Biographies & Memoirs

Runthood
The Good Good Pig
by Sy Montgomery
Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoe box. On a rain-drenched April evening, so cold the frogs were silent, so gray we could hardly see our barn, my husband drove our rusting Subaru over mud roads sodden with melted snow.

You Have the Power Within, Part 2
Barefootin'
by Unita Blackwell, JoAnne Prichard Morris
The men parked their pickups on the street around the courthouse, hemming us in. There were half a dozen trucks, as I recall. They hollered at us from inside their trucks: 'Niggers, niggers. Go home, niggers.' The sheriff came walking by again.

You Have the Power Within
Barefootin'
by Unita Blackwell, JoAnne Prichard Morris
The news whipped through Mayersville like a brushfire: 'A bunch of niggers are over at the courthouse.' And soon a gang of folks had gathered to see what was going on.

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.

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.

Scientist and Mechanic
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe
by Katrina S. Firlik, M.D.
The brain is soft. Some of my colleagues compare it to toothpaste, but that's not quite right. It doesn't spread like toothpaste. It doesn't adhere to your fingers the way toothpaste does.

I Know You Are, but What Am I?
Free Gift with Purchase
by Jean Godfrey-June
You know all the studies, how beautiful people make more money, do better in school, etc., etc., than everyone else? I think when you look at a truly beautiful person, you think, We're still the same species, no?

A Tehran Girlhood
Iran Awakening
by Shirin Ebadi, Azadeh Moaveni
My indulgent grandmother, who never spoke to us children in anything but honeyed tones of endearment, snapped at us for the first time on August 19, 1953.

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.

Eugene McCarthy & The Red Leather Wallet
Expecting to Fly
by Martha Tod Dudman
Back when I was at Alice Deal Junior High School, I got a huge crush on a boy with perfect features. One day he came up to me in the hall. 'I heard you were in a protest march,' he told me.

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

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

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

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.