Catalog Search Results
Author
Summary
"Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry...
Author
Summary
"'There are certain women,' Truman Capote wrote, 'who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich.' Barbara 'Babe' Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy's sister) -- they were the toast of midcentury New York, each beautiful and distinguished in her own way. These women captivated and enchanted Capote -- and at times, they infuriated him as well. He befriended them,...
Author
Summary
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family. A powerfully...
Author
Summary
A Memoir of Jane Austen is the Austen family's memoir of the beloved 19th century English novelist. Written and compiled by Austen's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen reveals the author as her family knew her, while at the same time protecting the author's privacy in keeping with the Victorian conventions of the time. A Memoir of Jane Austen did, however, reveal for the first time Austen's authorship of such classic stories...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2022
Formats
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author describes how he created his popular veteran sniper.
Retired Marine Gunnery Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger debuted in Stephen Hunter's military action thriller Point of Impact in 1993. The book was the first of many adventures for the fictional sniper and inspired a hit-movie, as well as a television series. But what led to the invention of such a character?
In this...
Retired Marine Gunnery Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger debuted in Stephen Hunter's military action thriller Point of Impact in 1993. The book was the first of many adventures for the fictional sniper and inspired a hit-movie, as well as a television series. But what led to the invention of such a character?
In this...
Author
Summary
"The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" is a one-of-a-kind autobiography. Up until its publication in 1782, only two autobiographies had ever been written, and both were written by devout religious saints. Highly scandalous yet witty in nature, calling Rousseau's work an "autobiography" is a loose categorization of the text, as many of the stories and tales have been proven false, yet Rousseau told the truth about the spirit of his life through...
Author
Lexile Measure
1150L
Summary
Presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.
"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan"...
Author
Pub. Date
2003
Formats
Summary
In her journals and writing exercises, this novelist “comes to us with all the brilliance, perceptiveness, and restraint we could wish” (Kirkus Reviews).
From 1918 to 1941, even as she penned masterpiece upon masterpiece, Virginia Woolf kept a diary. She poured into it her thoughts, feelings, concerns, objections, interests, and disappointments—resulting in twenty-six volumes that give unprecedented insight into...
From 1918 to 1941, even as she penned masterpiece upon masterpiece, Virginia Woolf kept a diary. She poured into it her thoughts, feelings, concerns, objections, interests, and disappointments—resulting in twenty-six volumes that give unprecedented insight into...
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Formats
Summary
The only place in the United States that Hemingway could really call home after he started writing was the tropical island of Key West. During his decade here in the 1930s, he acquired his famed macho persona as Papa, the biggest Big Daddy of them all. This vivid portrait of Ernest Hemingway's Key West reveals both Hemingway, the writer, and Hemingway, the macho, hard-drinking sportsman. His Key West years turned out to be his most productive:
...Author
Pub. Date
2011
Formats
Summary
Barry Kaufman's life has been spent helping others cope with severe adversities and traumas. When he learned of his father's cancer diagnosis, he had to summon all of his strength. That struggle, and the surprising rewards that came from it are the subject of No Regrets. Kaufman's father, Abe, was a man of simple tastes, modest aspirations, and respectable accomplishments who dares, at age eighty-five, to open his heart in the face of a terminal illness....
11) A tramp abroad
Author
Series
Summary
A Tramp Abroad is a work of travel literature, including a mixture of autobiography and fictional events, by American author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created for the book, and based on his closest friend, Joseph Twichell), through central and southern Europe. While the stated goal of the journey is to walk most of the way, the men find themselves using other forms...
Author
Series
Summary
William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...
Author
Series
Crosswicks journal volume 1
Formats
Summary
The beloved author of A Wrinkle in Time takes an introspective look at her life and muses on creativity in this memoir, the first of her Crosswicks Journals.
Every so often I need OUT. . . . My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings. . . . I sit there, dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected in the...
Every so often I need OUT. . . . My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings. . . . I sit there, dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected in the...
Author
Summary
Almost one hundred years after the death of Jane Austen, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh published Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record (1913). The book lovingly details Jane's birth, childhood, adolescence, and maturity, the everyday minutiae of her life, the circumstances in which she wrote her juvenilia and her six novels, and her early death. Using Jane Austen's own letters, additional letters sent between a...
Author
Series
Crosswicks journal volume 2
Summary
A poignant meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters—and the inescapable effects of time—from the author of A Wrinkle in Time.
In the second memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, Madeleine L’Engle chronicles a season of extremes. Four generations of family have gathered at Crosswicks, her Connecticut farmhouse, to care for L’Engle’s ninety-year-old mother. As summer days fade to sleepless...
In the second memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, Madeleine L’Engle chronicles a season of extremes. Four generations of family have gathered at Crosswicks, her Connecticut farmhouse, to care for L’Engle’s ninety-year-old mother. As summer days fade to sleepless...
Author
Pub. Date
2007
Formats
Summary
“A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation).
Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d...
Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d...
Author
Summary
When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is this memoir. Featuring 78 poems and 78 essays, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine -- growing up dirt-poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents. Throughout, a portrait emerges of his mother as a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent,...
19) Tono-Bungay
Author
Series
Summary
Presented as a miraculous cure-all, Tono-Bungay is in fact nothing other than a pleasant-tasting liquid with no positive effects. Nonetheless, when the young George Ponderevo is employed by his uncle Edward to help market this ineffective medicine, he finds his life overwhelmed by its sudden success. Soon the worthless substance is turned into a formidable fortune as society becomes convinced of the merits of Tono-Bungay through a combination of skilled...
Author
Pub. Date
2011
Summary
When Nina Sankovitch's sister died at the age of forty-six, Nina turned to books for comfort, escape, and introspection. In her beloved purple chair, she rediscovered the magic of such writers as Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ian McEwan, Edith Wharton, and, of course, Leo Tolstoy. Through the connections Nina made with books, authors, and other readers, her life changed in unexpected ways. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair also tells the story of...