Cultural Memoir

A veteran dog musher, Dave Olesen finished the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race eight times. After a 15-year career as a sled dog racer, Olesen set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. In four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the south, east, north and west, and home again to Hoarfrost River. His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled driver to loftier planes of introspection and contemplation.

¡Hola Papi! columnist John Paul Brammer’s Authentically Mexican is the hilarious and heartfelt story of his Mexican American family in diaspora, exploring his heritage and identity through six meaningful meals.

Ashes and Sky is a deeply personal and powerful memoir about love, loss, and survival. When eighteen-year-old girl loses her beloved father in a tragic accident, her world shatters overnight. Thrust into adulthood, she becomes the backbone of her grieving family in Tehran, navigating silence, societal expectations, and the secret pain of a hidden trauma.

Own it, snowflakes: you've lost everything you claim to hold dear. White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho, Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his...

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher.

On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. No one has captured Ali—and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated—with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick.

A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction. As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time...

Veteran Toronto Star editor Haroon Siddiqui, brown and Muslim, has spent a life on the media front lines, covering conflicts both global and local. Siddiqui’s journey took him from a divided India to a welcoming Canada—until the cataclysm of 9/11 hardened attitudes to Muslims around the world. His personal story weaves through growing Islamophobia in both India and North America. Siddiqui's experiences in the corridors of power in newsrooms and warzones are threaded with insights about historic changes in the last seventy years in India and Canada.

Before Chef Aaron Sanchez rose to fame on shows like MasterChef and Chopped, he was a restless Mexican-American son, raised by a fiercely determined and talented woman who was a successful chef and restaurateur in her own right. In this memoir, Sanchez delves into his formative years with remarkable candor, injecting his story with adrenaline and revealing how he fell in love with cooking and started a career in the fast-paced culinary world.

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

Don’t Take Your Love to Town is a story of courage in the face of poverty and tragedy. Ruby recounts losing her mother when she was six, growing up in a mission in northern New South Wales and leaving home when she was 15. She lived in tin huts and tents in the bush and picked up work on the land while raising nine children virtually single-handedly. Later she struggled to make ends meet in the Koori areas of Sydney.

Nearing the age of forty, with an entire life already lived as a woman, Miles Borrero comes face to face with his father’s impending death. Suddenly realizing he has been stalling his transition for fear of losing his family’s love, this moment catalyzes Miles’s determination to be known as his father’s son. In Beautiful Monster, Miles chronicles his unusual childhood, by turns riveting and hilarious, in ’80s and ’90s Colombia during the Pablo Escobar years, as well as his move to Salt Lake City to pursue acting and the winding trajectory that eventually lands him in New York City.

The only biography of Sam Cooke that his family has claimed as being both truthful and inclusive of not only his life, but his death. Today, Sam Cooke's music has enjoyed a cultural resurgence, yet the movies that try to tell his story fall short, mostly because they fail to also include the stories told by his family and closest friends.

How do you survive when everything you hold dear has been ripped away? This is the question Radha Manickam asks himself during the three years and nine months he spends under the merciless rule of the Khmer Rouge. When Khmer Rouge forces take the city of Phnom Penh in 1975, Radha is a new Christian, passionate about living out his faith. Over the next years of his life, 1.7 million of his fellow Cambodians--including most of his own family--will perish due to starvation, disease, and unthinkable violence.

NPR SPRING PICK An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature. A multifaceted genius...

Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong. What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparalleled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her.

Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just 14 years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. Born in the US, Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family.

Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal. In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”.

The Temptations' heritage, influence, and contributions to American culture and the global music landscape is undeniable. The group produced some of the greatest music of our era and it transcends generations. Through the years, the group's trademark razor-sharp choreography, finely tuned harmonies, and compelling vocals made them the exemplars of the Motown sound. Their story is one of courage, struggle, triumphs, setbacks, and ultimately, international superstardom.

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was a Black political activist, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which had a following of more than six million African descended people worldwide. Despite his massive popularity, this Jamaican born international leader was wrongfully sentenced to prison by the U.S. government on trumped-up mail-fraud charges.