front cover of Abuela in Shadow, Abuela in Light
Abuela in Shadow, Abuela in Light
Rigoberto González
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Standing over two graves, Rigoberto González studies the names “Ramon” and “María” under the family name “González.” “She was María Carrillo, not María González,” he thinks. His grandmother is missing. So begins González’s memoir, a journey to recover a more complete picture of his grandmother, who raised him following his mother’s death.
 
González travels to his abuela’s birthplace, Michoacán, Mexico, and along the way recovers his memories of a past he had tried to leave behind. A complex woman who was forced to take on maternal roles and suffered years of abuse, his grandmother simultaneously resisted traditional gender roles; she was kind yet unaffectionate, and she kept many secrets in a crowded household with little personal space. Sifting through family histories and anecdotes, González pieces together the puzzling life story of a woman who was present in her grandson’s life yet absent during his emotional journey as a young man discovering his sexuality and planning his escape from a toxic and abusive environment.
 
From fragments of memory and story, González ultimately creates a portrait of an unconventional yet memorable grandmother, a hard-working Indigenous Mexican woman who remained an enigma while she was alive. A grandmother, he shows, is more than what her descendants remember; she is also all that has been forgotten or never known. Through this candid exploration of his own family, González explores how we learn to remember and honor those we’ve lost.
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Accidental Gravity
Residents, Travelers, and the Landscape of Memory
Bernard Quetchenbach
Oregon State University Press, 2017
The compelling essays in Bernard Quetchenbach’s Accidental Gravity move from upstate New York to the western United States, from urban and suburban places to wild lands. In the first section of the book, he focuses on suburban neighborhoods, where residents respond ambivalently to golf-course geese and other unruly natural presences; in the second section, he juxtaposes these humanized places with Yellowstone National Park. Quetchenbach writes about current environmental issues in the Greater Yellowstone area—wildfire, invasive species, ever-increasing numbers of tourists—in the context of climate change and other contemporary pressures.
 
Accidental Gravity negotiates the difficult edge between a naive belief in an enduring, unassailable natural world and the equally naive belief that human life takes place in some unnatural, more mediated context. The title refers to the accidental but nonetheless meaningful nexus where the personal meets and combines with the universal—those serendipitous moments when the individual life connects to the larger rhythms of time and planet.
 
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Achieve the Honorable
A Missouri Congressman's Journey from Warm Springs to Washington
Ike Skelton
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Ike Skelton dreamed of joining the military. That dream was shattered when he contracted one of the most dreaded diseases of the era: polio. Far from abandoning hope, Skelton, after treatment at Warm Springs, Georgia, overcame his disability and went on to become a college athlete, a celebrated lawyer, a Missouri state senator, and a U.S. Congressman. Achieve the Honorable is the deeply personal tale of Ike Skelton’s determined journey from the small town of Lexington, Missouri, to Capitol Hill.

During his years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Skelton became known as a bipartisan negotiator and a champion of the Armed Services. Throughout the decades, he helped steer the nation through its most dangerous challenges, from Communism to terrorism; took a leading role in the reform of the Department of Defense; dedicated himself to fulfilling the interests of his constituents; and eventually rose to become chair of the House Armed Services Committee during such pivotal events as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to detailing Skelton’s political career and its accompanying challenges and triumphs, Achieve the Honorable provides inside glimpses into the lives of political titans like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. Along the way, we are treated to Skelton’s engaging humor and shrewd insight into twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. politics. 

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Adventures of a Ballad Hunter
By John A. Lomax, foreword by John Lomax III, John Nova Lomax, and Anna Lomax Wood
University of Texas Press, 2017

Growing up beside the Chisholm Trail, captivated by the songs of passing cowboys and his bosom friend, an African American farmhand, John A. Lomax developed a passion for American folk songs that ultimately made him one of the foremost authorities on this fundamental aspect of Americana. Across many decades and throughout the country, Lomax and his informants created over five thousand recordings of America’s musical heritage, including ballads, blues, children’s songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs. He acted as honorary curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, directed the Slave Narrative Project of the WPA, and cofounded the Texas Folklore Society. Lomax’s books include Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, American Ballads and Folk Songs, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, and Our Singing Country, the last three coauthored with his son Alan Lomax.

Adventures of a Ballad Hunter is a memoir of Lomax’s eventful life. It recalls his early years and the fruitful decades he spent on the road collecting folk songs, on his own and later with son Alan and second wife Ruby Terrill Lomax. Vibrant, amusing, often haunting stories of the people he met and recorded are the gems of this book, which also gives lyrics for dozens of songs. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter illuminates vital traditions in American popular culture and the labor that has gone into their preservation.

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After Effects
A Memoir of Complicated Grief
Andrea Gilats
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

An intensely moving and revelatory memoir of enduring and emerging from exceptional grief

To grieve after a profound loss is perfectly natural and healthy. To be debilitated by grief for more than a decade, as Andrea Gilats was, is something else. In her candid, deeply moving, and ultimately helpful memoir of breaking free of death’s relentless grip on her life, Gilats tells her story of living with prolonged, or “complicated,” grief and offers insight, hope, and guidance to others who suffer as she did. 

Thomas Dayton, Andrea Gilats’s husband of twenty years, died at 52 after a five-month battle with cancer. In After Effects Gilats describes the desolation that followed and the slow and torturous twenty-year journey that brought her back to life. In the two years immediately following his death, Gilats wrote Tom daily letters, desperately trying to maintain the twenty-year conversation of their marriage. Excerpts from these letters reveal the depth of her despair but also the glimmer of an awakening as they also trace a different, more typical course of the grief experienced by one of Gilats's colleagues, also widowed. Gilats’s struggle to rescue herself takes her through the temptation of suicide, the threat of deadly illness, the overwhelming challenges of work, and the rigor of learning and eventually teaching yoga, to a moment of reckoning and, finally, reconciliation to a life without her beloved partner. Her story is informed by the lessons she learned about complicated grief as a disorder that, while intensely personal, can be defined, grappled with, and overcome.

Though complicated grief affects as many as one in seven of those stricken by the loss of a close loved one, it is little known outside professional circles. After Effects points toward a path of recuperation and provides solace along the way—a service and a comfort that is all the more timely and necessary in our pandemic-ravaged world of loss and isolation.

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Against the Current
Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River
Kim Trevathan
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In August 1998 Kim Trevathan summoned his beloved 45-pound German shepherd mix, Jasper, and paddled a canoe down the Tennessee River, an adventure chronicled in Paddling the Tennessee River: A Voyage on Easy Water. Twenty years later, in Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River, he invites readers on a voyage of light-hearted rumination about time, memory, and change as he paddles the same river in the same boat—but this time going upstream, starting out in early spring instead of late summer. In sparkling prose, Trevathan describes the life of the river before and after the dams, the sometimes daunting condition of its environment, its banks’ host of evolving communities—and also the joys and follies of having a new puppy, 65-pound Maggie, for a shipmate.

