*In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor, by Larry L. King. Willie Morris was the legendary editor of Harper’s magazine, when Harper’s was the publication of choice. The Biblioteca Pública also has Willie Morris’s wonderful childhood biography, My Dog Skip.

Cervantes, by William Byron. It’s been 500 years since the great Spanish writer penned Don Quixote de la Mancha, so it’s about time to read a biography of him.

Hellman and Hammett, by Joan Helen. A biography of writers who are lovers. A delicious combination for a reader.

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, by Judith Thurman. This National Book Award Finalist explores how Colette—novelist and celebrity—redefined her time, conventions of writing, loving and aging. The author won the National Book Award in 1983 for her biography of Isak Dinesen, which the Biblioteca Pública also has.

Blind Eye, by James B Stewart. Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book. True crime story about “a doctor who got away with murder.”

The Short, Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez, by Jimmy Breslin. The “American Dreams” of Mexicans arriving illegally into the United States turn into nightmares. From poverty-ridden Mexican pueblos to New York City, many Mexicans try their luck in a country where they find plentiful political corruption.


Autobiographies and Memoirs, including Family Memoirs

*Fat Girl: A True Story, by Judith Moore. An unhappy fat girl grows into an unhappy fat woman. It is a harrowing, frank memoir.

*My Life in France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme. It’s all here: the celebrity chef’s own words about her years in France, where she found her calling for French cooking. Child died in 2004; this book was published in 2006. There are 76 photos that help tell the tale.

*Them: A Memoir of Parents, by Francine du Plessix Gray. This is a new book, a family memoir, that is getting rave reviews, such as this by Publisher’s Weekly: “Rich with history of early to mid-20th century design and publishing, this memoir stands as an instructive model of how to write a difficult story honestly. Gray’s parents were not nice people, but she loved them, and readers, by the end, understand why.” Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

*The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, in which she explores the death of her husband, the illness of her child—coming so closely together in time that she writes it “cut loose any fixed idea I even had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

Blue Blood, by Edward Conlon. The author of this memoir of the life of a New York City policeman was educated at Harvard before he put on the badge. Widely hailed as the best book ever about the men and women in blue.

*A Widow’s Walk: A Memoir of 9/11, by Marian Fontana, who lost her husband, Dave, a firefighter, in the World Trade Center on the couple’s eighth wedding anniversary. The book chronicles their love story, her activism and her use of humor as armor.

*Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss. From the jacket copy: “Roberto Clemente was a work of art in motion as a baseball player, a concept easily lost among a game often mired in statistics. But he was also important as a symbol: He was the Jackie Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, paving the way for Latino players who followed and now dominate the game.”

The Bill from My Father: A Memoir, by Bernard Cooper. As the father succumbs to dementia, he joins his son in the effort to create a coherent picture of the Cooper family history.

Possible Side Effects, by Augusten Burroughs. Hilarious, at the author’s expense. Burroughs’s point of view as a child or child-like adult is fun—and sometimes sad if you think too much about it.

This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff. In this classic childhood memoir the author describes a life on the move with his mother, the hostility of a stepfather, plus 1950s Americana.

*Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, by Anthony Swofford. Hailed for its realism from the front lines of a mechanized war.

Dispatches, by Michael Herr. This is a memoir by a Vietnam War reporter about the life of foot soldiers. It was also important source material for Martin Scorsese’s film Full Metal Jacket.

*Two Lives, by Vikram Seth. This is part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times—with a history of a violent century (India, the Third Reich, WWII, Auschwitz, Israel, Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain) told through the eyes of survivors and a complex, loving relationship.

*Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire. The author grows up in Havana in the ’50s and early ’60s and then is flown with other children to the United States to escape Castro and the Revolution.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, by Bill Bryson. This is the adventure of two middle-aged, out-of-shape friends wending their way over hill and dale.

Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, by Lynne Cox. This book has become a classic of sports memoir, and includes photos and maps.

*Death in Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Daughter, Her Mother, and the Beast Called Alzheimer’s, by Eleanor Cooney. The title says it all.

All but My Life: A Memoir, by Gwerda Weissman Klein. This is a new Holocaust survivor memoir. There won’t be too many more in this category, but the survivors’ children, and grandchildren, are writing, for example: Ester and Ruzyz: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace, by Masha Gessen.

All Over but the Shoutin’, by Rick Bragg. Alabama-born and raised southern boy Rick Bragg won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. This is his riveting account of his writing career and of some of the tragedies he witnessed.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer. A nail-biting description of the tragic 1996 Everest expedition. Krakauer’s Into the Wild is also an excellent read.

My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, by Abraham Verghese. A doctor born in India and trained in the United States gives his story of a rural Tennessee town and its people in the age of AIDS.

Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy. This is a painful subject—a child’s cancer and facial disfigurement, plus the adult’s pain that results from feeling ugly—handled with grace.

Three Came Home, by Agnes Newton Keith, 1946. They came home from WWII. Yes, it’s an old book, thus proving itself to be “unforgettable.”

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C.G. Jung. this autobiography is unusual in that it is an almost completely internalized recollection of thinking and feeling, rather than a chronology of physical events.

Vicki Gundrum serves on the English Language Materials Subcommittee of the Biblioteca Pública and can be reached at vgundrum@earthlink.net.