Berlin Childhood around 1900

Here Is New York

E.B. White · 56 pages

What is most amazing about E.B. White's "Here Is New York," This book written in 1948 says: "A single flight planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end t his island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions." The city is both the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence. White says, "This i

The Road to San Giovanni

Italo Calvino · 112 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

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 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

The Art of Eating

M.F.K. Fisher · 749 pages

This book is the essence of M.F.K. Fisher, whose wit and fulsome opinions on food and those who produce it, comment upon it, and consume it are as apt today as they were several decades ago, when she composed them. Why did she choose food and hunger, she was asked, and she replied, 'When I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth, and the love of it . .

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

Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

Frances Mayes · 322 pages

"A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region's powerful influence on her life. The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and

Running In The Family

Michael Ondaatje · 207 pages

Michael Ondaatje's story of his family is a journey through memory and imagination to reconstruct the life his parents and grandparents once led. Recollected experience and legendary family scandals kaleidoscope to give a portrait of a lost time and place, with eccentric characters and captivating scenes set against a colonial empire in decline. -- P. [4] of Cover.

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.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Laurie Lee · 192 pages

It was 1934 and a young man walked to London from the security of the Cotswolds to make his fortune. He was to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. Then, knowing one Spanish phrase, he decided to see Spain. For a year he tramped through a country in which the signs of impending civil war were clearly visible. Thirty years later Laurie Lee captured the atmosphere o

Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas

Ruskin Bond · 251 pages

Gift from the Sea

Anne Morrow Lindbergh · 138 pages

From inside flap- "Anne Morrow Lindbergh's reflections on a woman's life were matured in active years of family living and stimulated by conversations with men and women who experience the same problems and feel the same need for assessing the true values of life. The setting of her book is the sea shore; the time, a brief vacation which had lifted her from the distractions of everyday exis

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

John Steinbeck · 256 pages

A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California's Monterey Peninsula To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the tress, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

One Writer's Beginnings

Eudora Welty · 116 pages

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.

My Reading Life

Pat Conroy · 331 pages

Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life.

The Memory Chalet

Tony Judt · 233 pages

"'The Memory Chalet' is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Eur

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.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Joan Didion · 238 pages

American novelist Joan Didion's first volume of nonfiction essays, first published in 1968, consisting of twenty works that reflect the atmosphere in America during the 1960s, especially in California.

My Family and Other Animals

Gerald Durrell · 285 pages

My Family and Other Animals is an autobiographical work by naturalist Gerald Durrell, telling of the part of his childhood he spent on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939.

Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

Susan Hill · 236 pages

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade i

Aké: The Years of Childhood

Wole Soyinka · 230 pages

A dazzling memoir of an African childhood from Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, and poet Wole Soyinka. "Aké: The Years of Childhood" gives us the story of Soyinka's boyhood before and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria called Aké. A relentlessly curious child who loved books and getting into trouble, Soyinka grew up on a parsonage compound, raised by Ch