Trevathan discusses the Tennessee River’s varied contributions to the cultures that hug its waterway (Kentuckians refer to it as a lake, but Tennesseans call it a river), and the writer’s intimate style proves a perfect lens for the passageway from Kentucky to Tennessee to Alabama and back to Tennessee. In choice observations and chance encounters along the route, Trevathan uncovers meaningful differences among the Tennessee Valley’s people—and not a few differences in himself, now an older, wiser adventurer.

Whether he is struggling to calm his land-loving companion, confronting his body’s newfound aches and pains, craving a hard-to-find cheeseburger, or scouting for a safe place to camp for the night, Trevathan perseveres in his quest to reacquaint himself with the river and to discover new things about it. And, owing to his masterful sense of detail, cadence, and narrative craft, Trevathan keeps the reader at the heart of the journey. The Tennessee River is a remarkable landmark, and this text exhibits its past and present qualities with a perspective only Trevathan can provide.

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Águila
The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains
María Cristina Moroles
University of Arkansas Press, 2024
In Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains, María Cristina Moroles traces the path of her extraordinary life from the streets of Dallas to the wilderness of the Arkansas Ozarks, where she has resided for fifty years. Hailing from a large Indigenous and Mexican American family in Texas, Moroles apprentices herself to healers and shamans across the Americas as she follows the spiritual vision that leads her to establish a mountaintop sanctuary for women and children of color in a notoriously insular location in the Ozark Mountains. This is a survivor’s tale, and a back-to-the-lander’s tale, unlike any other. From early traumas to countercultural rebellion and profound spiritual awakening, Moroles recounts milestones that earn her the ceremonial names SunHawk and Águila, as she builds a sustainable community off the grid, atop a mountain otherwise uninhabited by human life. Águila tells the truth of one woman’s search for freedom and all women’s quest for dignity as it celebrates the healing powers of nature.
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Alandra's Lilacs
The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter
Tressa Bowers
Gallaudet University Press, 1999

When, in 1968, 19-year-old Tressa Bowers took her baby daughter to an expert on deaf children, he pronounced that Alandra was “stone deaf,” she most likely would never be able to talk, and she probably would not get much of an education because of her communication limitations. Tressa refused to accept this stark assessment of Alandra’s prospects. Instead, she began the arduous process of starting her daughter’s education.

Economic need forced Tressa to move several times, and as a result, she and Alandra experienced a variety of learning environments: a pure oralist approach, which discouraged signing; Total Communication, in which the teachers spoke and signed simultaneously; a residential school for deaf children, where Signed English was employed; and a mainstream public school that relied upon interpreters. Changes at home added more demands, from Tressa’s divorce to her remarriage, her long work hours, and the ongoing challenge of complete communication within their family. Through it all, Tressa and Alandra never lost sight of their love for each other, and their affection rippled through the entire family. Today, Tressa can triumphantly point to her confident, educated daughter and also speak with pride of her wonderful relationship with her deaf grandchildren. Alandra’s Lilacs is a marvelous story about the resiliency and achievements of determined, loving people no matter what their circumstances might be.

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The Algerian Memoirs
Days of Hope and Combat
Henri Alleg
Seagull Books, 2011

The personal history of journalist Henri Alleg is tied inextricably to the history of the French-Algerian Conflict. Best known for his book The Question, a first-hand account of his torture by French troops during the Algerian war for independence, Alleg is famous both for having brought the issue of French torture to the public eye and for his passionate work as a writer, a newspaperman, and a communist activist.

Beginning with his arrival in Algiers in 1939, when he fell immediately in love with the vibrant city, to his departure in 1965, after Boumédienne seized power, this is a critical work of history made devastatingly personal. Algerian Memoirs recounts his experience under the Vichy regime and such watershed moments in colonial history as the infamous Battle of Algiers. In these pages, he relives the violence and the summary executions, the communist struggle, and his party’s strained relations with the National Liberation Front. And, of course, he revisits in stark detail his arrest and torture by the French, his years in prison, and eventual escape to Czechoslovakia.
 
In the telling of his own story, Alleg explores some of the key events in the history of Europe and North Africa and in the history of the radical press. This is an irreplaceable document of colonialism and its tragic aftermath.
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Alias Caracalla
Daniel Cordier
Swan Isle Press, 2024
An English translation of Daniel Cordier’s epic portrait and memoir of the French Resistance during WWII.

Daniel Cordier’s fascinating, intimate memoir is a major contribution to our understanding of the fraught and historic relations between General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French and the fractious resistance movements under the Occupation during World War II. As the first young secretary to legendary Jean Moulin, one of the leaders of Conseil National de la Résistance, Cordier recounts Moulin’s tense negotiations to bring together the resistance movements and persuade them to join forces under de Gaulle’s banner between 1942 and ‘43. Cordier was a lookout on the fateful day the National Resistance Council was created, confirming de Gaulle’s legitimacy in the eyes of the French people and, crucially, in the eyes of Roosevelt and the Allied leadership. Later in life, Cordier penned his first-hand account of his role in the creation of Jean Moulin’s secretariat in Lyon and then Paris. Alias Caracalla is a brave and passionate story of action and self-discovery in times of war, with a sensitive and nuanced translation by Rupert Swyer.
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All Abroad
A Memoir of Travel and Obsession
Geoffrey Weill
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Yearning for an escape from a claustrophobic childhood, Geoffrey Weill became infatuated with travel. At twenty-three, the budding British connoisseur made his way across the Atlantic on an ocean liner. The year was 1973, and he was bound for New York to pursue a promising role as consultant-in-training at the headquarters of the world’s oldest travel agency, Thomas Cook. The idyllic trip was reminiscent of those from the early twentieth century but made distinctly modern by a nightly reminder—at the onboard dance club, one was sure to run into a sequin-clad David Bowie.

All Abroad is the memoir of a man hungry for the logistics of travel: getting there, staying there, and feeling at home on any continent. Woven into his entertaining anecdotes is an informative account of a lost era in travel. As a witness to compelling and monumental changes in the industry, Weill offers a unique view into how our vacations have been shaped deeply by human trends, tragedies, and technologies. While some long for the grandeur of tourism from decades ago, Weill insists that travel—the conveyances and hotels that await journey’s end—remains as glamorous as ever.
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All My Mothers and Fathers
A Memoir
Michael Blumenthal
West Virginia University Press, 2016
Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.
 
As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily—and terrifyingly—similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he himself had had to survive. With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life.
 
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All the Leavings
Laurie Easter
Oregon State University Press, 2021
In this nonlinear, loosely chronological memoir, Laurie Easter deftly navigates the rugged terrain of living off the grid in rural southern Oregon, along with the many hazards of the human heart. In quiet, searching, and sometimes experimental essays, she bravely explores the liminal spaces between guilt and forgiveness, life and death, grief and love, human society and the natural world.

Whether recounting the home birth of her second child, encounters with cougars, the fraught dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the destructive power of wildfires, or the community bonds challenged by a tragic suicide, Easter’s writing is firmly grounded in place. She takes readers deep into the heart of a still-wild Oregon, perilous yet rich with natural beauty.

