Full Description
Scores of appeal-based reading lists cover topics you'll never find in the library catalog—from extraordinary women and overcoming adversity to sports talk, spiritual journeys, and luminous prose.
With the genre of memoirs filled with so many titles and from such a variety of authors, it is hard to grasp what's available and what's worth reading. For all those who love delving into the lives of others, this Read On... volume offers help.
Read On...Life Stories: Reading Lists for Every Taste offers brief descriptions of nearly 450 published memoirs, from classics like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, to recent bestsellers like John Grogan's Marley and Me and Julie Andrews' Home. Titles are grouped together by their appeal to readers, and there is something for everyone: humorous memoirs, thrilling adventure stories, chatty celebrity reminiscences, cathartic dramas of family dysfunction, fascinating career retrospectives, and insightful stories of family and personal lives in many eras and places.
Contents
Series Foreword
Introduction
Chapter One: Character
Beating the Odds: Survivors of Awful Childhoods
Behind the Scenes: Celebrities' Lives
Being Different: Introspective Memoirs
Breaking Free: Overcoming Adversity
Caught in the Crossfire: People in Danger
Crossing Borders: Making a Life in a New Country
Extraordinary Women's Lives
Fathers and Sons
Fractured Families: From Adversity to Insight
Identity Papers: Discovering Our True Selves
Insiders: People Who Made History
Marching to Their Own Drum: Unique Individuals
Mothers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons
Passage to Adulthood: Coming-of-Age Memoirs
Then There Were Two: Love and Marriage
Who Goes There? Struggling with Mental Illness
Chapter Two: Story
Crooked Lives: People Behaving Badly
Dishing: Stories from the Kitchen
Faultlines: Difficult Family Relationships
Four Seasons: Memoirs of One Year
In Harm's Way: Lives at Risk
Living to Tell the Tale: Near-Death Experiences
Moments of Truth: Stories of Turning Points
Off the Beaten Path: Unusual Adventures
Pet Projects: The Animals in Our Lives
Relativity: Unusual Family Experiences
Rooting Around: Searching for Family Origins
Sports Talk
Under Fire: Stories of War
Chapter Three: Setting
Eureka! Scientists at Work
Far Out: Travel to Unusual Places
Foreign Exchange: Encountering Other Cultures
A Hard Day's Night: Life in the Music Business
Life Support: Memoirs from the Medical World
Orient Express: Travel to the Far East and Oceania
Outside the Box: Interesting Occupations
The Passing Scene: Road Trips
Primal Scenes: Vivid Childhood Memoirs
Small Is Beautiful: Life in Rural America
Under African Skies
Chapter Four: Language
The Definite Article: Writers on Their Lives
Depth of Field: Insightful Writers
Full Disclosure: Writing from the Heart
The Great Outdoors: Communing with Nature
Loud and Clear: Unique Voices
Luminous Prose: Elegant Memoirs
Private Worlds: Diaries
Short and Sweet: Under 200 Pages
Chapter Five: Mood
A Backward Glance: Nostalgic Memoirs
Growing Up Absurd: Unusual Childhoods
Laugh Lines: Memoirs on the Lighter Side
Renewal: Life-Altering Experiences
Taking It On Faith: Spiritual Journeys
The Ties that Bind: Bittersweet Family Stories
Undertow: Edgy, Dark Memoirs
Index
