Cultural Memoir

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

In this stunning blend of memoir, theory, and cultural criticism, a new mother examines the intersection between misogyny and motherhood, considering how caregivers can take back their bodies and pass on a language of consent to their children Motherhood and the culture of misogyny in America...

Besa recounts my life, beginning as a young boy in a large, happy three-generation family living together in southern Albania. The Bylykbashis were prosperous land owners and store owners, but when Enver Hoxha and his communist regime muscled their way into power, that idyllic life quickly fell apart for my family, my village, and my country at large. My story - sometimes horrible, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes heartrending - gives a factual account of the survival tactics I invented as a boy to stay alive under the communist regime and as a new soldier in the US Army.

An inspiring story of a modern American icon, here is the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama. With disciplined reporting and a storyteller’s eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago’s largely segregated South Side. He illuminates her tribulations at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s and the dilemmas she faced in Chicago.

No Longer Human (1948, Ningen Shikkaku / A Shameful Life / Confessions of a Faulty Man) was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan.

In the new state of Oklahoma, young Sarah Rector was among the Black citizens of the Creek Nation granted land allotments. Her property seemed worthless—a distant plot fifty miles from her family’s two-room shack. Then oil was discovered, and eleven-year-old Sarah’s land was producing 2,500 barrels of oil per day. The sudden wealth transformed her family’s circumstances, moving them from poverty to prosperity. But such wealth in Black hands drew unwanted attention.

Trying to navigate her Indian world at home and the British world outside her front door, Anita Rani was a girl who didn't ­fit in anywhere. She was always destined to stand out: from playing Mary in her otherwise all white nursery nativity to growing up in '80s Yorkshire with her Punjabi family, spending evenings in the factory her parents owned whilst trying to ­figure out how best to get rid of hair that seemed to be growing everywhere.

Growing up on the streets of East L.A., Luis Rodriguez narrowly escaped a serious jail term and then struggled to overcome his powerful addiction to heroin and alcohol. Eventually, Rodriguez embarked on a career as a successful journalist and a highly regarded poet. In It Calls You Back, Rodriguez describes with heartbreaking honesty his challenges as a husband and a father and his difficulty leaving his criminal past completely behind.

In the tradition of Neil Postman's masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death, Audience of One shows how American media have shaped American society and politics, by interweaving two crucial stories. The first story follows the evolution of television from the three-network era of the 20th century, which joined millions of Americans in a shared monoculture, into today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is a cultural critique of Donald Trump.

Shin Fujiyama grew up as an ordinary Japanese-American kid in the suburbs of Virginia. As a small-statured immigrant, he questioned his self-worth—until he found soccer. Cut after mere months on his college team, his sense of direction dissolved as quickly as it formed. When Shin saw a flyer for an international volunteer trip to Honduras, he took a chance. One week and his perspective was transformed. He returned to Honduras, determined to accomplish something no one believed he could do: end the cycle of generational poverty and gang violence in a riverbed shantytown.

From the winner of the National Book Award and the National Books Critics’ Circle Award—and one of the most original thinkers of our time—“Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays” (Vanity Fair). Travel narrative and global cultures...

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms. “This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at...

Dans ce livre profondément humain, Alain Samson rend hommage à une génération bénie tout en tendant la main à celles qui suivent. Il y parle de reconnaissance, de transmission, de douceur et de paix intérieure. Il nous invite à dire merci au passé sans s’y enfermer, et à accueillir l’avenir avec empathie et confiance. Nous, les chanceux n’est pas un livre sur le passé : c’est une lettre d’amour au monde, un message d’espoir pour l’humanité qui continue.

From backrooms of Max's and CBGB's to the Tropicana Hotel in Los Angeles and back, Punk Avenue is a tour de force of stories from someone at the heart of the era. With brilliant, often hilarious prose, Phil Marcade relays first-hand tales about spending a Provincetown summer with photographer Nan Goldin and actor-writer Cookie Mueller, having the Ramones play their very first gig at his party, working with Blondie's Debbie Harry on French lyrics for her songs, enjoying Thanksgiving with Johnny Thunders' mother, and starting the beloved NYC punk-blues band The Senders.

This is the truly remarkable life story of the notorious Ethel Livesey, a serial fraudster and confidence trickster who became a media sensation after she ran out on her society wedding in 1945 and later was arrested for obtaining goods by false pretences. With a prologue by Ethel Livesey's granddaughter, this extraordinary tale of Australia's greatest fraudster is told for the first time in rich and fascinating detail.

En el medio le decían "El Chupo" por su juventud, pero también por que le sacaba la piedra a los adultos, por irreverente y por arriesgado. Yo soñaba cuando grande ser como él. Cada cosa que se inventaba al aire, rayaba en la propia irresponsabilidad, y eso me seducía.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a Black man-and former slave-sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated.

This cultural biography tells the enthralling story of the high-achieving Black elites who thrived in the nation's capital during Reconstruction. Daniel Murray (1851-1925), an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, was a prominent member of this glorious class. Murray's life was reflective of those who were well-off at the time. This social circle included African American educators, ministers, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, US senators and representatives, and other government officials.

يروي ناظم الزهاوي في مذكراته «الفتى القادم من بغداد» مسيرة حياته منذ سنواته الأولى في العراق حتى مسيرته السياسية البريطانية. ينقسم الكتاب إلى ثلاثة أبواب كبرى، يعكس كل منها مرحلة مهمة من حياته: طفولته في بغداد، وانتقاله للعيش في المملكة المتحدة، وصعوده إلى الشهرة السياسية وخروجه النهائي من عالم السياسة. يروي الزهاوي كيف شهدت عائلته الاستبداد المتزايد في العراق، وقمع المعارضة، وتحول البلاد إلى دولة يسكنها الخوف. لذلك قررت عائلته الفرار إلى المملكة المتحدة حين كان الزهاوي في الحادية عشرة من عمره، خوفاً من الاضطهاد. يصف المؤلف تحديات التآلف مع اللغة والثقافة والنظام التعليمي البريطاني. وفي سنوات مراهقته، ترسخت اهتماماته بدنيا الأعمال. وقد وفَّر له نجاحه في مجال الأعمال الثقة والمنصة المناسبة لدخول عالم السياسة. وكانت البداية انتخابه نائباً عن حزب المحافظين، ثم تسلمه بضع حقائب وزارية في ضمنها وزارة التعليم ووزارة الخزانة.

The author of Population: 485 returns, delivering a truckload of humor, heart, and...gardening tips? Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, complete with stock cars, sexy vegetables, and a laugh track. "All I wanted to do was fix my old pickup truck," says Michael Perry. "That, and plant my garden. Then I met this woman...." Truck: A Love Story recounts a year in which Perry struggles to grow his own food, live peaceably with his neighbors, and sort out his love life.