Cultural Memoir

For years, Amy Thunig thought she knew all the details about the day she was born, often demanding that the story of her birth be retold. Years later, heavily pregnant with her own first child, she learns what really happened that day. It’s a tale that exemplifies many of the events of her early life, where circumstances sometimes dictated that things be slightly different from how they might seem–including what is meant by her dad being away for ‘work’ and why her legal last name differs from her family’s.

In late 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, he realized he could no longer walk. He could do nothing without the help of others and required constant care in a hospital. So began a yearlong odyssey through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home to his house in London.

She was a successful ad sales rep in Manhattan. He was a homeless 11-year-old panhandler on the street. He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But then something stopped her in her tracks, and she went back. And she continued to go back, again and again. They met up nearly every week for years and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.

His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.

As VIBE’s founding fashion editor and a CNN correspondent, Michaela Angela Davis has been at the forefront of cultural shifts, working alongside figures like Diana Ross, Prince, and Beyoncé. Her memoir is a celebration of Black media’s vibrant history and a critical examination of its challenges and erasure in mainstream narratives. In Tenderheaded, Davis journeys back through her career as both a celebration and an interrogation of Black media, exploring the difficult truth of how historically Black media titles and brands have had such mighty, culture-shifting starts, then disappeared.

Rebecca Makonnen a toujours su que sa situation familiale était hors du commun. En fouillant ses origines, elle met pourtant au jour une histoire encore plus improbable. De secrets dévoilés en révélations inattendues, elle livre un récit ­déconstruit et troublant. Comme si on la suivait dans le passé, dans son sang, en temps réel. Un témoignage haletant et bouleversant, porté par une plume sensible, qui se lit comme un roman.

Marion and Huguette Müller’s family was torn apart when the Nazis invaded France in 1940. After their mother was deported to Auschwitz, the sisters fled to the small Alpine ski resort village of Val d'Isère, where they were rescued by a brave young doctor. Through intrepid reporting and meticulous research, Whitehouse traces the story of the Müller sisters, solving decades-old mysteries in her attempt to deliver both closure and justice. With skill and urgency, Whitehouse raises moral questions at the heart of the tragedy of the Shoah.

As a Nisga'a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga'a language, Nisga'a community, and Nisga'a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school—both of his grandparents attended the same residential school—his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least.

Born in an era of rising violence, Black Elk killed his first man at Little Big Horn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, and instead chose the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that haunted and inspired him.

The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple best-selling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence - a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life.

Lea Ypi grew up in the last Stalinist country in Europe: Albania, a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. While family members disappeared to what she was told were "universities" from which few "graduated," she swore loyalty to the Party. In her eyes, people were equal, neighbors helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world.

Warm, feisty, and intelligent, the Delany sisters speak their mind in a book that is at once a vital historical record and a moving portrait of two remarkable women who continued to love, laugh, and embrace life after over a hundred years of living side by side. Their sharp memories show us the post-Reconstruction South and Booker T. Washington, Harlem’s Golden Age and Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson. Bessie breaks barriers to become a dentist; Sadie quietly integrates the New York City system as a high school teacher.

A thrilling, intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.

Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world's greatest distance runners and learn their secrets - and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.

He was a husband, a father, a preacher - and the preeminent leader of a movement that continues to transform America and the world.

His real name was Earl Simmons. As a child, he placed higher on tests than his fellow students and liked to spend mornings with his mother and sisters playing games and making pancakes. But for young Earl - a boy growing up on the streets of Yonkers, New York - that kind of childhood didn’t last long. Beatings, abuse, and neglect very soon had him moving on to other things, like robbing, stealing, drugs, and, eventually, jail. Along the way, however, he found a talent and a passion for rhyme.

Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.

After a decade as a political speechwriter - serving as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama, a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, and chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton on her 2008 presidential campaign - Sarah Hurwitz decided to apply her skills as a communicator to writing a book...about Judaism. And no one is more surprised than she is. Sarah Hurwitz is on a mission to close this gap by sharing the profound insights she discovered on everything from Jewish holidays, ethics, and prayer to Jewish conceptions of God, death, and social justice.

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. 

Writer John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) decided to perform an experiment in order to learn from the inside out how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another race. Through medication, he dyed his skin dark and left his family and home in Texas to find out.