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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Bill Bryson · 288 pages
Bill Bryson on his most personal journey yet: into his own childhood in America's Mid-West.Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have l
Wait Till Next Year
Doris Kearns Goodwin · 266 pages
Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, *Wait Till Next Year* re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father,
Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog
John Grogan · 368 pages
The heartwarming and unforgettablestory of a family in the making and thewondrously neurotic dog who taughtthem what really matters in lifeJohn and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.Marley quickly grew int
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
Jonathan Franzen · 208 pages
The author describes growing up in a family of all boys in Webster Groves, Missouri, reflecting on such topics as the dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship, his role as the school prankster, his marriage, and the life lessons he has learned from birds.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz · 533 pages
Love and darkness are just two of the many forces which run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving autobiographical novel. He takes us on a bold, courageous journey through his childhood and adolescence, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his parents. At the tragic heart of the story, its defining moment, is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
Edmund de Waal · 368 pages
Traces the parallel stories of nineteenth-century art patron Charles Ephrussi and his unique collection of 360 miniature netsuke Japanese ivory carvings, documenting Ephrussi's relationship with Marcel Proust and the impact of the Holocaust on his cosmopolitan family.
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor · 304 pages
The author presents a chronicle of his journey, at the age of 18, on foot across central Europe, through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire, up the Rhine, and down to the Danube, capturing an unrecoverable time in Europe before the devastation of World War II.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Orhan Pamuk · 384 pages
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share. With cinematic fluidit
The Snows of Yesteryear
Gregor von Rezzori · 280 pages
The Boys of My Youth
Jo Ann Beard · 208 pages
Jo Ann Beard grew up amid a tightly knit clan of mothers, aunts, sisters, and girlfriends. Her steadfast family and its culture of women somehow made the prospect of dangerous neighborhood boys, friendly barflies, and potential romance all the more irresistible. But in these wonderfully engaging memory pieces, the boys of Beard's youth - and the men who eventually replace them - are elusive charac
Wolf Willow
Wallace Stegner · 306 pages
"Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner's boyhood was spent on the beautiful and remote frontier of the Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920. In a recollection of his years there, Stegner applied childhood remembrances and adult reflection to the history of the region to create this wise and enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing
Not a Genuine Black Man: Or, How I Claimed My Piece of Ground in the Lily-White Suburbs
Brian Copeland · 250 pages
"As an African American, I am disgusted every time I hear your voice because YOU are not a genuine Black man!" –AnonymousBrian Copeland was a successful stand-up comedian, radio talk show host and local news commentator in Northern California when he received the above letter—a letter that would change the course of his career. In his mid-thirties at the time, happily married with kids, Copeland
Heart Earth
Ivan Doig · 168 pages
Readers will come to appreciate the strength and dignity of Berneta Ringer, a true Western heroine as Doig celebrates his mother's life after finding a cache of her letters, photographs, and childhood writings. It begins with her first winter living in a tent in Montana's Crazy Mountains to the ravages of the Depression on a ranch on Falkner Creek.
Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen · 389 pages
The author relates her experience in Kenya, describing not only her own youth but also the country's traditions and people.
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway · 209 pages
A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir belles-lettres by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously.[1] The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France. The memoir consists of various per
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
The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir
Jennifer Baszile · 310 pages
Traces the author's coming-of-age in an exclusive white California suburb in the 1970s and 1980s, describing the prejudices that minimized her family's achievements and her struggles to define herself as "the black girl next door" in light of her parents' dreams.
A Death in Belmont
Sebastian Junger · 288 pages
In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. Sensing a break in the case that has paralyzed the city of Boston, the police track down a black man, Roy Smith, who cleaned the victim's house that day and left a receipt with his name on the kitchen counter. Smith is hastily convicted of the
I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
Mourid Barghouti · 216 pages
In 2000 Mourid Barghouti published I Saw Ramallah, the acclaimed memoir that told of returning in 1996 to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile following the Six-Day War in 1967. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, a few years lat
A Walker in the City
Alfred Kazin · 176 pages
The acclaimed story of a soul awakening to the ecstasy of the senses, the power of language, and the meaning of existence. Kazin's memorable description of his life as a young man as he makes the journey from Brooklyn to "Americanca"--The larger world that begins at the other end of the subway in Manhattan. A classic portrayal of the Jewish immigrant culture of the 1930s.
Cross Creek
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings · 368 pages
Warm, leisurely account of author's neighbors, and her everyday affairs while living for thirteen years in a remote section of the Florida hammock at Cross Creek.
A Strong West Wind
Gail Caldwell · 228 pages
In this memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. Beginning in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle, she grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, and took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. W