Written from one woman’s perspective as a mother, wife, and friend, All the Leavings is ultimately a book about love—for the child who faces a health crisis, for the friend dying of AIDS, for the one entangled by addiction who then disappears. Long after the final page is turned, it will resonate with readers interested in essays, memoir, alternative lifestyles, and the literature of the West.
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All the Lost Girls
Confessions of a Southern Daughter
Patricia Foster
University of Alabama Press, 2002
Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award
 
Patricia Foster’s lyrical yet often painful memoir explores the life of a white middle-class girl who grew up in rural south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, a time and place that did not tolerate deviation from traditional gender roles. Her mother raised Foster and her sister as “honorary boys,” girls with the ambition of men but the temperament of women.
 
An unhappy, intelligent woman who kept a heartbreaking secret from everyone close to her, Foster's mother was driven by a repressed rage that fed her obsession for middle-class respectability. By the time Foster reached age fifteen, her efforts to reconcile the contradictory expectations that she be at once ambitious and restrained had left her nervous and needy inside even while she tried to cultivate the appearance of the model student, sister, and daughter. It was only a psychological and physical breakdown that helped her to realize that she couldn't save her driven, complicated mother and must struggle instead for both understanding and autonomy.
 
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All the Roads Are Open
The Afghan Journey
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Seagull Books, 2011
In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan’s Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses.
 
The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach’s turbulent life. Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of an Afghanistan already touched by the “fateful laws known as progress,” a remote yet “sensitive nerve centre of world politics” caught amid great powers in upheaval. In her writings, Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings and loneliness of travel as well as its grace.
 
Maillart’s account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a classic of travel literature, and, now available for the first time in English, Schwarzenbach’s memoir rounds out the story of the adventure.
 
Praise for the German Edition
 “Above all, [Schwarzenbach’s] discovery of the Orient was a personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and social context. . . . She shows no trace of colonialist arrogance. In fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of the West.”—Süddeutsche Zeitung
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All Will Yet Be Well
The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873-1952
Suzanne L. Bunkers
University of Iowa Press, 1993

Sarah Gillespie Huftalen led an unconventional life for a rural midwestern woman of her time. Born in 1865 near Manchester, Iowa, she was a farm girl who became a highly regarded country school and college teacher; she married a man older than either of her parents, received a college degree later in life, and was committed to both family and career. A gifted writer, she crafted essays, teacher-training guides, and poetry while continuing to write lengthy, introspective entries in her diary, which spans the years from 1873 to 1952. In addition, she gathered extensive information about the quietly tragic life of her mother, Emily, and worked to preserve Emily's own detailed diary.

In more than 3,500 pages, Sarah writes about her multiple roles as daughter, sister, wife, teacher, family historian, and public figure. Her diary reflects the process by which she was socialized into these roles and her growing consciousness of the ways in which these roles intersected. Not only does her diary embody the diverse strategies used by one woman to chart her life's course and to preserve her life's story for future generations, it also offers ample evidence of the diary as a primary form of private autobiography for individuals whose lives do not lend themselves to traditional definitions of autobiography.

Taken together, Emily's and Sarah's extraordinary diaries span nearly a century and thus form a unique mother/daughter chronicle of daily work and thoughts, interactions with neighbors and friends and colleagues, and the destructive family dynamics that dominated the Gillespies. Sarah's consciousness of the abusive relationship between her mother and father haunts her diary, and this dramatic relationship is duplicated in Sarah's relationship with her brother, Henry, Suzanne Bunkers' skillful editing and analysis of Sarah's diary reveal the legacy of a caring, loving mother reflected in her daughter's work as family member, teacher, and citizen.

The rich entries in Sarah Gillespie Huftalen's diary offer us brilliant insights into the importance of female kinship networks in American life, the valued status of many women as family chroniclers, and the fine art of selecting, piecing, stitching, and quilting that characterizes the many shapes of women's autobiographies. Read Sarah's dairy to discover why "all will yet be well."

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Almost Home
A Brazilian American's Reflections on Faith, Culture, and Immigration
H. B. Cavalcanti
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
In Almost Home, H. B. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian-born scholar who has spent three decades working and living in the United States, reflects on his life as an immigrant and places his story within the context of the larger history of immigration.
    Due to both his family background and the prevalence of U.S. media in Latin America, Cavalcanti already felt immersed in U.S. culture before arriving in Kentucky in 1981 to complete graduate studies. At that time, opportunities for advancement in the United States exceeded those in Brazil, and in an era of military dictatorships throughout much of Latin America, Cavalcanti sought in the United States a nation of laws. In this memoir, he reflects on the dynamics of acculturation, immigrant parenting, interactions with native-born U.S. citizens, and the costs involved in rejecting his country of birth for an adopted nation. He also touches on many of the factors that contribute to migration in both the “sending” and “receiving” countries and explores the contemporary phenomenon of accelerated immigration.
    With its blend of personal anecdotes and scholarly information, Almost Home addresses both individual and policy-related issues to provide a moving portrait of the impact of migration on those who, like Cavalcanti, confront both the wonder and the disorientation inherent in the immigrant experience.
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Alone in the Mainstream
A Deaf Woman Remembers Public School
Gina A. Oliva
Gallaudet University Press, 2004

When Gina Oliva first went to school in 1955, she didn’t know that she was “different.” If the kindergarten teacher played a tune on the piano to signal the next exercise, Oliva didn’t react because she couldn’t hear the music. So began her journey as a “solitary,” her term for being the only deaf child in the entire school. Gina felt alone because she couldn’t communicate easily with her classmates, but also because none of them had a hearing loss like hers. It wasn’t until years later at Gallaudet University that she discovered that she wasn’t alone and that her experience was common among mainstreamed deaf students. Alone in the Mainstream recounts Oliva’s story, as well as those of many other solitaries.

In writing this important book, Oliva combined her personal experiences with responses from the Solitary Mainstream Project, a survey that she conducted of deaf and hard of hearing adults who attended public school. Oliva matched her findings with current research on deaf students in public schools and confirmed that hearing teachers are ill-prepared to teach deaf pupils, they don’t know much about hearing loss, and they frequently underestimate deaf children. The collected memories in Alone in the Mainstream add emotional weight to the conviction that students need to be able to communicate freely, and they also need peers to know they are not alone.

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Alone
Reflections on Solitary Living
Daniel Schreiber
Reaktion Books, 2023
A book for our times: a moving meditation on the tension between loneliness and freedom, individualism and love.
 
