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32 listings found. Displaying 1 - 20 |
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Ahmedi, Farah. The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl On the Other Side of the Sky Ahmedi was born just as the war between the mujahideen and the Soviets reaches its peak in Afghanistan. The sounds of gunfire and fighter planes were as normal to her as the sounds of traffic or children playing are to a schoolgirl in America. When she stepped on a land mine on her way to school, she began to learn--slowly--that ordinary people, often strangers, have immense power to save lives and restore hope. She was taken from a childhood in Afghanistan, where the classrooms are naked chambers with only chalkboards on the walls and are filled with more students than seats (and no books), to a Chicago adolescence, where teenagers struggle to decide whether to try out for school plays, whom to take to the homecoming dance, and where to go to college. This story was selected from hundreds submitted to ABC's Good Morning America. 2005 Appears on the following book lists:  If you liked...The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini | ||||||||||||||
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Arana, Marie American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood From her father's genteel Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet from her mother's American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken's neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American, an individual whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who "was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American chica." 2001 | ||||||||||||||
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Bechdel, Alison Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic This graphic novel chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one's family. 2006 Appears on the following book lists: GLBT Voices Graphic Novels: Memoirs and History Rainbow Project
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Blunt, Judy Breaking Clean In this award-winning memoir of growing up female on Montana ranches (shown on a map), Blunt traces several generations of her family, her early marriage and divorce, and "breaking clean" of myths of rugged individualism to find a place of her own where women can have a voice beyond being capable helpmates. Several chapters were originally published in modified form in literary journals. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR 2002 Appears on the following book lists:
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Cameron, Julia Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir "In Floor Sample, Julia Cameron weaves an honest and moving portrayal of her life. From her early career as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and her marriage to Martin Scorsese, to her tortured experiences with alcohol and Hollywood, in this memoir she reflects on the experiences in her life that have fed her own art as well as her ability to help others realize their creative dreams. She also describes the circumstances that led her to emerge as a central figure in the creative recovery movement - a movement that she inaugurated and defined with the publication of her seminal work, The Artist's Way."--BOOK JACKET. 2006 | ||||||||||||||
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Carlson, Peggie The Girls Are Coming In 1974, lured by good wages, a 22-year-old African American college student from suburbia started work as a pipefitter trainee for a utility company, one of the first women to break into this male-dominated world. 1999 | ||||||||||||||
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Conway, Jill K. The Road from Coorain Jill Ker Conway's memoir takes us from her girlhood in the Australian Outback, to university life in Sydney during the 1950s, and finally to her appointment as the first female president of Smith College. 1989 Appears on the following book lists:
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Fuller, Alexandra Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Magnificently original and affecting, Fuller's memoir of a childhood dominated by the Rhodesian civil war of 1971-1979 captures the fascinating life of a white family living in one of the most remote regions of Africa. The author sensitively and lovingly conveys the frightening aspects of wartime, her family's personal struggles, and her parents' own racism, all the while retaining a bittersweet sense of humor. 2001 Appears on the following book lists: Extraordinary Lives
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Gelman, Rita Golden Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World At the age of forty-eight, on the verge of a divorce, the author left an elegant life in L.A. to follow her dream of connecting with people in cultures all over the world. In 1986 she sold her possessions and became a nomad, living in a Zapotec village in Mexico, sleeping with sea lions on the Galapagos Islands, and residing everywhere from thatched huts to regal palaces. She has observed orangutans in the rain forest of Borneo, visited trance healers and dens of black magic, and cooked with women on fires all over the world. 2001 Appears on the following book lists: Travel Writing
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Graham, Katharine Personal History In this critically acclaimed memoir, the woman who piloted the "Washington Post" through the crises of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and a pressmen's strike and turned it into a great newspaper, tells her story. 1997 Appears on the following book lists:
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Grealy, Lucy Autobiography of a Face At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect--Back cover. 2003 Appears on the following book lists: A Child Called It
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Hayt, Elizabeth I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving It's "Sex and the City" for the post-marriage crowd in an eye-opening memoir of one woman's journey from wife and mother to sexy single. 2005 | ||||||||||||||
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Humbert, Agnes Resistance: A Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France A real-life Suite Francaise, this riveting diary by a key female member of the French Resistance in WWII is translated into English for the first time. Agnes Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance--very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Resistance, gave the French Resistance its name.) In the throes of their struggle for freedom, the members of Humbert's group were betrayed to the Gestapo; Humbert herself was imprisoned. In immediate, electrifying detail, Humbert describes her time in prison, her deportation to Germany, where for more than two years she endured a string of brutal labor camps, and the horror of discovering that seven of her friends were executed by a firing squad. But through the direst of conditions, and ill health in the labor camps, Humbert retains hope for herself, for her friends, and for humanity. Originally published in France in 1946, the book was soon forgotten and is now translated into English for the first time.--From publisher description. 2008 | ||||||||||||||
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Karr, Mary The Liars' Club: A Memoir The author, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist-swinging father who spun tales with his cronies--dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was eight. 2005 | ||||||||||||||
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Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts The account of a first generation Chinese-American woman who must juggle the traditions, beliefs, and legends of her Chinese parents with the new Western policemen, social worker, and wino ghosts that she herself confronts. 1976 | ||||||||||||||
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Lisick, Beth Everybody into the Pool: True Tales Lisick's memoir takes a hilarious look back at her journey from suburban goody two shoes to San Francisco "Alterna-mom." 2005 Appears on the following book lists:
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Maathai, Wangari Unbowed: A Memoir Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya. Born in a rural village in 1940, she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her become the first woman both in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government; the establishment, in 1977, of the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages; and how her courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves.--From publisher description. 2006 Appears on the following book lists:
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Mah, Adeline Yen Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter Born in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen Mah was the youngest child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. But wealth and position could not shield Adeline from a childhood of appalling emotional abuse at the hands of a cruel and manipulative Eurasian stepmother. Determined to survive through her enduring faith in family unity, Adeline struggled for independence as she moved from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the United States to become a physician and writer. 1998 Appears on the following book lists:
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Markham, Beryl West with the Night West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s. 1983 Appears on the following book lists:
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Martini, Adrienne Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood "My family has a grand tradition. After a woman gives birth, she goes mad. I thought that I would be the one to escape." So begins Martini's candid, compelling, and darkly humorous history of her family's and her own experiences with depression and postpartum syndrome. 2006 |
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| Updated: Mar. 2009 © Hennepin County Library We welcome your comments and suggestions. |
