Best of
Biography-Memoir

1961

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident


Elie Wiesel - 1961
    The adolescent Elie and his family, among hundreds of thousands of Jews from all parts of Eastern Europe, are cruelly deported from their hometown to the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day.In the short novel Dawn (1961), Elisha - the sole survivor of his family, whose immolation he witnessed at Auschwitz - has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine. Apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang, he is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage. During the lonely hours before dawn, he meditates on the act of murder he is waiting to commit.In The Accident, (1962), Wiesel's second novel, Elisha, now a journalist living in New York, is the victim of a nearly fatal automobile accident. This fiction questions the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old? As the author writes in his introduction, "In Night it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two [narratives], it is the 'I' who listens and questions." Wiesel's trilogy offers meditations on mankind's attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

Wings on My Sleeve: The World's Greatest Test Pilot tells his story


Eric M. Brown - 1961
    They released him, not realising he was a pilot in the RAF volunteer reserve: and the rest is history. Eric Brown joined the Fleet Air Arm and went on to be the greatest test pilot in history, flying more different aircraft types than anyone else. During his lifetime he made a record-breaking 2,407 aircraft carrier landings and survived eleven plane crashes. One of Britain's few German-speaking airmen, he went to Germany in 1945 to test the Nazi jets, interviewing (among others) Hermann Goering and Hanna Reitsch. He flew the suicidally dangerous Me 163 rocket plane, and tested the first British jets. WINGS ON MY SLEEVE is 'Winkle' Brown's incredible story.

A Girl and Five Brave Horses


Sonora Carver - 1961
    Dr. W.F. Carver, who ran the show, had previously started "The Wild West" shows with his friends, Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. (The movie Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken is loosely based on her life.)

Harpo Speaks!


Harpo Marx - 1961
    Despite only a year and a half of schooling, Harpo, or perhaps his collaborator, is the best writer of the Marx Brother. Highly recommended." -Library Journal "A funny, affectionate and unpretentious autobiography done with a sharply professional assist from Rowland Barber." -New York Times Book Review

Black Like Me


John Howard Griffin - 1961
    Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

The Curve of Time: The Classic Memoir of a Woman and Her Children Who Explored the Coastal Waters of the Pacific Northwest


M. Wylie Blanchet - 1961
    This is the fascinating true adventure story of a woman who packed her five children onto a twenty-five-foot boat and explored the coastal waters of British Columbia summer after summer in the 1920's and 1930's.

Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America


Theodora Kroeber - 1961
    For more than forty years, Theodora Kroeber's biography has captivated readers. Now recent advances in technology make it possible to return to print the 1976 deluxe edition, filled with plates and historic photographs that enhance Ishi's story and bring it to life.Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and terrified of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughter house near Oroville, California. Finally identified as a Yahi by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology.Karl Kroeber adds an informative tribute to the text, describing how the book came to be written and how Theodora Kroeber's approach to the project was a product of both her era and her special personal insight and empathy.

The Rancher Takes a Wife


Richmond P. Hobson Jr. - 1961
    It's a vast and still barely explored wilderness, whose principal citizens are timber wolves, moose, giant grizzly bears, and the odd human being. Into this forbidding land, Rich Hobson, Pioneer cattle rancher, brings Gloria, his city-raised bride. Her adjustment to life in the wilderness is sure to be difficult, as is her relationship with Rich and his backwoods cronies. Will Gloria find that she belongs in this strange, harsh land? Told with wit and wisdom, Hobson recounts a wild true adventure story in the last book of his collection of survival tales. These dramatic tales are described with the humor and vivid detail that have made Hobson's books perennial favorites.

Mission to the Headhunters: How God's Forgiveness Transformed Tribal Enemies


Frank Drown - 1961
    The first missionaries in the Ecuadorian Rainforest Frank & Marie were committed to bringing about life changes in these tribes by seeking to communicate forgiveness of sin and new life which could be found in Christ. Frank and Marie Drown prepared the way for Jim Elliott, Nate Saint and their colleagues. Frank was the person who discovered their bodies.

My Hundred Children


Lena Kuchler-Silberman - 1961
    The courageous story of a woman who led a group of Jewish children from Poland to Israel at the time of the Second World War.

A Memoir of Mary Ann


Flannery O'Connor - 1961
    Recounts the surprisingly rich years a lively, wise child spent as a cancer patient in a home run by Dominican nuns.

Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil's Journal


Charles Stanley Nott - 1961
    Gurdjieff was a Russian occultist who used stylized dance to "free" people and help them to develop their full capabilities. Gurdjieff has often been attributed as the founder of the modern human-potential movement.

The Life and Times of James Connolly


Charles Desmond Greaves - 1961
    Connolly's work and ideas left their mark not only in Ireland but on American and British labour movements. As a young man he was one of the pioneers of the modern labour movement in Edinburgh, the city of his birth. The scene then shifted to Dublin, where Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party, whose programme declared: The national and economic freedom of the Irish people must be sought in...the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic. Then came a period of seven years in the USA where he worked with Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party. In 1910 Connolly returned to Ireland and played a leading part in the working-class struggles in Belfast, and in the Great Dublin lock-out-the highest point reached by the class struggle in Europe in the period leading up to the 1914 war. On the outbreak of war with Germany, Connolly declared: We have no foreign enemy except the Government of England...We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland.Thus he set out on the path which led to the Easter Rising of 1916. C. Desmond Greaves's The Life and Times of James Connolly, first published in 1961, is a major contribution to the history of Irelands fight for freedom and is widely recognised as the definitive biography of the greatest of all Irish Labour leaders.

Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his family and friends


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1961
    Original publication date: 1917 Original Publisher: ChattoOriginal online at archive.org

Memos From Purgatory


Harlan Ellison - 1961
    It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids with switchblades and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took a phony name, moved into Brooklyn's dangerous Red Hook section and managed to con his way into a "bopping club." What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour-long TV dramas...This autobiography is a book whose message you won't be able to ignore or forget. "Harlan Ellison is the dark prince of American letters, cutting through our corrupted midnight fog with a switchblade prose. He simply must be read." --Pete Hamill "Ellison writes with sensitivity as well as guts--a rare combination." --Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint

Make A Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell


Helen Elmira Waite - 1961