MEMOIRSGrade 10

2013-2014

LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE

WALDEN ON WHEELS BY KEN ILGUNAS

"In this frank and witty memoir, Ken

Ilgunas lays bare the existential terror of graduating from the

University of Buffalo with $32,000 of

student debt. Ilgunas set himself an

ambitious mission: get out of debt as

quickly as possible. Inspired by the

frugality and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Ilgunas undertook

a 3-year transcontinental journey,

working in Alaska as a tour guide, garbage picker, and night cook to

pay off his student loans before

hitchhiking home to New York.”296 pages

AMERICAN SHAOLIN BY MATTHEW POLLY

“Growing up a 98-pound weakling tormented by bullies in the

schoolyards of Kansas, Matthew Polly dreamed of one day journeying to the Shaolin

Temple in China to become the toughest fighter in the world,

like Caine in his favorite 1970s TV series Kung Fu….The story of

the 2 years Matthew spent in China living, studying, and performing with the Shaolin monks. The Chinese term for

tough training is chi ku (‘eating bitter’) and Matthew quickly

learned to appreciate the phrase.”

366 pages

“An account of the author's existence, observations and

reflections, as a seasonal park ranger in southeast

Utah.”337 pages

DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS BY EDWARD ABBEY

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL BY JAMES HERRIOT

Delve into the magical,

unforgettable world of

James Herriot, the

world's most beloved

veterinarian, and his

menagerie of

heartwarming, funny,

and tragic animal

patients.

499 pages

A BIG LITTLE LIFE: A MEMOIR OF A JOYFUL DOG NAMED TRIXIE BY DEAN KOONTZ

The author presents a

tribute to his late golden

retriever, Trixie, that

describes his family's

adoption of the retired

service animal, the

numerous lessons he

learned throughout their

relationship, and the

family's grief upon her

passing.

271 pagesInterlibrary Loan at

Voorheesville Public Library

THUNDER DOG: THE TRUE STORY OF A BLIND MAN, HIS GUIDE DOG, AND THE TRIUMPH OF TRUST AT GROUND ZERO BY MICHAEL HINGSON

Interlibrary Loan at the Voorheesville Public Library

232 pages

MY LIFE IN FRANCE BY JULIA CHILD

The legendary food expert describes her years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence and her

journey from a young woman who could not

cook or speak any French to the publication

of her cookbooks and becoming "The French

Chef.“

317 pages

HOW STARBUCKS SAVED MY LIFE: A SON OF PRIVILEGE LEARNS TO LIVE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE BY MICHAEL GATES GILL

In his 50’s, Michael Gates Gill had it all. By the time he turned 60, he had lost everything. Then as he sat in a

Manhattan Starbucks, the manager, half

joking, offered him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from a Brooks

Brothers suit to serving coffee in a green

uniform. 265 pages

JOURNALS BY KURT COBAIN

Kurt Cobain filled dozens ofnotebooks with lyrics,drawings, and writings

about his plans for Nirvanaand his thoughts about

fame, the state of music,and the people who bought

his music….his journalsreveal an artist who loved

records, who knew thehistory of rock, and wasdetermined to define his

place in that history.294 pages

CLAPTON: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“One of the very bestrock autobiographies

ever.”343 pages

Available at the Voorheesville Public Library

921 CLAPTON

PINK BOOTS AND A MACHETE: MY JORUNEY FROM NFL CHEERLEADER TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER BY MIREYA MAYOR

301 pages

GROWING UP AMISH: A MEMOIR BY IRA WAGLER

One fateful starless

night, 17-year-old Ira

Wagler got up at 2 AM,

left a scribbled note

under his pillow, packed

all of his earthly

belongings into in a

little black duffel bag,

and walked away from

his home in the Amish

settlement of

Bloomfield, Iowa.

271 pages

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE BY MITCH ALBOM

Recounts his weeklyvisits with a dyingteacher who years

beforehad set him straight.

“A wonderful book, astory of the heart told

bya writer with soul.”

192 pages  

LOST IN PLACE BY MARK SALZMAN

The oldest child in a middle class

household in Connecticut, the son

of a piano teacher and a social

worker, by age six the author was

an eccentric with enormous

aspirations – none of them ever

fulfilled – who stood out not only

from his more conventional parents

and brother and sister but from

everyone else in his suburban

neighborhood. A hilarious memoir.

269 pages

TRUE NOTEBOOKS: A WRITER’S YEAR AT JUVENILE HALL BY MARK SALZMAN

In 1997, the author paid areluctant visit to a writing

Class at L.A.’s CentralJuvenile Hall, a lockup forviolent teenage offenders,

many of them chargedwith murder. What he found so moved and

astonished him that he began to teach there

regularly.330 pages

THE HUNGRY OCEAN: A SWORDBOAT CAPTAIN’S JOURNEY BY LINDA GREENLAW

She's smart, hard-working and good at

what she does, though sometimes she

wishes she had a life. Greenlaw is

captain of the Hannah Boden, sister

ship to the Andrea Gail, the sword-

fishing boat whose disappearance was

described with agonizing verisimilitude

in Sebastian Junger's bestseller, The

Perfect Storm. Greenlaw tells a

comparatively quotidian tale, "the true

story of a real, and typical, sword-

fishing trip, from leaving the dock to

returning.“ 258 pages

A WALK IN THE WOODS: REDISCOVERING AMERICA ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL BY BILL BRYSON

 After living for many years in England, Bill Bryson moved

back to the United States and decided to reacquaint himself with his country by taking to this uninterrupted "hiker's

highway." Before long, Bryson and his infamous

walking companion, Stephen Katz, are stocking up on

insulated long johns, noodles and manuals for avoiding

bear attacks as they prepare to set off on a walk that is

both amusingly ill-conceived and surprisingly adventurous.

