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Biography and Memoir July 2020
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Hollywood Park
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Mikel Jollett
What it's about: indie musician Mikel Jollett's traumatic 1970s childhood in the Synanon cult; after escaping, his family battled poverty, mental illness, addiction, and abuse, and Jollett later found solace in music.
Read it for: Jollett's richly detailed account of self-discovery and healing.
For fans of: candid memoirs of surviving cults (like Ruth Wariner's The Sound of Gravel) and family dysfunction (like Tara Westover's Educated).
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The art of resistance : my four years in the French underground : a memoir
by
Justus Rosenberg
In this World War II memoir set in Nazi-occupied France—a story of bravery, daring, adventure, survival and romance—a former Eastern European Jew remembers his flight from the Holocaust and his extraordinary four years in the French underground. 100,000 first printing. Illustrations.
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The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore What it's about: In 1990, shortly after her fifth birthday, Wayétu Moore and her family fled the First Liberian Civil War, eventually settling in Texas, where Moore grappled with her identity as a black immigrant and feelings of displacement.
For fans of: heartrending and reflective immigration stories like Thi Bui's illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do.
About the author: Moore is the author of She Would Be King, a Booklist Editors' Choice Best Fiction Book of 2018. | | The Book of Rosy: A Mother's Story of Separation at the Border by Rosayra Pablo Cruz and Julie Schwietert Collazo What it is: a haunting exploration of the Trump administration's family separation policy, as experienced by one Guatemalan family.
What happened: Fleeing Guatemala after her husband's murder, asylum seeker Rosayra Pablo Cruz and her two sons traveled more than 2,000 miles to the southern U.S. border. Once they arrived, Pablo Cruz spent 80 days detained in an Arizona facility, and her children were placed with a foster family in the Bronx.
Read it for: a searing account of the lingering effects of separation. | | The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life by Janice Kaplan How it began: Journalist Janice Kaplan vowed one New Year's Eve to practice being grateful for one full year.
How she did it: Kaplan kept a "gratitude journal," surveyed experts including psychologists and medical doctors, and interviewed people who have overcome adversity.
Try this next: For another humorous memoir of embracing a new outlook on life, read Shonda Rhimes' inspiring Year of Yes. | |
Born a crime
by
Trevor Noah
The host of The Daily Show With Trevor Noah traces his wild coming of age during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed, offering insight into the farcical aspects of the political and social systems of today's world. Simultaneous.
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Maybe you should talk to someone : a therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed
by
Lori Gottlieb
"One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaningand mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them"
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Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting by Anna Quindlen What it's about: Anna Quindlen's examination of her changing family dynamics as she goes from parent to grandparent and must recalibrate her relationship with her child and her own understanding of herself.
Want a taste? "Those who make their opinions sound like the Ten Commandments see their grandchildren only on major holidays and in photographs."
About the author: Pulitzer Prize winner Quindlen is also known for her fiction, including Still Life with Breadcrumbs and Object Lessons. | |
Contact your librarian for more great books!
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