At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure? And can we ever be happy on our own? Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and the desire for companionship, intimacy, and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives—can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live, Alone spent almost a year on Germany’s bestseller list.
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Along Navajo Trails
Recollections of a Trader 1898-1948
Will Evans edited by Susan E. Woods and Robert McPherson
Utah State University Press, 2005
Will Evans's writings should find a special niche in the small but significant body of literature from and about traders to the Navajos. Evans was the proprietor of the Shiprock Trading Company. Probably more than most of his fellow traders, he had a strong interest in Navajo culture. The effort he made to record and share what he learned certainly was unusual. He published in the Farmington and New Mexico newspapers and other periodicals, compiling many of his pieces into a book manuscript. His subjects were Navajos he knew and traded with, their stories of historic events such as the Long Walk, and descriptions of their culture as he, an outsider without academic training, understood it. Evans's writings were colored by his fondness for, uncommon access to, and friendships with Navajos, and by who he was: a trader, folk artist, and Mormon. He accurately portrayed the operations of a trading post and knew both the material and artistic value of Navajo crafts. His art was mainly inspired by Navajo sandpainting. He appropriated and, no doubt, sometimes misappropriated that sacred art to paint surfaces and objects of all kinds. As a Mormon, he had particular views of who the Navajos were and what they believed and was representative of a large class of often-overlooked traders. Much of the Navajo trade in the Four Corners region and farther west was operated by Mormons. They had a significant historical role as intermediaries, or brokers, between Native and European American peoples in this part of the West. Well connected at the center of that world, Evans was a good spokesperson.
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Amazons
A Love Story
E. J. Levy
University of Missouri Press, 2012

   When E.J. Levy arrived in northern Brazil on a fellowship from Yale at the age of 21, she was hoping to help save the Amazon rain forest; she didn’t realize she would soon have to save herself.

Amazons: A Love Story recounts an idealistic young woman’s coming of age against the backdrop of the magnificent rain forest and exotic city of Salvador. This elegant and sharp-eyed memoir explores the interaction of the many forces fueling deforestation—examining the ecological, economic, social, and spiritual costs of ill-conceived development—with the myriad ones that shape young women’s maturation.
Sent to Salvador (often called the “soul of Brazil” for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture), a city far from the rain forest, Levy befriends two young Brazilians, Nel, a brilliant economics student who is estranged from her family for mysterious reasons, and Isa, a gorgeous gold digger. When the university closes due to a strike, none of them can guess what will come of their ambitions. Levy’s course of study changes: she takes up capoeira, enters cooking school (making foods praised in Brazilian literature as almost magical elixirs), gains fluency in Portuguese and the ways of street life, and learns other, more painful lessons—she is raped, and her best friend becomes a prostitute.
When Levy finally reaches the Amazon, her courage—and her safety—are further tested: on a barefoot hike through the jungle one night to collect tadpoles, she encounters fist-sized spiders, swimming snakes, and crocodiles. When allergies to the antimalarial drugs meant to protect her prove life-threatening, she discovers that sometimes the greatest threat we face is ourselves. Eventually, her work as a “cartographer of loss,” charting deforestation, leads her to realize that our relationships to nature and to our bodies are linked, that we must transcend the logic of commodification if we are to save both wilderness and ourselves.
The Amazon is a perennially fascinating subject, alluring and frightening, a site of cultural projection and commercial ambition, of fantasies and violence. Amazons offers an intimate look at urgent global issues that affect us all, including the too-often abstract question of rain forest loss. Levy illuminates the burgeoning sex-tourism trade in Brazil, renewed environmental threats, global warming, and the consequences of putting a price on nature. Accounts of the region have most often been by and about men, but Amazons offers a fresh approach, interweaving a personal feminist narrative with an urgent ecological one. In the tradition of Terry Tempest Williams, this timely, compelling, and eloquent memoir will appeal to those interested in literary nonfiction, travel writing, and women’s and environmental issues.
 
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American Autobiography after 9/11
Megan Brown
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, American memoirists have wrestled with a wide range of anxieties in their books. They cope with financial crises, encounter difference, or confront norms of identity. Megan Brown contends that such best sellers as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell teach readers how to navigate a confusing, changing world.
            This lively and theoretically grounded book analyzes twenty-first-century memoirs from Three Cups of Tea to Fun Home, emphasizing the ways in which they reinforce and circulate ideologies, becoming guides or models for living. Brown expands her inquiry beyond books to the autobiographical narratives in reality television and political speeches. She offers a persuasive explanation for the memoir boom: the genre as a response to an era of uncertainty and struggle.
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American Born
An Immigrant's Story, a Daughter's Memoir
Rachel M. Brownstein
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York.

When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, “American born.” 

The distinguished biographer and critic Rachel M. Brownstein began writing about her mother Reisel during the Trump years, dwelling on the tales she told about her life and the questions they raised about nationalism, immigration, and storytelling. For most of the twentieth century, Brownstein’s mother gracefully balanced her identities as an American and a Jew. Her values, her language, and her sense of timing inform the imagination of the daughter who recalls her in her own old age. The memorializing daughter interrupts, interprets, and glosses, sifting through alternate versions of the same stories using scenes, songs, and books from their time together.
 
But the central character of this book is Reisel, who eventually becomes Grandma Rose—always watching and judging, singing, baking, and bustling. Living life as the heroine of her own story, she reminds us how to laugh despite tragedy, find our courage, and be our most unapologetically authentic selves.
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American Cocktail
A “Colored Girl” in the World
Anita Reynolds
Harvard University Press, 2014

This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Of racially mixed heritage, Anita Reynolds was proudly African American but often passed for Indian, Mexican, or Creole. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, but above all free-spirited provocateur, she was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an “American cocktail.”

One of the first black stars of the silent era, she appeared in Hollywood movies with Rudolph Valentino, attended Charlie Chaplin’s anarchist meetings, and studied dance with Ruth St. Denis. She moved to New York in the 1920s and made a splash with both Harlem Renaissance elites and Greenwich Village bohemians. An émigré in Paris, she fell in with the Left Bank avant-garde, befriending Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso. Next, she took up residence as a journalist in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and witnessed firsthand the growing menace of fascism. In 1940, as the Nazi panzers closed in on Paris, Reynolds spent the final days before the French capitulation as a Red Cross nurse, afterward making a mad dash for Lisbon to escape on the last ship departing Europe.

In prose that perfectly captures the globetrotting nonchalance of its author, American Cocktail presents a stimulating, unforgettable self-portrait of a truly extraordinary woman.

