Memoir

Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, originally published in 2007, is a collection of letters containing Kozol’s teaching advice for a new first grade schoolteacher named Francesca. The format of this book is inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous Letters to a Young Poet, which has become a model for advice books for young people in different professions and callings. Although some identifying elements have been changed, the book’s letters represent a real correspondence... Read Letters to a Young Teacher Summary

Originally published in 1989, Liar’s Poker is a nonfiction book that details author Michael Lewis’s experiences as a Wall Street bonds salesman in the late 1980s. Liar’s Poker is a betting game played with single dollar bills. In the book, bond traders at Salomon Brothers, an investment bank, play a much bigger betting game involving hundreds of millions of dollars, but the skills they require—daring, quick thinking, and ruthless bluffing—are basically the same as in... Read Liar’s Poker Summary

Life on the Mississippi is a powerful narrative concerning the past, present, and future of the Mississippi River, including its towns, peoples, and ways of life. The narrative is written by Mark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Twain explains in the narrative how he “stole” this nickname from an old steamboat captain who was also a writer. Mark Twain is a nautical term and a pilot’s phrase that means “two fathoms.” Two... Read Life on the Mississippi Summary

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Lives on the Boundary is a nonfiction book by Mike Rose, Professor of Social Research Methodology in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The book tackles the problem of how low-performing students get left behind by the American education system. Originally published in 1989, Rose combines memoir, academic analysis, and social treatise to expose the failings of the current educational system and challenge the stereotypes that label remedial learners as incapable, unintelligent... Read Lives On The Boundary Summary

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Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela tells the life story of South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. Mandela rose to the leadership of the antiapartheid struggle to become one of the 20th century’s most iconic world leaders. He began writing the book in prison in 1975, and it was published in 2004.Mandela was born in rural South African in 1918. As a child, he was destined to become a royal advisor, but the... Read Long Walk to Freedom Summary

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison is a personal memoir published in 2007. Like Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day, Robison’s memoir is a personal account of living with autism spectrum disorder. A New York Times best-seller, the book has subsequently been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, and German.Look Me in the Eye details Robison’s life growing... Read Look Me In The Eye Summary

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is a nonfiction work in which US literature scholar Saidiya Hartman journeys to Ghana to explore the history of slavery and her ancestry. The book is unique because it is an admission of failure as much as a description of her findings. She concludes that, as an African American, one cannot return to one’s roots because slavery has erased them. Content Warning: The source text... Read Lose Your Mother Summary

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (2003), by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, presents ten accounts of ordinary contributors to the Rwandan genocide, which killed 800,000 Tutsis in just two months in 1994. Each survivor is from the same relatively small city and goes into depth about the neighbors they murdered (or helped murder). The work was first translated into English by Linda Coverdale.Its themes include personal responsibility, the horrors of groupthink, and mass dehumanization... Read Machete Season Summary

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive is Stephanie Land’s first book. Land is a former professional house cleaner whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her writing explores issues related to systemic poverty, the hardships and stigmas associated with social services, surviving in the gig economy, and the challenges of motherhood. Maid was originally inspired by a Vox article she wrote about... Read Maid Summary

Nathan McCall’s 1994 autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, is about growing up in a working-class black section of Portsmouth, Virginia in the 1960s and 1970s. McCall was a smart boy, but despite a strong family unit and a caring community, he fell into crime. From a young age, he was tormented by racism. He recounts violent racism when attending an integrated elementary school, a depressing level of inequality of opportunity when looking for work as... Read Makes Me Wanna Holler Summary

Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) is a memoir and work of nonfiction concerned with psychotherapy. The author, Victor Frankl, was born in 1905 and later became a psychiatrist in Vienna—an occupation that for some time protected him despite the fact that he was Jewish. When he was offered the opportunity to obtain a visa and escape to America, he chose to stay in Nazi-occupied Austria to be near his aging parents. Inevitably, he and his family were... Read Man's Search for Meaning Summary

Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog (2005) is an autobiography by journalist John Grogan. This guide is based on the 2005 first edition. The story was inspired by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Grogan’s obituary for his dog Marley.The book was adapted into a full-length film in 2008 and has also been adapted into a series of children’s stories about Marley. The title is borrowed from a chapter near the... Read Marley And Me Summary

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

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Men Explain Things to Me is Rebecca Solnit’s 19th book. First published in 2014, it is comprised of a collection of essays primarily concerned with gender politics. The first essay explores men silencing women. It begins with Solnit recounting a conversation with “Mr. Very Important” in which he asks her about her writing, only to talk over her and lecture her about a book that, it turns out, she actually wrote. She uses this to... Read Men Explain Things To Me Summary

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