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General Recommendations
Adult Summer Reading 2021: Best of the Best in Memoirs
By:
GreenwichFiction
Greenwich Library
Staff-created list
Everyone has a story in them and these are just a few of the exceptional memoirs published in the last twenty years.
By:
GreenwichFiction
Greenwich Library
20 items
20 items
A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
eBook - 2019
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? In the spring of ...Show more
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.
This is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
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What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? In the spring of ...Show more
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.
This is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
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From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel: A Life of Art and Friendship
by Smith, Patti
eBook - 2010
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and po...Show more
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.
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Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and po...Show more
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.
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A Memoir
by Ward, Jesmyn
eBook - 2013
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life -- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, p...Show more
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life -- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth -- and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from...
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In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life -- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, p...Show more
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life -- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth -- and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from...
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eBook - 2019
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one ...Show more
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
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A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one ...Show more
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
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A Memoir
eBook - 2019
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms ...Show more
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming
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In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms ...Show more
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming
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eBook - 2018
Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents—artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs—Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Sil...Show more
Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents—artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs—Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa’s father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he’d become the parent she’d always wanted him to be.
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Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents—artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs—Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Sil...Show more
Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents—artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs—Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa’s father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he’d become the parent she’d always wanted him to be.
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A Memoir
eBook - 2017
In this debut memoir, Lockwood invites us into the unusual tapestry of her life as the daughter of Father Greg Lockwood, a married Catholic priest who esc...Show more
In this debut memoir, Lockwood invites us into the unusual tapestry of her life as the daughter of Father Greg Lockwood, a married Catholic priest who eschews clothing, plays the electric guitar, despises Democrats, and calls his daughter—an irreverent poet who marries a man she met online—a "demon." Lockwood leaves the Catholic Church, in which she literally lives, and moves with her new husband to a Catholic-free life, only to return several years later when the couple suffers financial crisis. Her homecoming serves as the impetus for this memoir, which opens with her mother—a woman who delights in telling morbid stories and brags that she made a perfect score on the SAT—and introduces us piecemeal to the oddities of their family life, largely through the lens of the author's husband.-From Library Journal.
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In this debut memoir, Lockwood invites us into the unusual tapestry of her life as the daughter of Father Greg Lockwood, a married Catholic priest who esc...Show more
In this debut memoir, Lockwood invites us into the unusual tapestry of her life as the daughter of Father Greg Lockwood, a married Catholic priest who eschews clothing, plays the electric guitar, despises Democrats, and calls his daughter—an irreverent poet who marries a man she met online—a "demon." Lockwood leaves the Catholic Church, in which she literally lives, and moves with her new husband to a Catholic-free life, only to return several years later when the couple suffers financial crisis. Her homecoming serves as the impetus for this memoir, which opens with her mother—a woman who delights in telling morbid stories and brags that she made a perfect score on the SAT—and introduces us piecemeal to the oddities of their family life, largely through the lens of the author's husband.-From Library Journal.
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A Memoir
eBook - 2005
Walls, who spent years trying to hide her childhood experiences, allows the story to spill out in this remarkable recollection of growing up. From her cur...Show more
Walls, who spent years trying to hide her childhood experiences, allows the story to spill out in this remarkable recollection of growing up. From her current perspective as a contributor to MSNBC online, she remembers the poverty, hunger, jokes, and bullying she and her siblings endured, and she looks back at her parents: her flighty, self-indulgent mother, a Pollyanna unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenting, and her father, troubled, brilliant Rex, whose ability to turn his family's downward-spiraling circumstances into adventures allowed his children to excuse his imperfections until they grew old enough to understand what he had done to them--and to himself. His grand plans to build a home for the family never evolved: the hole for the foundation of the "The Glass Castle," as the dream house was called, became the family garbage dump, and, of course, a metaphor for Rex Walls' life.-From Booklist.