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An American Engineer in Afghanistan
Marjorie Bell
University of Minnesota Press, 1948
An American Engineer in Afghanistan was first published in 1948.The legend of Afghanistan as “The Forbidden Country” grew chiefly from a warning of the British Indian Government which once guarded the Afghan frontier north of the Khyber Pass -- “It is absolutely forbidden to cross this border into Afghanistan.” A glance at the endsheet map in this book will recall its strategic position in the Middle East.When A. C. Jewett entered in 1911 with an escort supplied for his safe transportation to Kabul, he was the first American permitted to live in the country since 1880. He was employed by Habibullah Khan, the Amir of Afghanistan, to take charge of installing a hydroelectric plan, and it was during this stay that the first attempts toward modernization were made in Afghanistan. Although he came for only a year, it was eight years before his work was completed. Electrical apparatus had to be hauled over rough mountain passes. The work elephants’ harnesses had to be made by hand. Labor was not skilled and whenever crops were harvested, his deliveries of supplies stopped!Written in a lively, readable style, Jewett’s letters and journal notes tell the story of the land of the Afghans. An isolated country of ancient caravan trails, mull-walled caravansaries, and villages -- it was little touched by Western ideas in the last days of the old monarchy. But forces have been unleashed in Asia which even remote Afghanistan is unlikely to escape. Jewett’s entertaining story will help westerners to understand coming events.
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American Imperialism in the Image of Peer Gynt
Memoirs of a Professor-Bureaucrat
E.A.J. Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

American Imperialism in the Image of Peer Gynt was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the life story of an economic historian whose distinguished career has included nine years of service as a United States government official in various capacities, both military and civilian, around the world. It is a revealing and often disturbing account, evoking in the author's mind, as he reflects on his own experiences and those of other American emissaries abroad, the image of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who wandered over the earth thinking he was doing good, only to find when he returned home that both his virtues and his sins were so insignificant that his soul was scheduled by the buttonmolder to be cast into limbo in the form of a little lead button.

Professor Johnson's book is much more than an autobiography. From the vantage point of his experiences and observations he provides a critical evaluation of American efforts abroad. He discusses cultural factors that have shaped American preconceptions and attitudes over the last half century and attempts to explain why a generation of presumably well-equipped Americans has been singularly incapable of materializing the hopes and aspirations of both the American people and the world community.

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Among the Swamp People
Life in Alabama's Mobile-Tensaw River Delta
Watt Key
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Colorful and lively personal essays about life in the wilds of Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw River Delta
 
Among the Swamp People is the story of author Watt Key’s discovery of the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. “The swamp” consists of almost 260,000 acres of wetlands located just north of Mobile Bay. There he leases a habitable outcropping of land and constructs a primitive cabin from driftwood to serve as a private getaway. His story is one that chronicles the beauties of the delta’s unparalleled natural wonders, the difficulties of survival within it, and an extraordinary community of characters—by turns generous and violent, gracious and paranoid, hilarious and reckless—who live, thrive, and perish there.
 
There is no way into the delta except by small boat. To most it would appear a maze of rivers and creeks between stunted swamp trees and mud. Key observes that there are few places where one can step out of a boat without “sinking to the knees in muck the consistency of axle grease. It is the only place I know where gloom and beauty can coexist at such extremes. And it never occurred to me that a land seemingly so bleak could hide such beauty and adventure.”
 
It also chronicles Key’s maturation as a writer, from a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer with no formal training as a writer to a highly successful, award-winning writer of fiction for a young adult audience with three acclaimed novels published to date.
 
In learning to make a place for himself in the wild, as in learning to write, Key’s story is one of “hoping someone—even if just myself—would find value in my creations.”
 
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Amy Signs
A Mother, Her Deaf Daughter, and Their Stories
Rebecca Willman Gernon
Gallaudet University Press, 2012

“Thirty-seven years ago, I vowed to write a truthful book about raising a deaf child.” Rebecca Willman Gernon followed through on her promise with her deaf daughter Amy Willman in this extraordinary new narrative. Many stories have been told about a parent’s struggle to help her deaf child succeed in a mostly hearing world. Amy Signs marks a signature departure in that both Rebecca and Amy relate their perspectives on their journey together.

       When she learns of 11-month-old Amy’s deafness in 1969, Rebecca fully expresses her anguish, and traces all of the difficulties she endured in trying to find the right educational environment for Amy. The sacrifices of the rest of her family weighed heavily on her, also. Though she resolved to place four-year-old Amy in Nebraska’s residential school for deaf students, the emotional toll seemed too much to bear.

       Amy’s view acts as the perfect counterpoint. Interwoven with her mother’s story, Amy’s account confirms that signing served her best. She summarizes life in boarding school as “laughter and homesickness.” She laughed with all of her deaf friends, though felt homesick at times. Amy thanks her mother for the gift of sign, asserting that a mainstream education would never have led her to earn a master’s degree and later teach American Sign Language at the University of Nebraska. Amy Signs is a positive albeit cautionary tale for parents of deaf children today whose only choice is a mainstreamed education.

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And No Birds Sing
Pauline Leader
Gallaudet University Press, 2016
Originally published in 1931, this memoir offers an unflinching look at the life of a deaf woman struggling with poverty and isolation in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village. In harrowing yet lyrical prose, Pauline Leader recounts her experience growing up as the daughter of Jewish immigrants in a small New England mill town. Born in 1908, Leader was exposed to frequent verbal and physical abuse. She became deaf at the age of 12, following a long illness. As a teenager, she ran away to New York City, where she found work in factories and sweatshops, and spent time in a home for “wayward girls.” As she sought community among the artists and eccentrics of the Village, Leader’s strong will and fierce independence were often thwarted by hardship and self-doubt. But through it all, she found solace in her writing.

This edition is accompanied by a new introduction and afterword that provide a scholarly framework for understanding Leader and her times. She persevered and became a published poet and novelist, often drawing on the experiences offered up here. Compelling and evocative, And No Birds Sing deftly reveals a complex, intelligent spirit toiling in a brutal world.

From the book:

I insisted to myself that I could still hear. I heard in my mind the sounds of streams as I passed them. I knew the sound the river made, that river that I had known always, the river by the marble house. In my mind the river washed with a low intimate sound. I had no need to hear as the people heard. True intimacy needs no ears. I knew the sound of birds; I heard them as they hopped about. I knew the sound of words also. It was words that I most intensely heard. I had not always the river and the birds—they appeared far away at times. I did not always want river and birds, but I always wanted words, and I always had them. I would have been terribly lonely without them. With them always in my mind, I could not be truly lonely. I played with them; I set them to music; I achieved endless variations with them. They were never weary, as other things could sometimes be weary.

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And Sadly Teach
Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture
Jurgen Herbst
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

To lend weight to his charge that the public school teacher has been betrayed and gravity to his indictment of the educational establishment for that betrayal, Jurgen Herbst goes back to the beginnings of teacher education in America in the 1830s and traces its evolution up to the 1920s, by which time the essential damage had been done.
    Initially, attempts were made to upgrade public school teaching to a genuine profession, but that ideal was gradually abandoned. In its stead, with the advent of newly emerging graduate schools of education in the early decades of the twentieth century, came the so-called professionalization of public education. At the expense of the training of elementary school teachers (mostly women), teacher educators shifted their attention to the turning out of educational "specialists" (mostly men)—administrators, faculty members at normal schools and teachers colleges, adult education teachers, and educational researchers.
    Ultimately a history of the neglect of the American public school teacher, And Sadly Teach ends with a plea and a message that ring loud and clear. The plea: that the current reform proposals for American teacher education—the Carnegie and the Holmes reports—be heeded. The message: that the key to successful school reform lies in educating teacher’s true professionals and in acknowledging them as such in their classrooms.

