Embedded in Cusk’s chiseled sentences are her attempts to engage with a roiling vulnerability. The book quickly became a beloved best seller when it was published, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography. “The Memory Chalet,” the resulting unlikely artifact, ranges over Judt’s boyhood in England; the lives of his lower-middle-class Jewish parents; life as a student and fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, in the 1960s and early ’70s; and his life in New York City, where he eventually settled and taught. This book has incisive things to say about the large themes of world history, including isolationism and interventionism, and about many other subjects besides, including the films of the 1930s. $14.99 #25. $14.49 There's a problem loading this menu right now. He was born in 1939 and grew up with an absent father, a Japanese prisoner of war. $14.45
Her tone throughout is frank, self-critical, modest and justifiably proud. “The book is already a period piece,” the legendary travel writer Jan Morris opens her memoir. The May 1996 disaster on Mount Everest took the lives of five climbers and greatly impacted the lives of everyone on the fateful expedition—journalist Jon Krakauer was one of the mountaineers to make it out alive. “At least I have a style,” Truman Capote once sniped at him. Hardcover Among those who came to her parties were Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Princess Margaret and Jane Fonda. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. What emerged from Cobb’s mouth was dense and tangled social history, a narrative that essentially takes us from slavery to Selma from the point of view of an unprosperous but eloquent and unbroken black man. The... Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and professor Azar... Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. With her journalistic talents, she’s able to piece together the events that led her here and to an eventual diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease. Becoming by Michelle Obama. Paperback Lots of famous memoirs become best-sellers, but most of us don't have time to read them all. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton These men were devoured by her hometown, DeLisle, Miss. It was a rangy life — one that took him into the military, politics, Hollywood, Broadway — and he depicts it with the silky urbanity you expect. When she was angry with her daughter, she would say, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” This memoir’s narrative includes Winterson’s search for her birth mother and the author’s self-invention, her intellectual development. The photographer Sally Mann’s memoir is weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful. (“Cockroach” was the Hutu epithet of choice for the Tutsis.) That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. Before it became a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, Cheryl Strayed's Wild was hitting the top of best-seller lists for its portrayal of a woman who had lost herself to grief, but then found redemption by hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail from California through Washington State. Paperback She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, by Jennifer Finney Boylan Small grew up with two parents that did not communicate with him but constantly subjected him to multiple x-rays for minor ailments—the procedures eventually gave him cancer, left untreated for years. | $15.99. They saw themselves as a “Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.” Life was navigated according to strict standards of behavior and femininity. The Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz writes prose that reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila. Everybody has a dog-lover somewhere in their lives, which is why everyone can feel for John Grogan, who wrote about the ups and downs of life with his ill-behaved pup. Mentions of things like America Online will certainly date this 2001 collection of personal essays by nonfiction writer extraordinaire Meghan Daum. Paperback None of the chipper, treacly stuff here; motherhood deserves more respect than that. (“It’s like getting a new version of software for the computer.”) As Oliver Sacks wrote in an introduction to the book, “Grandin’s voice came from a place which had never had a voice, never been granted real existence, before.”. Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir quickly became a classic on grief and mourning. These incredible memoirs are perennial favorites. It won’t age. Throughout, this account has an honest, lo-fi grace. Now 25, he tells his story of survival and the ongoing horror still experienced by child soldiers in this bracing memoir. The device of the trapped young person saved by books is a hoary one, but Winterson makes it seem new, and sulfurous. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel Yet somehow, the story isn't maudlin, and Burroughs manages to walk that fine line of being brutally honest about his upbringing, without losing sight of the humor in his situation. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong. Without self-pity, Miller details the ensuing shame, stress, and trauma caused by growing up in a rat-infested house that resembled “the remnants at the bottom of a garbage can.”, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott Obsessed with birds of prey since she was a girl, Macdonald was already an experienced falconer. $7.99. Patricia Lockwood, an acclaimed poet, weaves in this memoir the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with the crisis that led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof.