Townie

Rocket Boys

Homer Hickam · 386 pages

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · 384 pages

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish im

Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel · 336 pages

Full of promise is how anyone would have described Elizabeth Wurtzel at age ten, a bright-eyed little girl who painted, wrote stories, and excelled in every way. By twelve she was cutting her legs in the girls' bathroom and listening to scratchy recordings of the Velvet Underground. College was marked by a series of breakdowns, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations before she was finally given P

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Steve Martin · 216 pages

The author shares the stories of his years in stand-up comedy in a humorous memoir that recalls a first job selling guidebooks at Disneyland, his early magic and comedy act, his years of honing his craft, and the sacrifice, discipline, and originality it took to take him to the top.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages

The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.

Bad Boy: A Memoir

Walter Dean Myers · 224 pages

In his own words...As a boy, Walter Dean Myers was quick-tempered and physically strong, always ready for a fight. He also read voraciously-he would check out books from the library and carry them home, hidden in brown paper bags in order to avoid other boys' teasing. He aspired to be a writer. But growing up in a poor family in Harlem, his hope for a successful future diminished as he came to rea

The Removers: A Memoir

Andrew Meredith · 179 pages

"A literature professor, ... Andrew Meredith's father was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It's a transgression [he] cannot forgive, for it brought about long-lasting familial despair ... [He] treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence--falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next ... Broke, Andrew moves back home

The Tender Bar

J.R. Moehringer · 384 pages

JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X, Alex Haley · 484 pages

Experience

Martin Amis · 406 pages

"Martin Amis has been the object of obsessive media scrutiny for much of his career. In this memoir, he writes with candor about his life and, in the process, gives us a clear view of the "geography of the writer's mind."". "The son of the comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the fin

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · 281 pages

She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled. The Store was a microcosm

All Over But the Shoutin'

Rick Bragg · 329 pages

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the hab

Hippie Boy: A Girl's Story

Ingrid Ricks · 244 pages

For years Ricks yearned to escape the poverty and the suffocating brand of Mormon religion that oppressed her at home. Her chance came when she was thirteen and took a trip with her divorced dad, traveling throughout the Midwest, selling tools and hanging around with the men on his shady revolving sales crew. It felt like freedom from her controlling mother and cruel, authoritarian stepfather. But

Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie · 320 pages

First published in 1943, this autobiography is also a superb portrait of America's Depression years, by a man who saw it all.

Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

Paul Auster · 448 pages

This is the story of a young man's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster's memoir is essentially an autobiographical essay about money - and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art, and describes his ingenious, often farfetched attempts to survive on next

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

Alan Alda · 288 pages

One of America's most recognizable and acclaimed actors, the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing, Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances. The son of a popular actor and a loving but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on, after early struggles, t

Shot in the Heart

Mikal Gilmore · 403 pages

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, a

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama

To the Is-land: An Autobiography

Janet Frame · 253 pages

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth." Thus opens this first volume of autobiography by Janet Frame, one of the most highly regarded writers of today. Recounting her childhood in N

My Childhood

Maxim Gorky · 308 pages

Childhood is one of the most vivid and candid accounts of a child's life ever written. Althought Gorky's description of the cruelties and barbarities in his grandfather's household cannot fail to disturb the modern reader, he can take heart from what he hears of such worthwhile characters as Gorky's delightful grandmother and from the knowledge that Gorky's exposure let the light into these dark p

Just Kids

Patti Smith · 336 pages

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages

A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.

For Bread Alone

Mohamed Choukri · 152 pages