Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

Reaching Out

Francisco Jimenez · 196 pages

Leaving his home in a migrant community, Francisco sets off for college, carrying memories of years of poverty and prejudice.

'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 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

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

The 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

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

For Bread Alone

Mohamed Choukri · 152 pages

The Dark Child

Camara Laye · 188 pages

"The Dark Child is a ... memoir of Camara Laye's youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea, a place steeped in mystery. Laye marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood. ... More than the autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a mod

When I Was Puerto Rican

Esmeralda Santiago · 274 pages

Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

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

Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt

Jean Naggar · 373 pages

Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy's Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard

Mawi Asgedom, Dave Berger · 167 pages

An autobiography of a boy who, at the age of three, fled civil war in Ethiopia by walking with his mother and brother to a Sudanese refugee camp, and later moved to Chicago and earned a scholarship to Harvard University. Includes recipes and discussion questions

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

Sky of Stone

Homer Hickam · 432 pages

Homer Hickam won the praise of critics and the devotion of readers with his first two memoirs set in the hardscrabble mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia. The New York Times crowned his first book, the #1 national bestseller October Sky, "an eloquent evocation ... a thoroughly charming memoir." And People called The Coalwood Way, Hickam's follow-up to October Sky, "a heartwarmer ... truly beaut

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

Colored People

Henry Louis Gates Jr. · 216 pages

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

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

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

Mao's Last Dancer

Li Cunxin · 444 pages

A poor child living in poverty is chosen out of millions of children to attend Madame Mao's dancing ballet. His life drastically shifted from living in poverty to studying dance.

American Gypsy

Oksana Marafioti · 370 pages

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

A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir

Daisy Hernandez · 185 pages

*It's 1980. Ronald Reagan has been elected president, John Lennon has been shot, and a little girl in New Jersey has been hauled off to English classes. Her teachers and parents and tias are expecting her to become white--like the Italians.* This is the opening to A cup of water under my bed, the memoir of one Colombian-Cuban daughter's rebellions and negotiations with the women who raised her