Abeshaus
2013-14
AP Language and Composition
Summer Reading 2013—Memoir Recommendations
Keep in mind that these memoirs are adult reads about real life experiences (which are not always pretty) and may contain adult subject matter (which some may find disturbing) and adult language (which some may find offensive). Choose according to your own needs and taste.
Childhood in America
American Childhood by Annie Dillard
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.
Growing Up by Russell Baker
Pulitzer Prize winner for Distinguished Commentary and columnist for The New York Times, Russell
Baker traces his youth in the mountains of rural Virginia. When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed and matriarchal, never looked back. As is often the case, early hardships made the man.
Hamlet’s Dresser by Bob Smith
Bob Smith grew up in a town named for Shakespeare's birthplace: Stratford, Connecticut. His troubled childhood was spent in a struggle to help his devastated parents care for his severely retarded sister. But at age ten, Smith stumbled onto a line from The Merchant of Venice: "In sooth I know not why I am so sad." In the language of Shakespeare, he had found a window through which to view the world. When he was a teenager, the American Shakespeare Festival moved into Stratford and Smith became Hamlet's dresser. As he watched the plays from backstage, his life's passion took shape. Here, in gorgeous, tender, and lyrical prose, Smith tells the story of a life shaped by poetry. Melding tragedy and comedy, he gracefully weaves together the stories of his bittersweet childhood, his poignant experiences with the old people, and dozens of illuminating passages and scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Throughout, Bob's sweet, tortured sister plays both the beautiful Ophelia and the ghost to Bob's Hamlet, haunting the book with heartrending power.
Contemporary
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Eggers lost both his parents to cancer within a matter of months when he was only 22, and it is left to him (with the aid of his older sister and, to a lesser degree, his older brother) to raise his eight year-old brother, Toph. He and Toph pick up and move from their Chicago-area hometown to the San Francisco Bay region, where Eggers fashions a safe environment for Toph.
Burn Journals by Brent Runyon
In 1991, fourteen-year-old Brent Runyon came home from school, doused his bathrobe in gasoline, put it on, and lit a match. He suffered third-degree burns over 85% of his body and spent the next year recovering in hospitals and rehab facilities. During that year of physical recovery, Runyon began to question what he’d done, undertaking the complicated journey from near-death back to high school, and from suicide back to the emotional mainstream of life.
It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong
This is the story of Lance Armstrong, the world-famous cyclist, and his fight against cancer.
Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's by Thomas DeBaggio
Tom DeBaggio turned fifty-seven in 1999. One day he mentioned to his doctor that he seemed to be stumbling into forgetfulness. DeBaggio was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. He immediately began charting the ups and downs of his failing mind. Here is the captivating tale of DeBaggio's battle to stay connected with the world...
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
A funny collection of autobiographical essays about language itself. Meet the lisping young fifth-grader David "Thedarith," who arms himself with a thesaurus, learns every non-sibilant word in the lexicon, eludes his wily speech therapy teacher, and amazes his countrified North Carolina teachers with his out-of nowhere, man-sized vocabulary—and that’s only in the first chapter!
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
During the Christmas holidays in 2003, novelist Joan Didion began a month of hell. Just a few days before Christmas, Didion and her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, watched helplessly as their newly married daughter, Quintana, came down with a horrifying succession of illnesses that finally led to complete septic shock and system breakdown. A week later, as Quintana hovered close to death, Dunne collapsed and died. Didion plunged into a mad state of "magical thinking."
Adventure & Travel
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
A childhood dream of someday ascending Mount Everest, a lifelong love of climbing, and an expense account propelled writer Jon Krakauer to the top of the Himalayas. His tale is powerful and cautionary—an adventure gone horribly wrong.
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, and encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. He reflects on the American character, racial hostility, and on a particular form of American loneliness that he finds almost everywhere. He also examines the unexpected kindness of strangers that is a very real part of our national identity.
Blue Highways:A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon
William Least Heat-Moon's journey into America began with little more than the need to put home behind him. At a turning point in his life, he packed up a van he called “Ghost Dancing” and decided to leave his old life behind him. Escaping into the country, Heat-Moon discovers that people and places on his roundabout 13,000-mile trip down the back roads and through small, forgotten towns, are unexpected, sometimes mysterious, and full of the spark and wonder of ordinary life.
Historical (Recommended by the NPA History Department)
Bad Boy: A Memoir by Walter Dean Myers
Myers paints a fascinating picture of his childhood growing up in Harlem in the 1940s, with an adult's benefit of hindsight, wrote PW. What emerges is a clear sense of how one young man's gifts separate him from his peers, causing him to stir up trouble in order to belong.
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by Richard Neihardt
Black Elk Speaks is widely hailed as a religious classic, one of the best spiritual books of the modern era and the bestselling book of all time by an American Indian. This inspirational and unfailingly powerful story reveals the life and visions of the Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and the tragic history of his Sioux people during the epic closing decades of the Old West. In 1930, the aging Black Elk met a kindred spirit, the famed poet, writer, and critic John G. Neihardt (1881-1973) on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The Lakota elder chose Neihardt to share his visions and life with the world. Neihardt understood and today Black Elk is known to all. Black Elk's remarkable great vision came to him during a time of decimation and loss, when outsiders were stealing the Lakotas' land, slaughtering buffalo, and threatening their age-old way of life. As Black Elk remembers all too well, the Lakotas, led by such legendary men as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, fought unceasingly for their freedom, winning a world-renowned victory at the Little Bighorn and suffering unspeakable losses at Wounded Knee. Black Elk Speaks however is more than the epic history of a valiant Native nation. It is beloved as a spiritual classic because of John Neihardt's sensitivity to Black Elk's resounding vision of the wholeness of earth, her creatures, and all of humanity. Black Elk Speaks is a once-in-a-lifetime read: the moving story of a young Lakota boy before the reservation years, the unforgettable history of an American Indian nation, and an enduring spiritual message for us all.
