The Light of the World: A Memoir

An Amazon Best Book of April 2015: Elizabeth Alexander s memoir of her marriage and the sudden death of her husband is by turns sorrowful and joyful, earthy and elegiac, deeply personal and achingly universal. Alexander, an acclaimed poet perhaps best known for the poem she delivered at Barack Obama s first inauguration, is a professor at Yale. (In an aside, she reveals that she is only the 3rd African American woman to get tenure at that University.) Her husband, Ficre, was an Eritrean who d survived civil war in Africa to become a chef and artist in America; their marriage, as chronicled here, was a triumph of politics, society and romance. It was not without its secrets or its difficulties, but it was clearly a happy, no, make that a joyful union; the pleasures of cooking together (Alexander sometimes includes recipes), entertaining a huge, international group of family and friends and raising their two precocious boys is palpable on every mellifluous page. Like Joan Didion, Meghan O Rourke and Roger Rosenblatt before her, Alexander here faces the unfaceable topic of loss -- and almost convinces us and herself that despite her terrible grief, she is grateful for the life and love that preceded it. --Sara Nelson