"L. Annette Binder’s Child of Earth and Starry Heaven is a memoir of motherhood, memory and memory loss. It looks to mythology, science, poetry, history, and fiction to find beauty and meaning even as Annette’s mother succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease. Sad and joyous, the book is a meditation on what makes us human.
Kirkus notes that, 'The author writes with the probing lyricism of a poet... Readers will admire Binder's refusal of sentimentality, observant eye and determination to grasp answers that seem always on the verge of evaporation. An illuminating and moving meditation on dementia. (Our Verdict: GET IT.)' Foreword Reviews concludes that, “The prose is infused with love, exhibiting the grace Binder found in others and for herself...Despite the book's inevitable ending, there is no sense of tragedy to be found—only kinship.” James Brown, author of Apology to the Young Addict, calls the book 'a hauntingly powerful work of the sort only the very best of writers may hope to achieve in a lifetime,' while Harvard neuroscientist Daniel Schacter, author of The Seven Sins of Memory, calls it 'an essential book that both moves and informs.”"
"Bloomsbury presents The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder, read by Laurel Lefkow.
‘A heartbreaking portrait of an ordinary family shattered by a war they didn’t want’ The Times
They've wrecked the world, these men, and still they're not done. They'd take the sky if they could.
Germany, 1945, and the bombs are falling. In Heidenfeld, Etta and her husband Josef roam an empty nest: their eldest son Max is fighting on the frontlines, while fifteen-year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nürnberg school for the Hitler Youth. At home, news of the war provokes daily doses of fear as the planes grow closer, taking one city after the next.
When Max is unexpectedly discharged, Etta is relieved to have her eldest home and safe. But soon after he arrives, it’s clear that the boy who left is not the same returned. With Georg a hundred miles away and a husband confronting his own difficult feelings toward patriotic duty, Etta alone must gather the pieces of a splintering family, determined to hold them together in the face of an uncertain future. P 2020 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC C 2020 L. Annette Binder"
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