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"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure...
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"Letters of a Woman Homesteader" is the fascinating true tale of life on the American frontier by Elinore Pruitt Stewart. First published in 1914, Stewart's work is a collection of 26 letters written by Stewart from 1909 to 1914 which follow her adventures in Wyoming. Born Elinore Pruitt in 1876 in Chickasaw Nation territory in modern day Oklahoma, her birth father died when she was very young and her mother and step-father both died when Stewart...
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"My Inventions" is a candid and illuminating autobiography of Nikola Tesla, one of the most important technological innovators of the modern industrial age. Famous for the radio, robotics, and wireless energy, Tesla quickly gained international notoriety for his pioneering inventions as much for his eccentric life. Perhaps no one in his day more thoroughly embodied the archetype of the "mad scientist". This firsthand account reveals the fascinating...
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National Book Award Finalist: A “beautifully written, deeply felt” memoir about growing up in the American West (Los Angeles Times).
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us, but also of the ties to our...
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us, but also of the ties to our...
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Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home-to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs and finds herself following hazmat regulations for cleaning up bodily fluids; maintaining composure...
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"'...One of the gutsiest memoirs I've ever read. And the writing--oh my god the writing'--Entertainment Weekly; A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller's own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the...
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"The beloved star of Friends takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this candid, funny, and revelatory memoir that delivers a powerful message of hope and persistence In an extraordinary story that only he could tell, Matthew Perry takes readers onto the soundstage of the most successful sitcom of all time while opening up about his private struggles with addiction. Candid, self-aware, and told with his trademark...
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This is the miraculous and triumphant story of a young man who rediscovers not only his childhood life and home, but an identity long-since left behind. At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia....
10) The woman in me
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"The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope. In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice--her truth--was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey--and the strength at the core of one of the greatest...
11) Just kids
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In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton...
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton...
13) Heart earth
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Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters—and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as Doig would prove to be. In this moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig brings to life his childhood before his mother's death and the
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Monson shares the stories of twelve women who heard the call to settle the west and came from all points of the globe to begin their journey. As a slave, Clara watched helpless as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter six decades later. Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver that ever lived. A Native American, Gertrude fought to give her people a voice...
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The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. Trevor Noah's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents'...
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"With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, simple lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father's deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his...
17) Becoming
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In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily...
18) Plutarch's lives
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These forty-eight biographies by the ancient Greek scholar demonstrate the parallel lives of famous rulers such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.
A Greek priest of Delphi who acquired Roman citizenship later in life, Plutarch undertook his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to demonstrate the influence of character on the fates of famous men. He also wished to show that the legacy and achievements of his native Greece were no less impressive...
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This classic of the Jewish-American immigrant experience was an instant critical and popular success upon its 1912 publication. Author Mary Antin arrived in the United States from Russia in the 1890s at the age of 12. Her memoir vividly recaptures scenes from both Old and New World cultures, chronicling the poverty and oppression of Czarist Russia as well as the excitement and challenges of her assimilation into American life at the turn of the twentieth...
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"Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother's dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called "calorie restriction," eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, "Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn't tint hers?"...
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