Biographies & Memoirs

Deborah
Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier
by Alfred F. Young, Ph.D.
When either of the sexes reverses its common sphere of action,' her memoirist Herman Mann wrote in 1797, 'our curiosity is excited to know the cause and event.' Mann was not of an analytical mind, but, in five rambling chapters about Deborah Samson

Madeleine Albright and Maya Angelou
What I Know Now
by Ellyn Spragins
'You've got the guts to find your own purpose.' It's odd to think of a former secretary of state as someone who worries about fitting in, but for a long time Madeleine Albright did. In a group, she paid attention rather than interrupt.

A Memoir of Life in Death
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly : A Memoir of Life in Death (Vintage International)
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day. My heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible cocoon holds my whole body prisoner. My room emerges slowly from the gloom.

Chapter One
Isherwood: A Life Revealed
by Peter Parker
In the first days of 1986, christopher isherwood lay dying at his home in Southern California. He had not said much for several weeks, and he was drifting in and out of consciousness. He occasionally cried out for his mother or for his old nanny.

Rachel Ashwell and Barbara Boxer
What I Know Now
by Ellyn Spragins
'Don't leave school just yet.' Deep pillows and feather beds are at hand. Plump armchairs wear slouchy white denim or cream linen slipcovers. Worn tables bear honorable scars and nicks.

A Conversation Between Khaled Hosseini and Firoozeh Dumas
Funny in Farsi
by Firoozeh Dumas
I first met Khaled at a fundraiser for the Berkeley public libraries in January 2004. Both of our books had been published fairly recently, but I had not yet read The Kite Runner. I did, however, remember his name.

Into the Sun
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
by Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D.
I was standing with my head back, one pigtail caught between my teeth, listening to the jet overhead. The noise was loud, unusually so, which meant that it was close. My elementary school was near Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington

Part One
A Million Little Pieces
by James Frey
Intense, unpredictable, and instantly engaging, A Million Little Pieces is a story of drug and alcohol abuse and rehabilitation as it has never been told before. Recounted in visceral, kinetic prose, and crafted with a forthrightness that rejects piety

The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare
'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson
Every author's life tells a story. According to the conventional biography, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564; he moved to London sometime in the late 1580s or early 1590s and soon enjoyed great success as an actor

A love story. Yes: this is a love story
Drinking: A Love Story
by Caroline Knapp
It's about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It's about needs so strong they're crippling. It's about saying good-bye to something you can't fathom living without. I loved the way drink made me feel

Mother Antonia's Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail
The Prison Angel
by Mary Jordan, Kevin Sullivan
In early 2002, we asked a young woman on Islas Marías, a prison in the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles off the Mexican coast, how she liked being an inmate there. She bubbled on about the beautiful ocean setting and the fresh air

Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois
by Anonymous
Every one knows that America is called the New World because, until the close of the 15th century, it was unknown to the other nations of the earth - at least it was then unknown to Europe. Until quite near the end of that century

The Real Jackie
Farewell, Jackie
by Edward Klein
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is still so much with us that it is hard to believe she has been gone for ten long years. Perhaps that is because the blazing klieg lights of attention that pursued Jackie during her lifetime did not forsake her in death.

Introduction
Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Marshall Frady
Almost a geological age ago, it seems now-that great moral saga of belief and violence that unfolded in the musky deeps of the South during the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties.

Part 1
Robert E. Lee
by Roy Blount
In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursor-cross between England's Cary Grant and Virginia's Randolph Scott.

The Story of Martin Luther
Martin Luther
by Martin E. Marty, Ph.D.
Martin Luther is the story of Martin Luther, not a history of the Protestant Reformation, though its subject was the most prominent figure in the combined religious and political stirrings of sixteenth-century Europe.

Dreaming Through The Twilight
Fierce
by Barbara Robinette Moss
'You ought to join the military, Southpaw,' my dad said. I smiled at his term of endearment, Southpaw. When I was a little girl, he'd tried to force me to be right-handed by tying my left hand behind my back when I wrote.

Introduction
Morrie: In His Own Words
by Morrie Schwartz
His name: Morris Schwartz. 'But call me Morrie,' he insisted, even to Ted Koppel, who obliged on three Nightline specials in 1995, half-hour interviews which helped make this wise old man a national icon.

Growing Up Iranian in America
Funny in Farsi
by Firoozeh Dumas
When I was seven, my parents, my fourteen-year-old brother, Farshid, and I moved from Abadan, Iran, to Whittier, California. Farid, the older of my two brothers, had been sent to Philadelphia the year before to attend high school.

Don't Notice Anything
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned
by Alan Alda
He's one of America's most recognizable and acclaimed actors-a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing, during his eleven years on M*A*S*H.