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Biography and Memoir February 2026 |
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| Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton by Martha AckmannMartha Ackmann’s biography of country music legend Dolly Parton goes beyond the glamour to reveal the grit that propelled her to international stardom. Parton’s phenomenal talent was discovered while she was a teenager. Her business savvy and philanthropic generosity would be discovered later, namely by sexist Nashville executives trying to control her skyrocketing career. For the story of another feminist music star who refused to be put in a box, try Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel. |
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Insomnia
by Robbie Robertson
In a posthumous autobiography, musician and songwriter Robbie Robertson relates a rapid-fire, impressionistic collection of anecdotes surrounding an extended lost weekend in 1970s Los Angeles with film director Martin Scorsese. Exiled from their family home by his wife for bad behavior, Robertson moved in with Scorsese, dove into a pile of cocaine, and partied with the stars while the pair assembled the raw footage of The Last Waltz concert film. This is perfect for fans of high-octane music memoirs like Under a Rock by Blondie’s Chris Stein.
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Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built
by Gayle Feldman
The exhilarating (The Boston Globe) story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making A] big, beautiful biography . . . There's a new Power Broker in town.--The New York Times Feldman depicts a lost world, at times a lost paradise, when New York, Hollywood and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged.--The Washington Post At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line? whom TV brought into America's homes each week. But they didn't know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses. With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more. Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame--but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and politics. A fervent democratizer, he published high, low, and wide, and from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way. Using interviews with more than two hundred individuals, deeply researched archival material, and letters from private collections not previously available, this book brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.
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Homeschooled: A New York Times Bestselling Memoir and Read with Jenna Pick
by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were 'stifling his creativity.' Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. [So] when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening--
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Focus on: Black History Month
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Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
Drawing on interviews and previously unreleased archival materials, National Humanities Center fellow Nicholas Boggs’ moving and intimate biography of writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin examines how his personal relationships impacted his life and career. Further reading: James Baldwin: Living in Fire by Bill V. Mullen.
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Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
by Jeff Pearlman
Scrutinized in life, mythologized in death, Tupac Shakur remains a subject of ... cultural significance and speculation nearly thirty years after his murder. Despite a multitude of books, documentaries, and even a feature film, much about Tupac's story remains shrouded and misunderstood. Like many icons who died tragically young, Tupac the man has long been obscured--his edges sanded down, his complexity numbed--by the competing agendas that surround his legacy. In [this book], ... Jeff Pearlman tackles his most nuanced subject, telling the definitive story of Tupac Shakur in unprecedented depth. In this ... look at Tupac's life, Pearlman ... recreates West Coast hip hop in all its glory, going inside Death Row Records and on the sets of movies like Juice and Poetic Justice to offer the most clear-eyed rendering to date of the man who still casts a shadow over modern hip hop--
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A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power
by Abby Phillip
Focusing on his presidential runs in 1984 and, especially, 1988, Phillip highlights how Jackson built an unlikely coalition that showed how Black political power could be consolidated. His experience working under Martin Luther King; his organizing the SLCC's Operation Breadbasket in Chicago and beyond; and his roots in the deep South combined into two ... impactful presidential campaigns. Appealing to the working people of urban enclaves like that of Chicago, young people on college campuses, and Black people across the South, he created the modern Democratic coalition--one that has been used by all major Democrats seeking national success from Obama to Biden to Harris--
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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