Saturday, May 19, 2012

Julia Alvarez's 6 favorite books

Julia Alvarez grew up in the Dominican Republic before emigrating to the United States at the age of 10.

Her books include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, ¡Yo!, Once Upon a Quinceañera, the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist In the Time of the Butterflies, and the newly released A Wedding in Haiti, a memoir about cross-cultural friends.

One of her six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

A stirring, nonfiction portrait of physician Paul Farmer. Through his organization, Partners in Health, Farmer has focused on bringing modern medicine to "the triage nations of the world," among them Haiti. While writing, I'd reread sections of this book and be reminded of the ground my own narrative was traveling.
Read about another book on the list.

See Julia Alvarez's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue