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Biography and Memoir October 2020
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| A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K. BarnettWhat it is: lawyer and Buried Alive Project co-founder Brittany K. Barnett's impassioned memoir of the cases that helped define her career as a criminal justice reform advocate.
Read it for: an intimate and galvanizing narrative exploring racial bias in the American criminal justice system.
For fans of: Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy. |
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| Eat a Peach by David ChangWhat it's about: chef, Momofuku restaurateur, and Ugly Delicious host David Chang's path to culinary stardom.
Topics include: Chang's upbringing in a religious Korean American family; his battles with bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation; career triumphs and missteps; his friendship with the late Anthony Bourdain.
Don't miss: the author's self-deprecating sense of humor, which he reveals in playful prose, cheeky footnotes, and rules for becoming a chef. |
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| Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila LalamiWhat it is: an unflinching examination of how immigrants and naturalized citizens in America are dehumanized.
What sets it apart: In this incisive essay collection, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami offers eye-opening insights from her experiences as a Moroccan American Muslim woman navigating post-9/11 Islamophobia.
Try this next: For another thought-provoking own voices memoir about immigration, check out Dina Nayeri's The Ungrateful Refugee. |
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| The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara PayneWhat it is: a richly detailed revisionist biography of Malcolm X that reveals previously unexplored aspects of his life and legacy.
What's inside: interviews with Malcolm X's colleagues, adversaries, family, and friends; archival materials from the FBI and NYPD.
Author alert: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Les Payne spent nearly three decades working on The Dead Are Arising before his death in 2018; his daughter and co-researcher Tamara finished his work. |
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| Crazy Brave by Joy HarjoWhat it is: a reflective memoir from Muscogee poet, musician, and Native Writers' Circle Lifetime Achievement Award winner Joy Harjo.
Topics include: the author's fraught family dynamics and single teenage motherhood; her schooling at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
What sets it apart: Harjo's candid, lyrical writing conveys the "intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors." |
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The Crying Book
by Heather Christle
Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying--from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence.
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From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer
by Luis J. Rodriguez
Luis J. Rodriguez writes about race, culture, identity, and belonging and what these all mean and should mean (but often fail to) in the volatile climate of our nation. Rodriguez has a distinctly inspiring passion and wisdom in his approach. Ultimately,the book carries the message that we must come together if we are to move forward. As he reminds us in the first essay, "The End of Belonging," "I'm writing as a Native person. I'm writing as a poet. I'm writing as a revolutionary working class organizer and thinker who has traversed life journeys from which incredible experiences, missteps, plights, and victories have marked the way. . . . I belong anywhere." The pieces in From Our Land to Our Land capture that same fantastic energy and wisdom and will spark conversation and inspiration.
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Ordinary Light
by Tracy K Smith
An acclaimed poet explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.
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The Liars' Club
by Mary Karr
When it was first published twenty years ago, The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" today as it ever was.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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