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Walls, who spent years trying to hide her childhood experiences, allows the story to spill out in this remarkable recollection of growing up. From her cur...Show more
Walls, who spent years trying to hide her childhood experiences, allows the story to spill out in this remarkable recollection of growing up. From her current perspective as a contributor to MSNBC online, she remembers the poverty, hunger, jokes, and bullying she and her siblings endured, and she looks back at her parents: her flighty, self-indulgent mother, a Pollyanna unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenting, and her father, troubled, brilliant Rex, whose ability to turn his family's downward-spiraling circumstances into adventures allowed his children to excuse his imperfections until they grew old enough to understand what he had done to them--and to himself. His grand plans to build a home for the family never evolved: the hole for the foundation of the "The Glass Castle," as the dream house was called, became the family garbage dump, and, of course, a metaphor for Rex Walls' life.-From Booklist.
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A Memoir
eBook - 2015
Poet Smith, a Whiting Writers' Award winner who received the Pulitzer Prize for her third poetry collection, Life on Mars (2011), has ventured into prose ...Show more
Poet Smith, a Whiting Writers' Award winner who received the Pulitzer Prize for her third poetry collection, Life on Mars (2011), has ventured into prose and written a gracefully nuanced yet strikingly candid memoir about family, faith, race, and literature. Smith grew up in Northern California, snuggled close to her elegant and devout mother; challenged by her engineer father, whose career with the air force was followed by work on the Hubble Space Telescope; and enthralled by books. As one of few African Americans in their community, Smith navigated a "sea of white faces," in stark contrast to the world she discovered when staying with relatives in Alabama. In meticulously structured, philosophically inquisitive chapters, Smith compares the orderly facade of her youth with her inner turmoil and "spiritual dilemma" as she became more cognizant of her legacy, the "pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war." Smith holds our intellectual and emotional attention ever so tightly as she charts her evolving thoughts on the divides between races, generations, economic classes, and religion and science and celebrates her lifesaving discovery of poetry as "soul language." Smith's intricate and artistic memoir illuminates the rich and affecting complexity of "ordinary" American lives.-From Booklist.
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Poet Smith, a Whiting Writers' Award winner who received the Pulitzer Prize for her third poetry collection, Life on Mars (2011), has ventured into prose ...Show more
Poet Smith, a Whiting Writers' Award winner who received the Pulitzer Prize for her third poetry collection, Life on Mars (2011), has ventured into prose and written a gracefully nuanced yet strikingly candid memoir about family, faith, race, and literature. Smith grew up in Northern California, snuggled close to her elegant and devout mother; challenged by her engineer father, whose career with the air force was followed by work on the Hubble Space Telescope; and enthralled by books. As one of few African Americans in their community, Smith navigated a "sea of white faces," in stark contrast to the world she discovered when staying with relatives in Alabama. In meticulously structured, philosophically inquisitive chapters, Smith compares the orderly facade of her youth with her inner turmoil and "spiritual dilemma" as she became more cognizant of her legacy, the "pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war." Smith holds our intellectual and emotional attention ever so tightly as she charts her evolving thoughts on the divides between races, generations, economic classes, and religion and science and celebrates her lifesaving discovery of poetry as "soul language." Smith's intricate and artistic memoir illuminates the rich and affecting complexity of "ordinary" American lives.-From Booklist.
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eBook - 2015
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries th...Show more
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? Coates takes readers along on his journey to moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here.
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For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries th...Show more
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? Coates takes readers along on his journey to moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here.
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Stories From A South African Childhood
by Noah, Trevor
eBook - 2016
The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning host of the Daily Show, Noah was indeed "born a crime" in apartheid South Africa. He was the son of a white D...Show more
The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning host of the Daily Show, Noah was indeed "born a crime" in apartheid South Africa. He was the son of a white Dutch father and a black Xhosa mother who pretended to be his nanny or his father's servant when they were together as a family. Here he relates his rise to fame and his sometimes over-the-top mother's influence.-From Library Journal.
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The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning host of the Daily Show, Noah was indeed "born a crime" in apartheid South Africa. He was the son of a white D...Show more
The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning host of the Daily Show, Noah was indeed "born a crime" in apartheid South Africa. He was the son of a white Dutch father and a black Xhosa mother who pretended to be his nanny or his father's servant when they were together as a family. Here he relates his rise to fame and his sometimes over-the-top mother's influence.-From Library Journal.
