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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood
Richard Blanco · 260 pages
A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities. Richard Blanco’s childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents’ nostalgic w
Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris · 272 pages
A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of “Naked”, presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day sp
The Other Side of Paradise
Staceyann Chin · 278 pages
From the iconic and charismatic star of "Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam" comes this brave and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica by performer, activist, and writer Chin.
Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes
Kamal Al-Solaylee · 204 pages
A true story of life in the modern Middle-East spanning the nearly six decades from the nationalism of the 1960s to the Arab Spring of 2011, by a prominent Canadian journalist. In the '60s, Al-Solayee's father was one of the wealthiest property owners in Aden, south of Yemen, but when the country shrugged off its colonial roots, his properties were confiscated. As a gay man living in an intolerant
Gypsy Boy
Mikey Walsh · 278 pages
Mikey was born into a Romany Gypsy family. They live in a closeted community, and little is known about their way of life. After centuries of persecution Gypsies are wary of outsiders and if you choose to leave you can never come back. This is something Mikey knows only too well. Growing up, he rarely went to school, and seldom mixed with non-Gypsies. The caravan and camp were his world.
Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival
Sean Strub · 432 pages
Sean Strub, founder of the groundbreaking POZ magazine, producer of the hit play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and the first openly HIV-positive candidate for U.S. Congress, charts his remarkable life. As a politics-obsessed Georgetown freshman, Strub arrived in Washington from Iowa in 1976, with a plum part-time job running a Senate elevator. He also harbored a terrifying secret: his attracti
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
Janet Mock · 288 pages
With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman’s quest for self at all costs, Redefining Realness is a
American Gypsy
Oksana Marafioti · 370 pages
A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey
Leila Ahmed · 318 pages
Leila Ahmed grew up in Cairo in the 1940s and '50s in a family that was eagerly and passionately political. Although many in the Egyptian upper classes were firmly opposed to change, the Ahmeds were proud supporters of independence. But when the Revolution arrived, the family's opposition to Nasser's policies led to persecutions that would throw their lives into turmoil and set their youngest chil
Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
Elva Trevino Hart · 236 pages
Autobiography. Latino/a Studies. BAREFOOT HEART is a vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. Elva Trevino Hart was born in south Texas to Mexican immigrants and spent her childhood moving back and forth between Texas and Minnesota, eventually leaving that world to earn a master's degree in computer science/engineering. This is a
West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story
Tamim Ansary, Mir Tamim Ansary · 292 pages
"The day after Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an anguished e-mail to twenty friends, discussing the attack from his perspective as an Afghan American. That message, spreading via the Internet, reached and touched millions of people around the world." "Now Ansary gives us West of Kabul, East of New York, an account of a life lived in two very
Fifth Chinese Daughter
Jade Snow Wong · 264 pages
No well brought up Chinese girl refers to herself in the first person, so the author tells her charming story in the approved Chinese fashion. How, as the fifth daughter of a hard-working Chinese tailor, she and her sisters lived in a San Francisco basement, cutting, sewing, and sorting hundreds of men's overalls for the wholesale market. How she went to school and later, in face of parental oppos
Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad
Firoozeh Dumas · 240 pages
In the bestselling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in Laughing Without an Accent, sharing stories both tender and humorous on being a citizen of the world, on her well-meaning family, and on amusing cultural conundrums, all told with insights into the universality of the
Out of Place
Edward Said · 320 pages
"Out of Place is an extraordinary story of exile, a narrative of many departures, a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the Arab landscape of his early years - "the many places and people [who] no longer exist....Essentially a
American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood
Marie Arana · 320 pages
For years, Arana shuttled easily between her father's aristocratic Peruvian family and her mother's American family. Only when she immigrated to the United States as an adolescent did she come to understand that her cultural identity was split in half. She was a hybrid Hispanic American: a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica. In her father's Peruvian family, Marie Arana wa
Infidel
Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages
"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress
Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
Adeline Yen Mah · 278 pages
Adeline Yen Mah was born in 1937 in Tianjin, a port city one thousand miles north of Shanghai. She was the fifth and youngest child of an affluent family. Her grand aunt - in an unprecedented achievement - had founded the Shanghai Women's Bank in 1924, and her father was a revered businessman whose reputation for turning iron into gold began when he started his own firm at the age of nineteen. Ye
Paper Daughter: A Memoir
M. Elaine Mar · 292 pages
When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver to join her father in a community more Chinese than American, more hungry than hopeful. While working with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and living in the basement of her aunt's house, Mar quickly masters English and begins to excel in school. But as her home and school life - Chinese trad
Stealing Buddha's Dinner
Bich Minh Nguyen · 272 pages
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mai
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
Richard Rodriguez · 197 pages
Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Andre Aciman · 339 pages
Set in luxuriant cosmopolitan Alexandria, this richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family from its bold arrival in Egypt at the turn of the century to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, Andre Aciman introduces us to the Olympian figures who shaped his life: Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, by turns soldier, salesman, Itali
Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt
Jean Naggar · 373 pages
The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi · 352 pages
From inside front cover: The story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a ... loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a coutnry plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, fina