Memoir

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

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

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

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

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

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) comprises two autobiographical essays in which the author confronts the racial issues and tensions that he believes corrupt and deform American life and the American dream. Baldwin’s essays exemplify and precursor many of the elements and arguments central to the Civil Rights movement. Please note: Throughout the text, Baldwin uses the racial labels/language common at the time he was writing. This study guide, which uses the Vintage Reissue... Read The Fire Next Time Summary

In The Forest People, anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull describes his experiences while living as a friend and observer with the BaMbuti (Pygmies) of the Ituri Forest. He shares the everyday lives of the Pygmies located in the Epulu River region and their interactions with each other and with him. The setting is the Belgian Congo, which Turnbull describes as located in the center of Africa. Turnbull had visited the Epulu BaMbuti in 1951. This narrative... Read The Forest People Summary

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

In his 2008 nonfiction book The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner travels the world in search of happiness. Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, sets out in this travelogue to investigate where in the world people are the most happy—and why. Casting himself as an inveterately cranky person, Weiner mixes humor, scientific inquiry, and psychological research to explain geographic concentrations of elevated mood. Since its publication, the book has been on the... Read The Geography of Bliss 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

“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II was published in 1984 and received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year. Written by Studs Terkel, the book is still considered a classic of oral history. Unlike traditional history, which tends to rely on written records and other material artifacts like works of art and literature or archaeological remains, oral histories collect information about past events through interviews with individuals who were... Read The Good War Summary

Andrew Carnegie wrote “The Gospel of Wealth” in June 1889. Carnegie begins his treatise by identifying what he sees as the most significant problem of modern-day times: “the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship” (1).Carnegie mentions that, in the past, “there was little difference” (1) between the living situations of a leader of a community and those of the members... Read The Gospel Of Wealth Summary

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The Happiest Refugee is a 2010 autobiography by Vietnamese-born, Australian author, actor, comedian, and artist Anh Do. Following his journey from a perilous escape from Communist-ruled Vietnam as a toddler with his large family, to his working-class childhood in Australia where he struggled to fit into the predominantly white society, to his rise as one of Australia’s most sought-after comedians and motivational speakers, The Happiest Refugee is considered one of the most well-received stories of... Read The Happiest Refugee Summary

The Last Lecture, published in 2008, is a best-selling memoir that repurposes the final lecture delivered by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The book, which was co-authored with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffery Zaslow, fleshes out Pausch’s lecture, delving into the background behind the speech and detailing the months after its delivery, ultimately becoming a record of Pausch’s life. He admits that “under the ruse of giving an academic lecture... Read The Last Lecture Summary

The Latehomecomer, a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, was published in 2008. It won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. Yang was born in Thailand’s Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in 1980 and immigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota when she was six years old. She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University and co-founder of Words Wanted, an organization committed to helping immigrants with... Read The Latehomecomer Summary

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East is a biography and work of historical nonfiction written by Sandy Tolan and published in 2006. Against the backdrop of the first Arab-Israeli War’s 50th anniversary, American journalist Sandy Tolan traveled to the Middle East to research his assignment. Through the biography, Tolan aims to highlight how two families on opposite sides of the conflict—the Khairis and the Eshkenazis—are connected on... Read The Lemon Tree Summary