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A Memoir
eBook - 2018
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a...Show more
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.
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Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a...Show more
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.
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A Memoir of (my) Body
by Gay, Roxane
eBook - 2017
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger wh...Show more
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. "I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere...' I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe."
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger wh...Show more
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. "I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere...' I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe."
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Book 1
by Lewis, John
eBook - 2013
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin ...Show more
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement...all told in graphic novel form.
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A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin ...Show more
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement...all told in graphic novel form.
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A Memoir
eBook - 2015
Former New York Times theater critic Jefferson defines Negroland as "a small region of Negro America where residents are sheltered by privilege and p...Show more
Former New York Times theater critic Jefferson defines Negroland as "a small region of Negro America where residents are sheltered by privilege and plenty," and in 1947 she was born into it. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital, and her mother was a socialite. Here she describes what it was like to grow up in Negroland and to proceed through the civil rights and feminist movements toward, putatively, postracial America.-From Library Journal.
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Former New York Times theater critic Jefferson defines Negroland as "a small region of Negro America where residents are sheltered by privilege and p...Show more
Former New York Times theater critic Jefferson defines Negroland as "a small region of Negro America where residents are sheltered by privilege and plenty," and in 1947 she was born into it. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital, and her mother was a socialite. Here she describes what it was like to grow up in Negroland and to proceed through the civil rights and feminist movements toward, putatively, postracial America.-From Library Journal.
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eBook - 2020
Activist/essayist Solnit shows how 1980s San Francisco made her a writer and a feminist. Among the forces influencing her: moving into a tiny apartment at...Show more
Activist/essayist Solnit shows how 1980s San Francisco made her a writer and a feminist. Among the forces influencing her: moving into a tiny apartment at age 19, discovering punk rock, resisting an epidemic of street violence against women, learning about the importance of joy and belonging from gay men, and embracing the beauty and deep-rooted conflicts of the American West.-From Library Journal
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Activist/essayist Solnit shows how 1980s San Francisco made her a writer and a feminist. Among the forces influencing her: moving into a tiny apartment at...Show more
Activist/essayist Solnit shows how 1980s San Francisco made her a writer and a feminist. Among the forces influencing her: moving into a tiny apartment at age 19, discovering punk rock, resisting an epidemic of street violence against women, learning about the importance of joy and belonging from gay men, and embracing the beauty and deep-rooted conflicts of the American West.-From Library Journal
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by Didion, Joan
eBook - 2007
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience...Show more
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage and a life, in good times and bad that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion' s attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
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From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience...Show more
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage and a life, in good times and bad that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion' s attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
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eBook - 2015
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey--an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with...Show more
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey--an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T.H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.
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Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey--an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with...Show more
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey--an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T.H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.
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A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
eBook - 2006
The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven sibling...Show more
The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. "Mommy," a fiercely protective woman with "dark eyes full of pep and fire," herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion, and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain. In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story.
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The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven sibling...Show more
The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. "Mommy," a fiercely protective woman with "dark eyes full of pep and fire," herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion, and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain. In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story.
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A Daughter's Memoir
eBook - 2020
As a poet, Trethewey, knows how to make every word count. This book clocks in at just over 200 pages, but is still able to vividly recount the story of Tr...Show more
As a poet, Trethewey, knows how to make every word count. This book clocks in at just over 200 pages, but is still able to vividly recount the story of Tretheway's mixed race childhood and the inevitable murder of her mother when she was just nineteen years old. Beautifully told but heartbreaking nonetheless.
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As a poet, Trethewey, knows how to make every word count. This book clocks in at just over 200 pages, but is still able to vividly recount the story of Tr...Show more
As a poet, Trethewey, knows how to make every word count. This book clocks in at just over 200 pages, but is still able to vividly recount the story of Tretheway's mixed race childhood and the inevitable murder of her mother when she was just nineteen years old. Beautifully told but heartbreaking nonetheless.
Show less