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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorI 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
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.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 248 pages
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civiliza
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
Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin · 190 pages
Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre
Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir
Domingo Martinez · 449 pages
"Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving. Partly a reflection on the culture of machismo and partly an exploration of the author's boyhood spent in his sister's hand-me-down clothes, this book delves into the enduring and complex bond between Martinez and his deeply flawed, but fi
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
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington · 192 pages
Booker T. Washington, the most recognized national leader, orator and educator, emerged from slavery in the deep south, to work for the betterment of African Americans in the post Reconstruction period. "Up From Slavery" is an autobiography of Booker T. Washington's life and work, which has been the source of inspiration for all Americans. Washington reveals his inner most thoughts as he transi
An Angel at my Table
Janet Frame · 514 pages
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LITERARY. New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually fo
One Writer's Beginnings
Eudora Welty · 116 pages
The Story of My Experiments With Truth
Mahatma Gandhi · 420 pages
Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. He feared the enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding of his quest for truth rooted in devotion to God
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Alex Haley · 484 pages
The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston · 209 pages
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is Kingston's disturbing and fiercely beautiful account of growing up Chinese-American in California. The young Kingston lives in two worlds: the America to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother's "talk stories." Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors - tales that clash puzzlingly with the
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
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
Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela · 638 pages
The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader
Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh · 144 pages
"At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States began their invasion in Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American so
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass · 126 pages
This book is an autobiographical account by runaway slave Frederick Douglass that chronicles his experiences with his owners and overseers and discusses how slavery affected both slaves and slaveholders.
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.
Mixed: My Life in Black and White
Angela Nissel · 234 pages
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Audre Lorde · 256 pages
"Zami, a carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers." --Back cover A "biomythography" describing the author's childhood and coming of age and the relationships to other women that informed her life.
Black Boy
Richard Wright · 288 pages
Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.
Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within
Elif Shafak · 267 pages
The author recounts her effort to balance her writing career and her parenting responsibilities, describing her battle with postpartum depression, her views on prominent women authors, and the many roles she embraced throughout her journey.