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Another Appalachia
Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
Neema Avashia
West Virginia University Press, 2022

2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Named the BEST LGBTQ+ MEMOIR of 2022 by Book Riot
Named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022

Weatherford Award finalist, nonfiction

“Commands your attention from the first page to the last word.” —Morgan Jerkins

“I’m glad this memoir exists . . . and I’m especially glad it’s so good.” —Vauhini Vara, New York Magazine

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.

Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

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Another City upon a Hill
A New England Memoir
Joseph A. Conforti
Tagus Press, 2013
This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place—Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti's world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile city.
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Another Way Home
The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family
Ronne Hartfield
University of Chicago Press, 2004
In her prologue to Another Way Home, Ronne Hartfield notes the dearth of stories about African Americans who have occupied the area of mixed race with ease and harmony for generations. Her moving family history is filled with such stories, told in beautifully crafted and unsentimental prose. Spanning most of the twentieth century, Hartfield's book celebrates the special occasion of being born and reared in a household where miscegenation was the rule rather than the exception—where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage.

Hartfield begins with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day's journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, through the eyes of Day and, ultimately, her daughter, we witness the bustling city streets and vibrant middle-class culture of this iconic black neighborhood. We also relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author's family and others in Chicago's South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Throughout her book, Hartfield portrays mixed-race Americans navigating the challenges of their lives with resilience and grace, making Another Way Home an intimate and compelling encounter with one family's response to our racially charged culture.
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Anthropologies
A Family Memoir
Beth Alvarado
University of Iowa Press, 2011

A vivid archive of memories, Beth Alvarado’s Anthropologies layers scenes, portraits, dreams, and narratives in a dynamic cross-cultural mosaic. Bringing her lyrical tenor to bear on stories as diverse as harboring teen runaways, gunfights with federales, and improbable love, Alvarado unveils the ways in which seemingly separate moments coalesce to forge a communal truth. Woven from the threads of distinct family histories and ethnic identities, Anthropologies creates a heightened understanding of how individual experiences are part of a larger shared fabric of lives.

 
Like the opening of a series of doors, each turn of the page reveals some new reality and the memories that emerge from it. Open one door and you are transported to a modest Colorado town in 1966, appraising animal tracks edged into a crust of snow while listening to stories of Saipan. Open another and you are lounging in a lush Michoacán hacienda, or in another, the year is 1927 and you are standing on a porch in Tucson, watching La Llorona turn a corner.
 
With vivid imagery and a poetic sensibility, Anthropologies reenacts the process of remembering and so evokes a compelling narrative. Each snapshot provides a glimpse into the past, illuminating the ways in which memory and history are intertwined. Whether the experience is of her own drug use or that of a great-great-grandmother’s trek across the Great Plains with Brigham Young, Alvarado’s insight into the binding nature of memory illuminates a new way of understanding our place within families, generations, and cultures.
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Antiboy
Valentijn Hoogenkamp
Seagull Books, 2024
A queer memoir that takes place at the messy intersection between gender and desire, challenging stereotypes and embracing the nuance of identity.

When Valentijn must undergo a mastectomy because of a gene defect, he makes the decision not to have implants and adopts an in-between gender identity that feels more natural. He shaves his head and discards his wardrobe of women’s clothes, even the perfect dress his mother was so fond of. But all of this causes friction: not only are Valentijn’s doctors stumped, but friends, family, and lovers too. His trans ex helps him feel more comfortable in his new guise—not a girl, not a boy, but an antiboy—while his boyfriend draws away from the relationship. Encircled by grief and loss, Valentijn searches for the ultimate freedom to be allowed to be himself and tries to rebuild the relationships with those around him.
 
A refined, poetic autobiographical essay about adopting a new and truer identity, Antiboy is poignant without ever being sentimental. Valentijn finds new emotional depth and complexity in his personal relationships, providing readers with a rich and empathetic reading experience. Antiboy goes beyond the author’s own journey, becoming a nuanced exploration of human connections amid transformation.
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Apocalypse, Darling
Barrie Jean Borich
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

From award-winning author Barrie Jean Borich comes Apocalypse, Darling, a narrative, lyric exploration of the clash between old and new. Set in the steel mill regions of Chicago and in Northwest Indiana, the story centers on Borich’s return to a decimated landscape for a misbegotten wedding in which her spouse’s father marries his high school sweetheart. The book is a lilting journey into an ill-fated moment, where families attempt to find communion in tense gathering spaces and across their most formative disappointments. Borich tells the story of the industrial heartland that produced the steel that made American cities, but also one of the most toxic environmental sites in the world.
 
 
As concise as a poem and as sweeping as an epic novel, Apocalypse, Darling explores the intersection of American traditional and self-invented social identities and the destruction and re-greening of industrial cityscapes. Borich asks: can toxic landscapes actually be remediated and can patriarchal fathers ever really be forgiven? In a political climate where Borich is forced to daily re-enter the toxic wastelands she thought she’d long left behind, Apocalypse, Darling is an urgent collision of broken spaces, dysfunctional affections, and the reach toward familial and environmental repair. 
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Appalachia North
A Memoir
Matthew Ferrence
West Virginia University Press, 2018

Appalachia North is the first book-length treatment of the cultural position of northern Appalachia—roughly the portion of the official Appalachian Regional Commission zone that lies above the Mason-Dixon line. For Matthew Ferrence this region fits into a tight space of not-quite: not quite “regular” America and yet not quite Appalachia.

Ferrence’s sense of geographic ambiguity is compounded when he learns that his birthplace in western Pennsylvania is technically not a mountain but, instead, a dissected plateau shaped by the slow, deep cuts of erosion. That discovery is followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumor, setting Ferrence on a journey that is part memoir, part exploration of geology and place. Appalachia North is an investigation of how the labels of Appalachia have been drawn and written, and also a reckoning with how a body always in recovery can, like a region viewed always as a site of extraction, find new territories of growth.

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Appalachia's Alternative to Mainstream America
A Personal Education
Paul Salstrom
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In many communities across North America in the 1960s and 1970s, the rural-relocation movement became both a way of life and a path forward for many people inclined to buck the mainstream—and Paul Salstrom embraced it. His experiences in rural Lincoln County, West Virginia, led him to the self-sufficient, “neighborly networking” lifestyle well known in many Appalachian communities since the early nineteenth century.

In Appalachia’s Alternative to Mainstream America, Salstrom outlines his Appalachian experiences in a memoir, revisiting this back-to-the-land tradition that guided his cultural experience during this time. While he pursued a number of experimental alternatives to a mainstream way of life during the late 1960s, it was not until he landed in Lincoln County a few years later that he found himself engaging in an alternative way of living that didn’t feel “experimental” at all. This distinctive way of life was largely characterized by a closer connection to the earth—local sufficiency informed by homesteading, subsistence farming, and gardening—and the community-wide trading of favors in a spirit of mutual aid.

