camden mayor in American Hustle before he became heir to the Jason Bourne franchise (The Bourne Legacy). Amongst other iconic roles, he also captured hearts as fan-favorite comic book marksman Hawkeye in seven Marvel films.

Yet, his otherworldly success on-screen faded to the periphery when a fourteen-thousand-pound snowplow crushed him on New Year’s Day 2023. Somehow able to keep breathing for more than half an hour, he was subsequently rushed to the ICU, after which he would face multiple surgeries and months of painful rehabilitation.

In this debut memoir, Jeremy writes in blistering detail about his accident and the aftermath. This retelling is not merely a gruesome account of what happened to him; it’s a call to action and a forged companionship between reader and author as Jeremy recounts his recovery journey and reflects on the impact of his suffering. Ultimately, Jeremy’s memoir is a testament to the human spirit and its capacity to endure, evolve, and find purpose in the face of unimaginable adversity. His writing captures the essence of profound transformation, exploring the delicate interplay between vulnerability and strength, despair and hope, redemption and renewal.

The Reviews

Amber B
5.0 out of 5 stars 
Inspiring story of a miracle! Great read!
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2025
Verified Purchase
Wow! My intention for the night was to just sit down and briefly page through the book, looking at the pictures and knowing I didn't quite have the time to read tonight. However, page 1 sucked me right in and now I'm at Chapter 4, page 59 and might very well read this in one sitting tonight. I've been a huge Jeremy Renner fan since SWAT, Tag is my go-to comedy movie when I need a good laugh, and being an archery enthusiast myself, Hawkeye instantly became my favorite Avenger. I followed him on social media before this happened so once he started posting his recovery, I checked in frequently to help heal my broken heart I felt for him. The way he details every second of that gruesome day makes you feel like you're right there with him on the ice, holding his hand, cheering him on and reminding him to breathe and stay alive for his beloved family. I watched him on Diane Sawyer so it's easy to visualize the area he's describing and the treacherous conditions of the roads, but hearing his own words brings to life the horrific trauma he endured. It is perfectly written and very easy to follow, and I can't put it down. We already knew it was indescribable what he went through, but to see it in words makes me just cringe in my chair and thank God repeatedly that he survived and is doing so remarkably well! What tenacity he has to pull through and focus on everything important in his life, and not wallow in torture and give up. He's a superhero on screen, but seems he is the very definition of it in real life. His family is superb, his love for his daughter makes my heart explode (I have 3 girls, I know the feeling!), and his will to not only live but to thrive is beyond admirable. I'll likely be finishing this tonight, and anxiously awaiting Mayor season 4 to cheer him on! Get this book and be prepared to read it all at once! God bless, Jeremy Renner. The world is so happy you are still here. Much love!

Update: it's 2:00am and I read the whole thing today. He sure didn't have to share this story with the public, but I can imagine perhaps it was therapeutic to relive it, but likely not always in a good way as it's got to be so hard detailing the worst experience of your life. The book had my emotions all over the place; I laughed along with his stubbornness as I could feel it emanating off the pages, and I understood that desperate need to escape the hospital. I teared up as he described the anguish and guilt he felt for "causing" this, though I can't imagine his family holds him guilty for it. I felt so awful for the excruciating pain he had to endure. If I didn't know what the future held for him, this book would have been so much more emotionally difficult to read, but having seen him on Mayor season 3 and numerous times on talk shows and social media, I at least felt relief knowing how well he pulls through before I even got to those parts of the book. However, it's clear that it didn't come without a hefty mental, emotional and physical price tag that he paid in his recovery. Eternally grateful you are still here and proud of you for living with a new outlook and so much positivity. You are an inspiration!

Posted in #BookTours

The Bad Guys Won!

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the … on a New York Uniform–and Maybe the Best

“Jeff Pearlman has captured the swagger of the ’86 Mets. You don’t have to be a Mets fan to enjoy this book—it’s a great read for all baseball enthusiasts.”—Philadelphia Daily News

Award-winning Sports Illustrated baseball writer Jeff Pearlman returns to an innocent time when a city worshipped a man named Mookie and the Yankees were the second-best team in New York.

It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin’s left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake—hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.

Continue reading “The Bad Guys Won!” →