276 pages

PILGRIMAGE ON A STEEL RIDE: A MEMOIR ABOUT MEN AND MOTORCYCLES BY GARY PAULSEN

At 57, with heart

disease and a bad case

of wanderlust, Gary

Paulsen decided to get

himself the motorcycle

of his dreams and take

it to Alaska from his

home in New Mexico.

This is his story.

179 pages

A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY: GROWING UP SMALL IN MOORELAND, INDIANA BY HAVEN KIMMEL

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed

"Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this

small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In

this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers

back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent

postwar period-people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard

animals in their backyards. 

Available at the Voorheesville Public Library

921 KIMMEL

ROCKET BOYS BY HOMER HICKAM, JR.

14-year-old Homer Hickam

decided in 1957 to build his

own rockets. They were his

ticket out of Coalwood, West

Virginia, a mining town

that everyone knew was

dying…He grew up to be

a NASA engineer and his

memoir of the bumpy

ride.

368 pages

IDENTICAL STRANGERS: A MEMOIR OF TWINS SEPARATED & REUNITED BY ELYSE SCHEIN

Elyse had always known she was adopted, but it

wasn't until her mid-thirties that she searched for her biological mother. She was not prepared for the life-changing news: she had an identical

twin sister.270 pages

WILD: FROM LOST TO FOUND ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL BY CHERYL STRAYED

Facing down rattlesnakes & black bears, intense heat

& snowfalls, beauty & loneliness, Strayed pieces

her life back together again.

315 pages

Available at the Voorheesville Public Library

921 STRAYED

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X BY MALCOLM X

If there was any one man who

articulated the anger, the

struggle, and the beliefs of

African Americans in the 1960s,

that man was Malcolm X. His

“Autobiography” is the result of a

unique collaboration between

Alex Haley and Malcolm X,

whose voice and philosophy

resonate from every page, just as

His experience and his

intelligence continue to speak to

millions. 500 pages

Available at the Voorheesville Public Library

921 X

“By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw,

the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge

Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in

American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro,

that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What

Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic

autobiography, is how much he was a man.”

242 pages

SOUL ON ICEBY ELDRIDGE CLEAVER

“In 1959, Griffin headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin and immersed himself

in black society, then traveled to several states until he could no longer

stand the racism, segregation and degrading

living conditions.”200 pages

BLACK LIKE ME BY JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN

COLORED PEOPLE BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

America's most celebrated black scholar reminisces to his

daughters about his boyhood in the polluted, dying Allegheny Mountains' papermill town of

Piedmont, West Virginia.…a world shifting from segregation to

integration and from colored to Negro to black, Gates evokes a bygone time and place as he

moves from his birth in 1949 to 1969, when he goes off to Yale University after a year at West

Virginia's Potomac State College…. a story of boyhood,

family, segregation, the pre-Civil Rights era, and the era when Civil

Rights filtered down from television to local reality. 216

pages

Available at the Voorheesville Public Library

921 GATES

“A fiercely honest autobiography of growing up Chinese-American in

California chronicles Kingston's struggle to

balance the “ghosts'' of her Chinese tradition with her new American values.”

209 pages

THE WOMAN WARRIOR: MEMOIRS OF A GIRLHOOD AMONG GHOSTS BY MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

HOLE IN MY LIFE BY JACK GANTOS

Just 20 years old, Gantos was in a medium security prison for his

participation in a get rich-quick drug scam. Scared silly by the violence he saw around him

daily, Gantos's only lifeline was a battered copy of The Brothers

Karamazov, which he painstakingly turned into an

impromptu journal by scratching his own thoughts into the tiny

spaces between the lines.200 pages

THIS BOY’S LIFE BY TOBIAS WOLFF

“His experiences are at once

poignant and comical, and

Wolff does a masterful job of

re-creating the frustrations

and cruelties of adolescence.

His various schemes –

running away to Alaska,

forging checks, and stealing

cars - lead eventually to an

act of outrageous self-

invention that releases him

into a new world of possibility.”

288 pages

COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI BY ANNE MOODY

The story of a black girl growing

up in the desperate poverty ofrural Mississippi….To read her

book is to know what it is to have grown up

black in Mississippi in the forties and fifties -- and to have survived with pride and courage intact.

In this now classic autobiography,

She details the sights, smells, and

suffering of growing up in a racist

society and candidly reveals the

soul of a black girl who had the courage to challenge it.

384 pages 

MEN WE REAPED BY JESMYN WARD

Jesmyn Wardwrites of the deaths of 5 young men in her life. “The cause of

each death was different, but she sees them all as connected to being poor and black in the rural South: Her younger brother, Joshua, was

19 when he was killed by a drunken driver who smashed into his car…Over the next 4 years, her friend

Demond was murdered after agreeing to testify against the

alleged shooter in a drug-related case; another friend committed suicide; a third died of a heart

attack at 23, probably brought on by cocaine & other drugs; & her cousin was killed when his car

collided with a train on the tracks.

256 pages

THE BONE LADY: LIFE AS A FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST BY MARY MANHEIN

When a skeleton is all that's

left to tell the story of a

crime, Mary H. Manhein,

otherwise known as "the bone

lady," is called in. For almost

two decades, Manhein has

used her expertise in forensic

pathology to help law

enforcement agents--locally,

nationally, and

internationally--solve their

most perplexing mysteries.

137 pages

ON WIRITNG: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT BY STEPHEN KING

The author shares hisinsights into the craft of

writing and offers a humorous perspective on his own experience as a

writer.291 pages

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS BY DAVE EGGERS

A compelling voice for Generation X, Eggers

here recounts his early 20s, caring for his younger

brother after their parents'

unexpected deaths and his

endeavors in a variety of media.

437 pages