Best of
Biography-Memoir

1963

The Cross and the Switchblade


David Wilkerson - 1963
    A young preacher from the Pennsylvania hills comes to New York City and influences troubled teenagers with his inspirational message.

And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II


Jacques Lusseyran - 1963
    He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.* Chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century by a jury of writers including Harold Kushner, Thomas Moore, Huston Smith, and Natalie Goldberg* This fourth edition includes a new insert of photographs“One of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever encountered...[Lusseyran’s] experience is thrilling, horrible, honest, spiritually profound, and utterly full of joy.”— Ethan Hawke, in the Village Voice

Child of the Silent Night: The Inspiring Story of Laura Bridgman, Both Deaf and Blind


Edith Fisher Hunter - 1963
    Also blind and deaf, she was the first to break the pattern of early nineteenth-century tradition, learning to read the alphabet and leading the way for others to be freed of their handicaps.

Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton


Byron Farwell - 1963
    He made significant contributions in the fields of literature and geography, and was also a poet, traveler, soldier, diplomat, inventor, explorer, archaeologist, student of religion and more. But above all, Burton was an adventurer in both the intellectual and spiritual world.Byron Farwell spent seven years investigating virtually every place ever visited by Burton. He overcame formidable difficulties in tracking down and reading all of Burton's extant works (his widow, Isabel, had burned most of his books when he died). Still, Burton proved a highly elusive subject for his biographer. But he has at last been caught. The result is a magnificent biography and a story that fascinates and compels.

Search to Belong: The Experience of a Foster Child


Christmas Carol Kauffman - 1963
    

A Donkey in the Meadow


Derek Tangye - 1963
    

The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook


Margaret Rudkin - 1963
    It is a working cookbook that gathers together more than 500 mouth-watering recipes, from soup to nuts. It is also an intimate autobiography of a charming and adventuresome woman whose enthsiasm has given her the vitality to rear 3 children, manage 3 homes and develop a mulitmillion dollar business. .....and finally, it is a valuable treasury of early recipes from Mrs. Rudkins fabulous collection of antique cookbooks which she has updated with her own modern present-day ready to use translations. It was the first cookbook ever to make the bestseller list of The New York Times.

A River Rules My Life


Mona Anderson - 1963
    First book for the author, Mona Anderson, with a string of others that followed.

My Sea Lady: An Epic Memoir of the Arctic Convoys


Graeme Ogden - 1963
    This was a voyage fraught with storms, icebergs, and sub zero temperatures in peacetime alone, but now the convoys faced worseOCothe fearsome gauntlet of German aircraft, submarines and surface raiders strung out along the coast of Norway, waiting to meet them. Ogden commanded the vessel in question, keeping diaries of his harrowing experiences of those years, which also cover his time on the equally perilous Atlantic convoys. These accounts were rediscovered and published as a memoir in the 1960s, illustrated with exquisite line drawings by Richard Elsden, who also sailed on these voyages. This is a very different kind of war memoir, vivid and bittersweet, in which the human elements take centerstage against the backdrop of great events."

Nureyev: An Autobiography With Pictures


Rudolf Nureyev - 1963