Inspiring Biographies

The Double Helix is American scientist James Watson’s personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. He and Francis Crick succeed in determining the three-dimensional chemical structure of DNA in 1953, while they were working together at Cavendish Laboratory, at Cambridge University. Their discovery is widely acknowledged as one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century and a ground-breaking event for biology, genetics, and our understanding of life itself. This... Read The Double Helix Summary

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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe is the nonfiction debut of American journalist and author, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, first published in 2011. It chronicles the story of Kamila Sidiqi, a young woman living under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, who became a fashion entrepreneur at a time when the rights of women were strictly limited. Lemmon traveled to Afghanistan to study... Read The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Summary

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First published in Italy in 1986 as I sommersi e i salvati, The Drowned and the Saved, is a collection of eight essays by Primo Levi about his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The book was translated into English in 1988 by Raymond Rosenthal. Some critics categorize The Drowned and the Saved as a memoir, while others believe it to be an autobiography; still other critics name this book a treatise in which... Read The Drowned and the Saved Summary

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The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (2009) is a memoir by Lawrence Anthony, detailing his experiences with rehabilitating a traumatized herd of elephants on his game reserve in South Africa. The book explores themes of bonding and communicating with animals, the inherent interconnectedness of nature, and the challenges of conservation efforts.Anthony was an internationally renowned conservationist and environmentalist. He was the co-owner and head of conservation at the Thula... Read The Elephant Whisperer Summary

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The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison is a collection of nonfiction essays that are connected thematically by pain and caring. Jamison uses a combination of personal experiences and journalistic approaches to ponder essential questions about both physical and emotional wounds, tenderness, and how people connect through pain. First published in April 2014, this collection premiered at #11 on the New York Times bestseller list and has received considerable acclaim from reviewers across the world... Read The Empathy Exams Summary

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, is nothing less than an account of the 4,000-year quest to understand and treat cancer, a malady that continues to plague us over the centuries. Mukherjee, an Indian-American oncologist and author, received a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the 2010 work. The autobiography opens with Mukherjee’s fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he treats a 31-year-old mother named Carla Reed, who has... Read The Emperor of All Maladies Summary

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First published in 2014, Candance Fleming’s The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion and the Fall of Imperial Russia is a young-adult nonfiction book detailing the last generation of Romanovs to rule Russia from 1894 to 1917, and the fall of Russia’s autocracy through the Russian Revolution. The Family Romanov won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction. In The Family Romanov, Fleming combines her nonfiction... Read The Family Romanov Summary

In The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), Lauren Markham tells the true story of 17-year-old Salvadoran twins, Ernesto and Raúl Flores, who flee violence in El Salvador to build new lives for themselves in America. It follows the twins from their initial exodus from El Salvador, across the Rio Grande, and into the United States, where a world of both unbounded possibility and undeniable danger await... Read The Far Away Brothers Summary

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The Freedom Writers Diary is a nonfiction book that collects the stories of English teacher Erin Gruwell and her students at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, as they move from their freshman to senior years from 1994-1998. The book is divided into eight major sections, one for the fall and spring of each year, as well as a forward and epilogue. Each major section begins with an introductory entry from Ms. Gruwell, followed... Read The Freedom Writers Diary Summary

Published in 2013, Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City tells the stories of Oak Ridge, a secret town that grew around plutonium processing plants in Tennessee, and of the women who worked there during the Second World War. A New York Times bestseller within its first week of publication, the book went on to receive the 2014 APSA Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. Via the experiences of several new arrivals, the reader learns about Oak Ridge... Read The Girls of Atomic City Summary

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After is a 2018 memoir by Clemantine Wamariya, who at age six escaped the Rwandan genocide of 1994 with her older sister Claire. The memoir, which is co-authored by Elizabeth Weil, follows a dual narrative that alternates between scenes from Wamariya’s journey through seven African countries and from her life in America, where she moved in 2000. Wamariya describes the dehumanization of refugees... Read The Girl Who Smiled Beads Summary

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, is Hyeonseo Lee’s 2015 autobiography. Lee leaves North Korea shortly before her eighteenth birthday. She does not intend to defect. She has received a lifetime of propaganda and truly believes her country is the best in the world. She is simply a curious child who wanted to see China, and intends to return to North Korea within days. Once in China, however, she is exposed... Read The Girl with Seven Names Summary

The Glass Castle is a nonfiction memoir published by American journalist Jeannette Walls. Published in 2005, book chronicles Walls and her three siblings’ nomadic and impoverished upbringing by their severely maladjusted parents. In recounting her childhood, Walls explores themes like Letting Go of Childhood Illusions, The Struggle to Understand a Parent’s Poor Choices, The Destructiveness of Codependent Relationships, and The Connection Between Poverty and Abuse.A critical and popular success, The Glass Castle remained on the... Read The Glass Castle Summary

Will Allen, author of the 2012 book The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities, co-written with Charles Wilson, is an important figure in the American urban farming movement. Born into a farming family, Allen spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood hoping to avoid the agricultural life; however, after a career in professional basketball and later in corporate sales and marketing, Allen finds himself farming full-time, with idealism in his heart... Read The Good Food Revolution Summary