Cash by Johnny Cash (Seriously good!)
A humble, happy look back from the man in black. Johnny Cash answers to many names; he's JR to childhood friends and family, John to bandmates, and Johnny to fans. ``Cash'' is the name wife June Carter reserves for ``the star, the egomaniac.'' The star gets plenty of ink here, from the early days at Sun Records--with Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis--to his current status as a darling of the alternative rock set. But it's the private man who's most compelling and surprisingly complex. Cash writes candidly of his recurring addiction to amphetamines and his concomitant shortcomings as a father, addresses his spirituality without sounding maudlin, and displays genuine humility at his success and very little bitterness at his abandonment by the country music establishment. A more accurate subtitle might be ``The Second Autobiography,'' since this volume covers some of the same ground as Cash's previous work, The Man in Black (1986), but a life so chock full of oddments (he once started a forest fire with an automobile and on another occasion was nearly disemboweled by an ostrich) and renegade stands (he opposed Vietnam, heresy to the nation's blue- collar constituency) easily merits a second look. Organized around the domiciles where he divides his time--homes in Tennessee, Florida, and Jamaica, as well as his tour bus--the book stays grounded in the present, mixing reflections on his 40-year career with a running chronicle of an ongoing tour. This novel approach minimizes the as-told-to blahs that plague many a celebrity autobiography and highlights Cash's wry humor and introspection. With the help of Carr, editor of Country Music magazine, Cash keeps the pace lively until the end, when the roses he throws everyone from grandkids to music biz buddies bog things down. Mostly, though, a pungent, substantive autobiography from one the most iconoclastic talents on the American music scene.
Dust Bowl Diary by Ann Marie Low
“Life in what the newspapers call ‘the Dust Bowl’ is becoming a gritty nightmare,” Ann Marie Low wrote in 1934. Her diary vividly captures that “gritty nightmare” as it was lived by one rural family—and by millions of other Americans. The books opens in 1927—“the last of the good years”—when Ann Marie is a teenager living with her parents, brother, and sister on a stock farm in southeastern North Dakota. We follow her family and friends, descendants of homesteaders, through the next ten years—a time of searing summer heat and desiccated fields, dying livestock, dust to the tops of fence posts and prices at rock bottom—a time when whole communities lost their homes and livelihoods to mortgages and, hardest of all, to government recovery programs. We also see the coming to maturity of the author in the face of economic hardship, frustrating family circumstances, and the stifling restrictions that society then placed on young women. Ann Marie Low’s diary, supplemented with reminiscences, offers a rich, circumstantial view of rural life a half century ago: planting and threshing before the prevalence of gasoline-powered engines, washing with rain water and ironing with sadirons, hauling coal on sleds over snow-clogged roads, going to end-of-school picnics and country dances, and hoarding the egg and cream money for college. Here, too, is an iconoclastic on-the-scene account of how a federal work project, the construction of a wildlife refuge, actually operated.
His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis
As commander of the Continental army, George Washington united the American colonies, defeated the British army, and became the world's most famous man. But how much do Americans really know about their first president? Today, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph J. Ellis says in this crackling biography, Americans see their first president on dollar bills, quarters, and Mount Rushmore, but only as "an icon--distant, cold, intimidating." In truth, Washington was a deeply emotional man, but one who prized and practiced self-control (an attribute reinforced during his years on the battlefield). Washington first gained recognition as a 21-year-old emissary for the governor of Virginia, braving savage conditions to confront encroaching French forces. As the de facto leader of the American Revolution, he not only won the country's independence, but helped shape its political personality and "topple the monarchical and aristocratic dynasties of the Old World." When the Congress unanimously elected him president, Washington accepted reluctantly, driven by his belief that the union's very viability depended on a powerful central government. In fact, keeping the country together in the face of regional allegiances and the rise of political parties may be his greatest presidential achievement. Based on Washington's personal letters and papers, His Excellency is smart and accessible--not to mention relatively brief, in comparison to other encyclopedic presidential tomes. Ellis's short, succinct sentences speak volumes, allowing readers to glimpse the man behind the myth. --Andy Boynton
Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battle by Anthony Swafford (seriously good!)
A witty, profane, down-in-the-sand account of the war many only know from CNN, this former sniper's debut is a worthy addition to the battlefield memoir genre. There isn't a bit of heroic posturing as Swofford describes the sheer terror of being fired upon by Iraqi troops; the elite special forces warrior freely admits wetting himself once rockets start exploding around his unit's encampment. But the adrenaline of battle is fleeting, and Swofford shows how it's in the waiting that soldiers are really made. With blunt language and bittersweet humor, he vividly recounts the worrying, drinking, joking, lusting and just plain sitting around that his troop endured while wondering if they would ever put their deadly skills to use. As Operation Desert Shield becomes Desert Storm, one of Swofford's fellow snipers-the most macho of the bunch-solicits a hug from each man. "We are about to die in combat, so why not get one last hug, one last bit of physical contact," Swofford writes. "And through the hugs [he] helps make us human again." When they do finally fight, Swofford questions whether the men are as prepared as their commanders, the American public and the men themselves think they are. Swofford deftly uses flashbacks to chart his journey from a wide-eyed adolescent with a family military legacy to a hardened fighter who becomes consumed with doubt about his chosen role. As young soldiers might just find themselves deployed to the deserts of Iraq, this book offers them, as well as the casual reader, an unflinching portrayal of the loneliness and brutality of modern warfare and sophisticated analyses of-and visceral reactions to-its politics.