Published by Top Shelf, 2019, 208 pages. After the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941, the US government declared that all people of Japanese origin were “enemy aliens”, including those who were US citizens. They were rounded up and incarcerated. The assumption was that their race made them “nonassimilable” and …
Category: Autobiography / Biography / Memoir / Autofiction
A Sky the Color of Chaos: M.J. Fièvre
Published by Beating Windward Press, 2014, 178 pages. “My life was a deconstructed text, and I was surrounded by words—their sustaining luxuries and dangers. Words have power; you never know what may come of them. Take this: I want to leave—the rest is a jigsaw of memory taking up space in my head. I want …
Les années: Annie Ernaux
Published by folio, 2008, 254 pages. Published in English as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017. Translated from French by Alison L. Strayer. “All the images will disappear. ...“—all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to …
Nature Cure: Richard Mabey
Published by Vintage, 2005, 228 pages. “My past, or lack of it, had caught up with me. I’d been bogged down in the same place for too long, trapped by habits and memories. I was clotted with rootedness. And in the end I’d fallen ill and run out of words. My Irish grandfather, a day-worker …
The Black Count—Napoleon’s Rival and the Real Count of Monte Cristo–General Alexandre Dumas: Tom Reiss
Published by Vintage / Crown, 2012, 414 pages. Published in the US as The Black Count—Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo We know Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as a work of fiction. But he based a lot of it on the life of his father, also Alexandre …
Black Lion—Alive in the Wilderness: Sicelo Mbatha with Bridget Pitt
Published by Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2021, 256 pages. “I am not a lion whisperer. I am an ordinary wilderness guide who has simply grasped some small part of the great wisdom of wild animals and the wilderness, and learnt a little about how to share this with other humans. As a guide, I share wild …
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Me: Elton John
Published by Pan Books, 2019, 398 pages. “I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do, or even what I could do. I knew I could sing and play piano, but I clearly wasn’t pop star material. For one thing, I didn’t look like a pop star, as evidenced by my inability to carry …
The Liar Tells the Truth: Irshad Panjatan
2021, 287 pages. “In pure mime, the artist has to depend entirely on his body on an empty stage to create an atmosphere around him, plus the characters he depicts, to tell the story without any dialogues, music, or songs, and without any external aids like props and decorations. He has to fill the stage …
The Middle—A Story of Love, Life & Laughter: Nayana Goradia
Published by Vitasta Publishing, 2021, 148 pages. Nayana Goradia started her career writing short, catchy articles for newspapers. Her book is a collection of these articles—which appeared in a column called The Middle—in Indian newspapers such as The Statesman, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times. Her book also contains excerpts from Fly Me …
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The Favored Daughter—One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future: Fawzia Koofi with Nadene Ghouri
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 272 pages. “On the day I wrote the letter [that became chapter 1 in this book] I was warned not to travel because there had been a credible threat that the Taliban planned to kill me by planting an improvised explosive device (a roadside bomb) underneath my car. The Taliban …
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