Biography Memoir category: 96853 books

As the grandson of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee and the nephew of Robert E. Lee, Fitzhugh Lee—nicknamed “Fitz”—was born into one of Virginia’s most distinguished families.   Upon graduation from West Point, Fitz Lee served in the U.S. Army until the outbreak of the Civil...

In A Safe Arrival, author Sonja Southwell tells the unforgettable story of her parentsRyer and Johanna van Kralingenattending particularly to the period of their service as Salvation Army officers in Holland and in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) from the 1930s through to the 1950s. It...

Herman Affield (1906-1970) was discharged from the army at the end of World War Two. He returned to his farm in northern Minnesota with a dream and a .50 caliber ammo box packed with war memories. On December 13, 1945, he received his first mail-order bride catalogue, The Exchange, a medium for the...

During Louise DeSalvo's childhood in 1950s New Jersey, the kitchen becomes the site for fierce generational battle. Louise's step-grandmother insists on recreating the domestic habits of her Southern Italian peasant upbringing, clashing with Louise's convenience-food-loving mother; Louise, meanwhile,...

Lance Armstrong and I first met at the 1992 U.S. Olympic Trials in Altoona, PA when I experienced my first glimpse of Lance's powerful glare as a journalist covering cycling. Our first meeting was hardly cordial. I ambushed Lance immediately after the race, before anyone else could get to him, and...

Something happened and nothing was ever the same. Little nine-year-old Eva kept a photo album/diary of her summer with Uncle Jim in 1927. Found in a box after her death in 2003, the album provoked ten years of research and interviews to piece together what happened and its later effects. Part biography,...

I used to sit on my mother's lap while she showed me the faded pictures in her old photo album. "That's me when I had beautiful long blond hair," she's say, or ""Look at that Homer! He was a bad one." Then, a far-away look would cross her face, and she would smile. "My...

When Maria Flook's fourteen-year-old sister Karen disappeared from their suburban home, the author was changed forever. My Sister Life maps the story of two castaways from American suburbia who, while apart from each other, live mysteriously parallel lives. With unrelenting realism and beguiling...

Nocturnal Musings is a compilation of ponderings, essays, and stories written by the author over the years. The range of subjects is vast, but are an accurate representation of the kinds of topics many of us may think and wonder about on a daily basis.Filled with bits of memoir, slices of biography,...

"The Comedy of Errors" is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays, believed to have been written between 1592 and 1594. It tells the story of two sets of identical twins that were accidentally separated at birth. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, arrive in Ephesus,...

The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters is a narrative and epistolary biography drawn from the unpublished lifelong correspondence exchanged among four brothers: Charles Chauncy, Edward Bliss, Ralph Waldo, and William Emerson. This is an extensive correspondence, for not counting Waldo's...

Muriel Newmarch was born in North London in 1903. She died in 2009, aged 106, in a care home in Sussex. Judith Bruce is her daughter, and Funny How Things Turn Out- part biography, part memoir - tells the story of both her mother and herself, which in turn traces the unprecedented changes to women's...

Betty White, the first woman ever to host a talk show. She's the pioneer of television, because she was not only the first woman to have control both in front of and behind the camera, but also Betty White was the first woman to produce a sitcom (situation comedy), especially in times where women...

There's hardly a woman in the modern world today who hasn't heard of the Chanel brand. Yet, somewhat 50 years after Coco Chanel's death, her products and brand become more luxurious and expensive for those who can actually afford them. Coco Chanel's "simple, but sophisticated" fashion approach...