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Biography and Memoir November 2023 |
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Go back and get it : a memoir of race, inheritance, and intergenerational healing
by Dionne Ford
"One-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the slave masters who bought and sold their ancestors. In other words, one-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are descended also from sexual exploitation. Dionne Ford, whosegreat-grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker called the Colonel and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift, is among them. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take and how to root it out ofthe body? In Go Back and Get It, Ford's debut memoir, she tells us: it manifests as alcoholism and depression and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in Ford's own experience of rape at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which, much later, she builds an interracial family and manages the heartache of her daughters' racial confusion; it wracks her insides, stalling both her pregnancies. Meanwhile, Ford's preoccupation with healing is what truly sets this book apart. She tries eye-movement therapy, visits to a medium, twelve-step recovery, capoeira, a sugar- and wheat-free diet. "Anything," she writes, "to keep from going back there." But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors and uncover what about them she can to begin to feel whole. Thus begins a journey that's anguished and hopeful and strange, one that brings Ford to long-lost cousins both Black and white, to forgotten newspaper articles about her great-uncle's lynching and to abandoned gravesites, to an eBay sword that belonged to the Colonel and that she considers using as a way into the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Go Back and Get It combines the story of her inner life with research and reflections on how racial trauma is generated, repeated, stored, and processed, what the cycle looks like and how it might be broken. It is a memoir about how, in the search for belonging, family can be a source of loneliness and even danger and also a true home"
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| Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones by Dolly Parton with Holly George-Warren; curated by Rebecca SeaverBeloved country superstar Dolly Parton shares the stories behind her favorite fashion moments in this charming full-color memoir featuring 450 photographs, never-before-seen images from her personal archives, and insights from her designers and stylists. Read-alike: Supreme Glamour by Mary Wilson. |
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The Black Angels : the untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis
by Maria Smilios
"During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York's largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed "the pest house" where "no one left alive." Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid young women, the "Black Angels," who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for the city's poorest-1,800 souls languishing in wards, waiting to die or become "guinea pigs" for experimental (often deadly) drugs. Yet despite their major role in desegregating the NYC hospital system-and regardless of their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View-these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this rivetingstory celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival"
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Leslie f*cking Jones : a memoir
by Leslie Jones
Introducing the woman behind the laughs, this audacious memoir reveals what it took to for Leslie Jones to become one of America's most beloved and plain-speaking superstars, encouraging others to let go of the fear and self-doubt holding them back to live a bigger life than ever imagined.
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The best strangers in the world : stories from a life spent listening
by Ari Shapiro
"The Best Strangers in the World is a witty, poignant book that captures Ari Shapiro's love for the unusual, his pursuit of the unexpected, and his delight at connection against the odds."--Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times-bestselling author of Catch and Kill and War on Peace From the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, a stirring memoir-in-essays that is also a lover letter to journalism. In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad. As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Ari Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human."
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Talking to my angels
by Melissa Etheridge
"Twenty years after the success of her first memoir, the New York Times bestseller The Truth Is . . ., the Grammy and Oscar award-winning rocker and trailblazing LGBTQIA icon takes stock of the intervening years, recounting the euphoric triumphs and the life-altering tragedies of her life"
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The woman in me
by Britney Spears
The noted pop star offers a moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.
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Thicker Than Water
by Kerry Washington
In this profoundly moving and beautifully written memoir, the award-winning actor and activist provides an intimate view into both her public and private worlds as she chronicles her life's journey thus far, sharing how she discovered her truest self and, with it, a deeper sense of belonging. 250,000 first printing. Illustrations.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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