Cultural Memoir

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?

Jada Pinkett Smith was living what many would view as a fairy-tale of Hollywood success. But appearances can be deceiving, and as she felt more and more separated from her sense of self, emotional turmoil took hold. Sparing no detail, Worthy chronicles her life.

In 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing became a literary sensation of the year in China. The story of a worker doing odd jobs in various anonymous mega-cities, Hu Anyan’s voice hit a nerve with a generation of young Chinese who feel at odds with an ever-growing pressure to perform and succeed.

From the legendary singer-songwriter of Bad Religion comes a historical memoir and cultural criticism of punk rock’s evolution. Greg Graffin is the lead vocalist and songwriter of Bad Religion, recently described as “America's most significant punk band.” Since its inception in Los...

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets and astronauts into space. Among these problem solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation.

Dolly Faulkner has many heart-stopping moments of terror and anxiety, living much of the time truly alone in the Alaskan wilderness. But she is not lonely, as the awesome space and beauty of the mountains fill her with appreciation of all things of nature. Dolly Faulkner came to Alaska as a young woman with the dream of living in the wilderness. Forty Years in the Wilderness is a true reality of carving out a homestead in the Kilbuck Mountains near a minor hotsprings that the regional Native corporation is now trying to claim.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)

It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations.

The life story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, lone survivor of an exterminated tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. Ishi stumbled into the 20th century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and terrified of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California.

A Flower Traveled in My Blood is the rarest of nonfiction that reads like a novel and puts your heart in your throat. It is the product of years of extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting. It marks the arrival of a blazing new talent in narrative journalism. In this audiobook, a regime tries to terrorize a country, but love prevails. The grandmothers’ stunning stories reveal new truths about memory, identity, and family.

Unbroken is an extraordinary work of memoir and investigative journalism focusing on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, written by an award-winning Gitxsan journalist who survived life on the streets against all odds.

For almost three decades, the Grateful Dead was America's most popular touring band. No Simple Highway is the first book to ask the simple question of why - and attempt to answer it. Drawing on new research, interviews, and a fresh supply of material from the Grateful Dead archives, author Peter Richardson vividly recounts the Dead's colorful history, adding new insight into everything from the Acid Tests to the band's formation of their own record label to their massive late career success, while probing the riddle of the Dead's vast and durable appeal.

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.

Here is one of the great autobiographies of the English language - exuberant, wonderfully contemporary in spirit, by a man twice as large as life who—he said so himself—had no trouble remembering everything that had ever happened to him and a lot of things besides.

As the youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents' emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her early years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with its sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother's happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure. 

Beginning in the 1950s, America entered a period of unprecedented social reform. This remarkable book demonstrates how the social programs of the 1960s and ’70s had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, ignorance, and discrimination. Using widely understood and accepted data, it conclusively demonstrates that the amalgam of reforms from 1965 to 1970 actually made matters worse.

Read by Liz Cheney with 50+ audio source material clips included, Oath and Honor is a gripping first-hand account from inside the halls of Congress as Donald Trump and his enablers betrayed the American people and the Constitution--leading to the violent attack on our Capitol on January 6th...

The definitive, full-access story of the life and songs of Canada's legendary troubadour. Gordon Lightfoot’s name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness. His music defined the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and ‘70s, topped charts and sold millions. He is unquestionably Canada’s greatest songwriter, and an international star who has performed on the world’s biggest stages.While Lightfoot’s songs are well known, the man behind them is elusive. He’s never allowed his life to be chronicled in a book - until now.

Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and an overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily escape: a story. The story. One implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."

In Dangerous Memory, renowned politician, author, and musician Charlie Angus undertakes a major rethink of the cultural and political shifts of the 1980s, an era that unleashed an unprecedented looting of the economy, the environment, and the common good that continues to haunt us today. Expertly weaving his story within the larger narrative of the times, Angus elucidates such key events as the Chernobyl disaster, the Digital Revolution, the AIDS epidemic, the fight against South African apartheid, the rise of neoliberalism, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.