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Biography and Memoir November 2025 |
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Tell Them My Name
by Laura Maya
An inspiring true story that explores how even the most impossible dreams can come true when unlikely friendships are built across cultures. In this offbeat travel memoir, four strangers from three countries, with barely a common language between them, decide to adopt each other as family and take on the world. Dar Kumari is an indigenous Gurung woman living in the Nepali Himalayas with her elderly husband, Nar Bahadur. Their lives are turned upside down when a local NGO sends the Australian author, Laura, and her French husband, David, to live with their family while they help build the mountain's first library. Dar Kumari adopts the newcomers as if they were her children, but she's baffled this married couple show no interest in having a baby and can't even cook rice over a fire or clean a mud floor. Eventually, Laura and David invite their Nepali 'parents' to travel with them back to Europe-maybe if they experience the other side of their cultural differences, it might help them understand each other better? For one month this quirky international family travel together through six countries exploring the differences between their cultures and the places they call home.
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Free Ride: Heartbreak, Courage, and the 20,000-Mile Motorcycle Journey That Changed My Life
by Noraly Schoenmaker
Noraly Schoenmaker was a thirty-something geologist living in the Netherlands when she learned that her live-in partner had been having a long-term affair. Suddenly without a place to stay, she decided to quit her job and jet off to India in search of a new beginning. Her plans were dashed when she fell quickly and helplessly in with a motorcycle. Behind the handlebars, she felt alive and free nimble enough to trace the narrowest paths, powerful enough to travel the longest of roads.
She first rode toward the Pacific, through the jungles of Myanmar and Thailand, then into Malaysia. Rather than satisfy her appetite for the open road, this ride only piqued it. She shipped her bike to Oman, at the base of the Arabian Peninsula, and embarked on a journey through Iran, across Turkmenistan along its border with Afghanistan, over the snowy peaks of Central Asia and into Europe, all the way back home to the Netherlands. She covered remote and utterly unfamiliar territory; broke down on impossibly steep mountains; and pushed too many miles along empty roads, farther and farther from civilization. But through her travels, she discovered the true beauty of the world - the kindness of its people, the simplicity of its open spaces, as well as her own inner strength.
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Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend
by Michael Wallis
Bestselling author Michael Wallis' (The Best Land Under Heaven) lively biography of Wild West outlaw Belle Starr (1848-1889) offers a demythologizing corrective to her reputation and legacy. Further reading: Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West by Dane Huckelbridge.
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The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History
by Karen Valby
The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood, a legacy erased from history--until now. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company--the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a troupe of women and men who became each other's chosen family. These Swans of Harlem performed for the Queen of England, Mick Jagger, and Stevie Wonder, on the same bill as Josephine Baker, at the White House, and beyond. But decades later there was almost no record of their groundbreaking history to be found. Out of a sisterhood that had grown even deeper with the years, these Swans joined forces again--to share their story with the world. Captivating, rich in vivid detail and character, and steeped in the glamour and grit of professional ballet, The Swans of Harlem is a riveting account of five extraordinarily accomplished women, a celebration of both their historic careers and the sustaining, grounding power of female friendship, and a window into the robust history of Black ballet, hidden for too long.
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Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South
by Elizabeth Varon
An authoritative biography of the second-highest-ranking and most controversial Confederate general, who rejoined the Union after the Civil War, advising other Confederate soldiers to put that war behind them. After joining an interracial government in New Orleans, Longstreet fought against white supremacists when they attacked these postwar elected officials, for which he was vilified and attacked by other Southerners, and blamed for the South's defeat in the Civil War--
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Somebody's daughter : a memoir
by Ashley C. Ford
One of the prominent voices of her generation, the author presents this coming-of-age recollection of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and a traumatic event, revealing the threads between who you are and what you are born into.
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The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington's Most Famous Hostess
by Meryl Gordon
A deeply researched biography of the socialite, political hostess, activist and United States envoy to Luxembourg, Perle Mesta, from New York Times bestselling author Meryl Gordon. Perle Mesta was a force to be reckoned with. In her heyday, this wealthy globe-trotting Washington widow was one of the most famous women in America, garnering as much media attention as Eleanor Roosevelt. Renowned for her world-class parties featuring politicians and celebrities, she was very close to three presidents-Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson. Truman named her as the first female envoy to Luxembourg, which inspired the hit musical based on Perle's life - Call Me Madam - which starred Ethel Merman, ran on Broadway for two years and later became a movie. A pioneering supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, she was a prodigious Democratic fundraiser and rescued Harry Truman's financially flailing 1948 campaign. In this intensely researched biography, author Meryl Gordon chronicles Perle's lavish life and society adventures in Newport, Manhattan and Washington, while highlighting her important, but nearly forgotten contribution to American politics and the feminist movement.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Charlotte County Library
112-116 LeGrande Avenue,
P.O. Box 788, Charlotte Court House, Virginia 23923
(434) 542-5247https://cclibrary.net/ |
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