Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi

Ava's Man

Rick Bragg · 265 pages

The Pulitzer Prize--winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River, made boats out of car

Half Broke Horses

Jeannette Walls · 313 pages

It is 1970 in a small town in California. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decay

Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

Condoleezza Rice · 342 pages

Condoleezza Rice has achieved extraordinary levels of achievement and attributes her success to the standards and sacrifices made by several generations of her loving family. Her description of her parents includes, "...they raised their little girl in Jim Crow Birmingham to believe that even if she couldn't have a hamburger at the Woolworth's lunch counter, she could be the President of the Unite

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Dorothy Allison · 94 pages

The National Book Award finalist for Bastard Out of Carolina illuminates the rural poverty of the South in a story love and loss, beauty and terror, and the intricate web of family love and hatred that spins itself through all our lives.

Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

J.D. Vance · 272 pages

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over fo

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

Sally Mann · 482 pages

A revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through

The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Elizabeth Gaskell · 448 pages

Intertwining fact and story, The Life of Charlotte Bronte takes the reader by one hand and Charlotte Bronte by the other to run rampant through the making of one of the greatest authoresses of all time. Follow Charlotte from her birthplace of Thornton as she sets off for school and later returns to teach her sisters, and come to know the “characteristic kindness of the Brontes.” This unsentimental

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

Brad Gooch · 448 pages

The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships--with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick,

The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family

Laurence Leamer · 946 pages

Monumental in scope and extraordinary in sensitivity, The Kennedy Women chronicles five matrilineal generations in our nation's premier political dynasty. Not merely distinguished cultural history, it is a story of epic sweep, brimming with triumph and tragedy, courage and compliance, self-sacrifice and self-delusion. Moving from steerage on an immigrant vessel to the slums of Boston, from the Co

The Concubine's Children

Denise Chong · 266 pages

The ethos of family is dramatically portrayed by Denise Chong in this tale of her grandmother, brought from China as a young concubine by a sojourner to the New World, of the man's wife and the children who would be left behind, and of the author's own incredible discovery of those children six decades later. Here is a true story, woven from letters, photographs, and memories, with more twists an

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

Art Spiegelman · 135 pages

"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out o

Across Many Mountains: A Tibetan Family's Epic Journey from Oppression to Freedom

Yangzom Brauen · 324 pages

Kusang never thought she would leave Tibet. Growing up in a remote mountain village, she married a monk and gave birth to two children. But then the Chinese army invaded, and their peaceful lives were destroyed forever. Thousands were tortured, prison camps were set up and Kusang's monastery was destroyed.

On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family

Lisa See · 394 pages

In 1867, Lisa See's great-great-grandfather left China in search of riches on the 'Gold Mountain', the Chinese name for the promised land of America. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws that prohibited unions between the races. Through sheer endeavour and entrepreneurial genius he became one of the most successful Chinese men in the coun

Bound Feet & Western Dress

Pang-Mei Natasha Chang · 215 pages

Translated from the spanish edition of Seix Barral Editorial: > *Bound feet & Western dress* narrates the story of an exceptional woman born in 1900 and deceased in 1988, who not only overcame difficult situations in the strict environment of traditional China, but also managed to develop her education and obtain relevant position in the banking and commerce fields. > This life symboli

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt

David McCullough · 445 pages

This biography of young Theodore Roosevelt covers his youth when he demanded a strenuous life despite his asthma, weak eyes, and patrician family.

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr. · 456 pages

The rich mystery of a reclusive, eccentric heiress Huguette Clark: a true story of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Casey Cep · 314 pages

Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

Adeline Yen Mah · 224 pages

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother

Lee

Douglas Southall Freeman · 601 pages

Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman

Galadrielle Allman · 385 pages

Portrait of Duane Allman, founder of the legendary Allman Brothers Band, written by his daughter Galadrielle.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams

Abigail Adams, John Adams · 528 pages

A collection of letters between Abigail and John Adams written from 1762 to 1801 covering topics of revolution, independence, and nation building, along with those that reflect their love for one another.

Miriam's Kitchen

Elizabeth Ehrlich · 377 pages

As a girl, Elizabeth Ehrlich loved to visit her grandmother's kitchens. These were busy, onion-scented, Yiddish-accented places. Within their steamy plaster walls, the grandmothers - remarkable women of insight, strength, and grace - preserved and handed on history, tradition, community connection, humor, and wry lessons of life. As an adult, Ehrlich followed the path of her assimilating clan, fo