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Biography and Memoir September 2017
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| I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad by Souad MekhennetWashington Post national security correspondent Souad Mekhennet is a Muslim who grew up in Germany. Viewed by Muslims as an interviewer they can trust, she often has access to significant newsmakers who won't meet with other Western journalists. In I Was Told to Come Alone, Mekhennet traces her life and career, offering insight into the experiences of Arabs and Muslims living in Europe. Mekhennet also vividly portrays the people she's interviewed (including several jihadis) and the places of conflict she's visited as a reporter. |
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| Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia by Gerda SaundersIn Memory's Last Breath, retired gender studies professor Gerda Saunders recounts her life, reports on her exploration of neurological science in relation to her memory loss, and provides notes -- presented in sidebars -- on her experience of advancing dementia. Her lyrical descriptions of growing up in South Africa, immigrating to the U.S., and receiving acclaim for her academic achievements contrast starkly with her candid depiction of losing memory and other intellectual functions. For another engrossing first-person account of dementia's effects, pick up Thomas DiBaggio's Losing My Mind. |
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You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
by Sherman Alexie
The National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian presents a literary memoir of poems, essays and intimate family photos that reflect his complicated feelings about his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation with his siblings and alcoholic parents.
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| Among the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads... by Inara VerzemnieksPushcart Prize-winning author and Pulitzer finalist Inara Verzemnieks was raised in Tacoma, Washington by her Latvian grandparents. They had immigrated to the U.S. after World War II because their family was displaced by the 1940 Soviet invasion of Latvia. In this memoir, Verzemnieks chronicles her journeys to Latvia, after her grandparents' deaths, to look for traces of her grandmother Livija's family. In Latvia, Verzemnieks meets her great-aunt Ausma, who helps Verzemnieks understand the sisters' childhood and the suffering they both endured over 70 years earlier. |
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Memoirs like The Glass Castle |
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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight : an African Childhood
by Alexandra Fuller
The author describes her childhood in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war of 1971 to 1979, relating her life on farms in southern Rhodesia, Malawi, and Zambia with an alcoholic mother and frequently absent father
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson
The author of the best-selling Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit traces her life-long search for happiness as the adopted daughter of Pentecostal parents who raised her in a north England industrial town through practices of fierce control and paranoia, an experience that prompted her to search for her biological mother and turn for solace to the literary world.
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The Liars' Club
by Mary Karr
Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all.
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A Girl Named Zippy : Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana
by Haven Kimmel
An entertaining memoir chronicles growing up in a small town in America's heartland, offering colorful portraits of her family and her vivid encounters with the baffling complexities of the adult world, romance, and small-town life during the 1960s and 1970s.
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After a While You Just Get Used to it : a Tale of Family Clutter
by Gwendolyn Knapp
Growing up in a dying breed of eccentric Florida crackers, Knapp thought she had it rough--what with her pack rat mother, Margie; her aunt Susie, who has fewer teeth than prison stays; and Margie's bipolar boyfriend, John. But not long after Knapp moves to New Orleans, Margie packs up her House of Hoarders and follows along. As if Knapp weren't struggling enough to keep herself afloat, working odd jobs and trying to find love while suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, the thirty-year-old realizes that she's never going to escape her family's unendingly dysfunctional drama.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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