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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHalf Broke Horses
Jeannette Walls · 313 pages
It is 1970 in a small town in California. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decay
The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee
Marja Mills · 278 pages
This book is one journalist's memoir of her personal friendship with Harper Lee and her sister, drawing on the extraordinary access they gave her to share the story of their lives. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel's celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists h
Growing Up
Russell Baker, Gilbert Riswold · 348 pages
Pulitzer prize-winning writer Russell Baker shares his memories of growing up between the two world wars, telling of his life in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore, and discussing his loving mother and family, teachers, schoolmates, and how they all survived the Depression years.
A Painted House
John Grisham · 465 pages
Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.
On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
Lisa See · 394 pages
In 1867, Lisa See's great-great-grandfather left China in search of riches on the 'Gold Mountain', the Chinese name for the promised land of America. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws that prohibited unions between the races. Through sheer endeavour and entrepreneurial genius he became one of the most successful Chinese men in the coun
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J.D. Vance · 272 pages
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over fo
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Daniel James Brown · 416 pages
Daniel James Brown’s robust book tells the story of the University of Washington’s 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing f
Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi
Dean Faulkner Wells · 271 pages
In this book the author recounts the story of the Faulkners of Mississippi, whose legacy includes pioneers, noble and ignoble war veterans, three never convicted murderers, the builder of the first railroad in north Mississippi, the founding president of a bank, an FBI agent, four pilots (all brothers), and a Nobel prize winner arguably the most important American novelist of the twentieth century
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.
9 Summers 10 Autumns
Iwan Setyawan · 209 pages
Cheaper by the Dozen
Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Ernestine Gilbreth Carey · 207 pages
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.
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
The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family
Laurence Leamer · 946 pages
Monumental in scope and extraordinary in sensitivity, The Kennedy Women chronicles five matrilineal generations in our nation's premier political dynasty. Not merely distinguished cultural history, it is a story of epic sweep, brimming with triumph and tragedy, courage and compliance, self-sacrifice and self-delusion. Moving from steerage on an immigrant vessel to the slums of Boston, from the Co
Bound for Glory
Woody Guthrie · 320 pages
First published in 1943, this autobiography is also a superb portrait of America's Depression years, by a man who saw it all.
When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine
Monica Wood · 235 pages
Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South
Anne Moody · 384 pages
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. In this now classic autobiography, she details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of the black girl who had the courage to challenge it. The result is a touc
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages
Across Many Mountains: A Tibetan Family's Epic Journey from Oppression to Freedom
Yangzom Brauen · 324 pages
Kusang never thought she would leave Tibet. Growing up in a remote mountain village, she married a monk and gave birth to two children. But then the Chinese army invaded, and their peaceful lives were destroyed forever. Thousands were tortured, prison camps were set up and Kusang's monastery was destroyed.
Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt
David McCullough · 445 pages
This biography of young Theodore Roosevelt covers his youth when he demanded a strenuous life despite his asthma, weak eyes, and patrician family.
The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers
Harry Bernstein · 322 pages
The narrow street on which Harry Bernstein grew up was unremarkable, except for an invisible wall down the middle, dividing Jews on one side, from Christians on the other. This is the story of Harry's childhood in a Lancashire mill town before the First World War.
The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father
Jim Wight · 384 pages
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
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.