Over time, Salstrom’s engagement in this “neighborly” occupation has nurtured an informed belief that Americans will be drawn back to landed customs, taking care of the earth and of one another to thrive as individuals and communities. Facing today’s pandemics, climate change, and deepening political divisions, says Salstrom, Americans urgently need to create a groundswell of localized food security and energy production.

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Aquamarine Blue 5
Personal Stories of College Students with Autism
Dawn Prince-Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2002

Rated Outstanding by the American Association of School Libraries

This is the first book to be written by autistic college students about the challenges they face. Aquamarine Blue 5 details the struggle of these highly sensitive students and shows that there are gifts specific to autistic students that enrich the university system, scholarship, and the world as a whole.

Dawn Prince-Hughes presents an array of writings by students who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, showing their unique ways of looking at and solving problems. In their own words, they portray how their divergent thinking skills could be put to great use if they were given an opportunity. Many such students never get the chance because the same sensitivity that gives them these insights makes the flicker of fluorescent lights and the sound of chalk on the board unbearable For simple—and easily remedied—reasons, we lose these students, who are as gifted as they are challenged.

Aquamarine Blue 5 is a showcase of the strength and resilient character of individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome. It will be an invaluable resource for those touched by this syndrome, their friends and families, and school administrators.

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The Archipelago
A Balkan Passage
Robert Isenberg
Autumn House Press, 2010
Isenberg's travelogue explores an intimate view of the Balkans through the eyes of a young American adventurer.
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Architecture by Moonlight
Rebuilding Haiti, Redrafting a Life
Paul E. Fallon
University of Missouri Press, 2015
When a natural disaster strikes, one imposing obstacle always impedes recovery: the need to rebuild. Not just homes, schools, and other buildings but also lives must be reconstructed. Yet amid the horror there is also the opportunity to build back better, to create more resilient buildings and deeper human connections.
After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, architect Paul E. Fallon wanted to help rebuild the magic island he had visited the previous summer. Over the next three years, he made seventeen trips to design and supervise construction of an orphanage and a school in Grand Goâve. In the process, he confronted the challenges of building in a country with sparse materials and with laborers predisposed toward magic over physics.
Architecture by Moonlight is about much more than construction, however. Readers will also experience the many relationships Fallon developed as he balanced the contradictory demands of a boisterous American family constructing a memorial for their deceased daughter and Evangelical missionaries more interested in saving souls than filling bellies. Dieunison, a wily Haitian orphan, captured Fallon’s heart and exemplifies both Haiti’s tragedy and its indomitable spirit.
Fallon’s personal experience is an eloquent tale of “an ensemble of incomplete people struggling in a land of great trial and great promise, trying to better understand their place on Earth.” He reveals how, when seemingly different people come together, we succeed by seeking our commonality. Architecture by Moonlight illustrates our strength to rise above disaster and celebrate recovery, perseverance, and humanity.
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Art for the Ladylike
An Autobiography through Other Lives
Whitney Otto
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
“In this inviting blend of biography and memoir, novelist Otto (How to Make an American Quilt) examines her life in terms of the women artists who influenced her.…Otto provides a fascinating tour of art through the lens of her own experience. Creatives of all sorts will enjoy [her] wide-ranging insights.” —Publishers Weekly

In Art for the Ladylike, Whitney Otto limns the lives of eight pioneering women photographers—Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Ruth Orkin, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Madame Yvonne, and Grete Stern—to in turn excavate her own writer’s life. The result is an affecting exploration of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an artist, and the perils and rewards of being both at once. In considering how feminism, career, and motherhood were entangled throughout her subjects’ lives as they tirelessly sought to render their visions and paved the way for others creating within the bounds of domesticity, Otto assesses her own struggles with balancing writing and the pulls of home life. Ultimately, she ponders the persistent question that artistic women face in a world that devalues women’s ambition: If what we love is what we are, how do those of us with multiple loves forge lives with room for everything?
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The Art of Being Deaf
A Memoir
Donna McDonald
Gallaudet University Press, 2014
Concerned about aspects of her romantic relationships, Donna McDonald consulted with a psychologist who asked, “Your hearing loss must have had a big impact on you?” At age 45, with a successful career in social work policy, McDonald took umbrage at the question. Then, she realized that she never had addressed the personal barrier she had constructed between her deaf-self and her hearing persona. In The Art of Being Deaf, she describes her long, arduous pursuit of finding out exactly who she was.
 
       Born in 1950s Australia, McDonald was placed in an oral deaf school when she was five. There, she was trained to communicate only in spoken English. Afterwards, she attended mainstream schools where she excelled with speechreading and hard work. Her determination led to achievements that proved her to be “the deaf girl that had made good.” Yet, despite her constant focus on fitting in the hearing world, McDonald soon realized that she missed her deaf schoolmates and desired to explore her closed-off feelings about being deaf.
 
       When she reconnected with her friends, one urged her to write about her experiences to tell all about “the Forgotten Generation, the orally-raised deaf kids that no one wants to talk about.” In writing her memoir, McDonald did learn to reconcile her deaf-self with her “hearing-deaf” persona, and she realized that the art of being deaf is the art of life, the art of love.
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The Art of the Turnaround
Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations
Michael M. Kaiser
Brandeis University Press, 2008
Many arts organizations today find themselves in financial difficulties because of economic constraints inherent in the industry. While other companies can improve productivity through the use of new technologies or better systems, these approaches are not available in the arts. Hamlet requires the same number of performers today as it did in Shakespeare’s time. The New York Philharmonic requires the same number of musicians now as it did when Tchaikovsky conducted it over one hundred years ago. Costs go up, but the size of theaters and the price resistance of patrons limit what can be earned from ticket sales. Therefore, the performing arts industry faces a severe gap between earnings and expenses. Typical approaches to closing the gap—raising ticket prices or cutting artistic or marketing expenses—don’t work. What, then, does it take to create and maintain a healthy arts organization? Michael M. Kaiser has revived four major arts organizations: the Kansas City Ballet, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, and London’s Royal Opera House. In The Art of the Turnaround he shares with readers his ten basic rules for bringing financially distressed arts organizations back to life and keeping them strong. These rules cover the requirements for successful leadership, the pitfalls of cost cutting, the necessity of extending the programming calendar, the centrality of effective marketing and fund raising, and the importance of focusing on the present with a positive public message. In chapters organized chronologically, Kaiser brings his ten rules vividly to life in discussions of the four arts organizations he is credited with saving. The book concludes with a chapter on his experiences at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, an arts organization that needed an artistic turnaround when he became the president in 2001 and that today exemplifies in practice many of the ten rules he discusses throughout his book.
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As Far As the Eye Can See
Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker
David Brill
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

 
When David Brill’s now-classic account of his 1979 thru-hike of the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail was released in 1990, it immediately struck a chord with veterans and aspirants of one of the world’s longest continuously marked footpaths. Over the years, the book has continued to sell through multiple printings.
 
