Boston Book Festival

Four fascinating memoirs describe life lived on the edge, whether by choice or by necessity. Howard Axelrod’s deeply moving and much-lauded memoir, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude, tells how a freak accident that left him blind in one eye prompted him to retreat to the woods to regain a sense of identity. Jerald Walker, whose The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult, earned a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, tells an astounding story of isolation and redemption. In Dreaming of Lions, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas recounts a life spent studying the people and, especially, the animals of Africa in what Shelf Awareness describes as an “undeniably powerful narrative.” William Giraldi’s The Hero’s Body explores, in “lucid, vibrant prose” (PW), his quest to meet his family’s stringent standards of masculinity, despite his own fondness for classical literature. Moderated by Kelly Horan, editor of WBUR’s Cognoscenti.