Inspiring Biographies

Maus by Art Spiegelman was the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. It originally ran in Spiegelman’s Raw magazine between 1980 and 1991 before receiving mainstream attention as two collected volumes, Maus I in 1986 and Maus II in 1991. This guide is based on the 1996 complete edition. This historic memoir interlaces two narratives, one of Spiegelman’s Jewish father as he survives World War II Poland and the Auschwitz concentration camp, and... Read Maus Summary

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (2019) is a nonfiction book by American writer and psychotherapist, Lori Gottlieb. A combination of memoir and popular science, it brings together Gottlieb’s personal life experience and her therapeutic work to illuminate the role therapy can play in everyone’s lives. The work has become a New York Times bestseller and Time magazine Must-Read Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for... Read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Summary

Meditations is a collection of prose philosophical reflections and exercises composed in Koine Greek by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who lived from 121-180 and ruled from 161-180. Though the precise dating of his compositions is unknown and they are not believed to be presented in chronological order, at least some of the books were written while he was on military campaign in the north of Europe during his reign. Scholars are generally in consensus that... Read Meditations Summary

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In her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward pays tribute to five young Black men from her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi. She honors each man’s life and death in individualized chapters and explores her own personal and family history as she navigates the complex experiences of grief. Ward seeks to understand the forces that led to each man’s death and chronicle the impact of their deaths on her life and community.Other works by this... Read Men We Reaped Summary

David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of twenty-seven essays exploring the author’s childhood in North Carolina, his relationship with his family, his time living in France, and observations about American social life. The book is comprised of two sections, Part One and Part Deux in which the latter half focuses primarily on Sedaris’s time in Normandy, France. Told with sardonic humor, each chapter deploys various levels of fantasy, irony, and other... Read Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis published in 2003 by W. W. Norton. Lewis holds a master’s degree in economics and made his writing debut with the acclaimed Liar’s Poker (1989), based on his experience working for the investment bank Salomon Brothers. This background prepared him for Moneyball, a book about how statistics is applied to baseball in a method known as sabermetrics. A movie adaptation... Read Moneyball Summary

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Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World is a 2003 nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder. It is an expansion of “The Good Doctor,” a 2000 article for The New Yorker and the winner of the 2004 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. The book profiles Dr. Paul Edward Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, as he treats patients in Haiti and... Read Mountains Beyond Mountains Summary

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Sonia Sotomayor (b. June 25, 1954) is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Born and raised in the Bronx, NY to Puerto Rican parents, she graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and Yale University’s law school in 1979. After four and a half years working as an assistant district attorney in New York City, she joined Pavia & Harcourt, a small Manhattan law firm, eventually becoming a partner. In... Read My Beloved World Summary

Frederick Douglass’s memoir My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), published a decade after the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), is his revision of his original narrative. Written during a period after Douglass attained freedom, it is more revealing than his first memoir and more politically sophisticated. Douglass was older and better educated when he wrote this book. Conversely, he had composed his Narrative in response to a skeptical public, as proof of... Read My Bondage and My Freedom Summary

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My Friend Dahmer is a graphic novel/memoir by American cartoonist and writer Derf Backderf, known for utilizing darkness and shading in his comic strips and graphic novels. Evolving from a 24-page cartoon created in 2002, My Friend Dahmer (2012) depicts the author’s memories of his high school friend, notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, in novelistic form—exploring the ways Dahmer himself could have been helped and his 17 murders prevented. The graphic novel was adapted into... Read My Friend Dahmer Summary