As Far as the Eye Can See: Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker, now in its fifth (thirtieth-anniversary) edition and eighth printing, was recently released by the University of Tennessee Press. The new edition features a new preface on Brill’s 2019 40th-anniversary reunion in Maine with his AT buddies, as well as prefaces to earlier editions and three bonus chapters that bring Brill’s continuing connection with the trail to near the present.  
 
In the years following release of As Far as the Eye Can See, first-person accounts of hiking the trail burgeoned into a literary genre, but Brill’s book was among the first to capture the physical and spiritual aspects of the long journey across fourteen states. 
 
Brill and his fellow hikers, who are all portrayed in the book, were relatively early devotees on a pilgrimage that, within a few decades, would become a popular rite of passage. Indeed, by the end of 1979, a mere 837 people had reported finishing the entire AT route over the trail’s then 42-year history. The total now easily exceeds 20,000.
 
Brill credits his trail experiences with inspiring his career as a magazine journalist and book author and providing the theme for much of his subsequent writing on nature and adventure travel. The trail also did much to shape his enduring values and beliefs.
 
“Though it took me a while to realize it, the trail had shaped me, had given me a philosophy, had toughened me in some ways, had softened me in others, and taught me lessons I will never forget: lessons on survival, kindness, strength, friendship, courage, perseverance, and the ways of nature,” Brill writes in the book’s final chapter, “Coming Home.” “Those lessons have affected everything I’ve done since.”
 
Readers find that Brill’s experiences and observations on the healing power of nature from forty years ago are equally relevant in today’s world.
 
The book’s first edition received widespread critical acclaim. The San Francisco Book Reader wrote: “Evocatively written gems of observation full of native wisdom brimming over with thoughts and exploits…. You read and read again, this book is that rich.” Many other reviewers have commended the book on its honest portrayal of the trail experience and the literary quality of its prose. In its review, The Roanoke Times effused “Thoreau lives!”

 

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A-Train
Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman
Charles W. Dryden
University of Alabama Press, 1997

A moving personal account by one of the first Tuskegee airmen which illustrates the period of racial integration in American military and civilian life

A-Train is the story of one of the black Americans who, during World War II, graduated from Tuskegee (AL) Flying School and served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps’ 99th Pursuit Squadron. Charles W. Dryden presents a fast-paced, balanced, and personal account of what it was like to prepare for a career traditionally closed to African Americans, how he coped with the frustrations and dangers of combat, and how he, along with many fellow black pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and crewmen, emerged with a magnificent war record.

Under the command of Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the Tuskegee airmen fought over North Africa, Sicily, and Europe, escorting American bomber crews who respected their "no-losses" record. Some were shot down, many of them were killed or captured by the enemy, and several won medals of valor and honor. But the airmen still faced great barriers of racial prejudice in the armed forces and at home. As a member of that elite group of young pilots who fought for their country overseas while being denied civil liberties at home, Dryden presents an eloquent story that will touch each and every reader.




 
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The Attic
A Memoir
Harnack, Curtis
University of Iowa Press, 2011

In The Attic, his sequel to the classic We Have All Gone Away, Curtis Harnack returns to his rural Iowa homeplace to sift through an attic full of the trash and treasures left behind by the thirteen children in two generations who grew up in the big farmhouse.

      The adult Harnack had been making pilgrimages to his past from various parts of the country for thirty-plus years; now the death of an uncle and the disposal of an estate bring him home once more. The resonant diaries, church bulletins, photos, newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia in the attic allow him to rediscover both personal and universal truths as he explores the enduring legacies of home, family, and community.
      Finally, discovering a cache of letters written home while he was in the Navy in the mid 1940s, he confronts a stranger—his younger self. Harnack’s “dream-pod journey . . . from who I am now to how it once was for me” tells the life story of a close-knit family and extends this story to our own journeys through our own memory-filled attics.
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front cover of Australian Adventure
Australian Adventure
Letters from an Ambassador's Wife
By Anne Clark
University of Texas Press, 1969

From August 1965 to February 1968, during his period of service in Australia, Ambassador Edward Clark traveled in that country as no other American and probably few Australians ever have. His wife, Anne Clark, traveled with him, then wrote her observations and impressions to friends and family in the United States.

Her letters, published for the first time in this volume, reveal the isolations and involvements as well as the opportunities and the pleasures of embassy life. The etiquette of official functions at times posed problems, as in the Clarks' first black-tie dinner with the Acting Governor General, where Mrs. Clark was supposed to curtsy. "Some Ambassadors feel strongly that the representative of the President of the United States should never bend his knee (or rather his wife's) to any man. Mrs. Battle, wife of our predecessor ... put the question directly to President Kennedy. His answer to her was, 'Curtsy you must, but keep a stiff upper knee.'"

Soon, Anne Clark realized that the routine of appearances and entertainments was constant: "I do not know when I will make peace with the schedule. I am a slave to the little black book that is my calendar."

In addition to the intricacies of embassy life, the Clarks encountered much that was unfamiliar—new people, almost a new language, new flowers, new animals—even a sky with its new moon upside down. But their warm hospitality and genuine interest in things Australian attracted friends throughout the continent. Figures from the government, the church, the diplomatic circle, and everyday life, plus well-known guests from home, all become known to the reader in this perceptive account of official life from the inside.

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front cover of Autobiography of My Hungers
Autobiography of My Hungers
Rigoberto González
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Rigoberto González, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger.
            The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body—all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes.
            Each vignette is a defining moment of self-awareness, every moment an important step in a lifelong journey toward clarity, knowledge, and the nourishment that comes in various forms—even "the smallest biggest joys" help piece together a complex portrait of a gay man of color who at last defines himself by what he learns, not by what he yearns for.

Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Publishing Triangle

“Told in a series of revealing vignettes and poems, González’s Autobiography of my Hungers turns moments of need and want into revelations of truth and self-awareness, creating the portrait of an artist that is complex if not entirely complete.”—El Paso Times

“Through his provocative vignettes, González communicates a lifetime of struggle for affirmation and self-acceptance.”—Make/Shift 
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front cover of Autumn Equinox
Autumn Equinox
Jabbour Douaihy
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
Jabbour Douaihy’s Autumn Equinox is a diary of a young man recently resettled in his Lebanese village after going to college in the United States. It continues from the end of May through the September equinox of 1986, narrating his efforts to remake himself through adjustments to his reading, writing, and eating habits, his dress, his posture, his family relationships, his love life. . . .
 
The diary begins with a view of an Israeli bombing in South Lebanon and ends with a description of refugee families fleeing to the mountain villages. Otherwise, except for allusions to what is going on in the capital, the Lebanese Civil War is far from the story, although its violence has never been far from this village. America, personified by a Lara who does not answer his letters, is a faraway land of nostalgia. The village is here, at the center of the young man’s narration, peopled by comic characters who seem to insist on their own unchanging selfhoods and to resist his attempts to be different.
 
The Civil War and the Occupation, the author seems to be saying, are not the only sources of turmoil. Violence and revenge have been part of the people’s consciousness, and people might indeed need to redefine themselves while at the same time adjusting to the environment.
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