Best of
Biography-Memoir

1976

All Things Wise and Wonderful


James Herriot - 1976
    Now here's a third delightful volume of memoirs rich with Herriot's own brand of humor, insight, and wisdom.In the midst of World War II, James is training for the Royal Air Force, while going home to Yorkshire whenever possible to see his very pregnant wife, Helen. Musing on past adventures through the dales, visiting with old friends, and introducing scores of new and amusing character--animal and human alike--Herriot enthralls with his uncanny ability to spin a most engaging and heartfelt yarn.Millions of readers have delighted in the wonderful storytelling and everyday miracles of James Herriot in the over thirty years since his delightful animal stories were first introduced to the world.

Let Justice Roll Down


John M. Perkins - 1976
    He was beaten and tortured by the sheriff and state police. But through it all he returned good for evil, love for hate, progress for prejudice and brought hope to black and white alike. The story of John Perkins is no ordinary story. Rather, it is a gripping portrayal of what happens when faith thrusts a person into the midst of a struggle against racism, oppression and injustice. It is about the costs of discipleship--the jailings, the floggings, the despair, the sacrifice. And it is about the transforming work of faith that allowed John to respond to such overwhelming indignities with miraculous compassion, vision and hope.

Joni: An Unforgettable Story


Joni Eareckson Tada - 1976
    She went from being an active young woman to facing every day in a wheelchair. In this unforgettable autobiography, Joni reveals each step of her struggle to accept her disability and discover the meaning of her life. The hard-earned truths she discovers and the special ways God reveals his love are testimonies to faith's triumph over hardship and suffering.The new 25th Anniversary edition of this award-winning story--which has more than 3,000,000 copies in print in over 40 languages--will introduce a new generation of readers to the incredible greatness of God's power and mercy at work in those who fully give their hearts and lives to him. Joni has written an afterword in which she describes the events that have occurred in her life since the book's publication in 1976, including her marriage to Ken Tada and the expansion of her worldwide ministry to families affected by disability.Joni is now available for the first time in an unabridged audio version read by the author.

Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing


Virginia Woolf - 1976
    In "Reminiscences," the first of five pieces, she focuses on the death of her mother, "the greatest disaster that could happen," and its effect on her father, the demanding Victorian patriarch. Three of the papers were composed to be read to the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, which exacted absolute candor of its members."A Sketch of the Past" is the longest and most significant of the pieces, giving an account of Virginia Woolf's early years in the family household at 22 Hyde Park Gate. A recently discovered manuscript belonging to this memoir has provided material that further illuminates her relationship to her father, Leslie Stephen, who played a crucial role in her development as an individual and as a writer.

Lovey: A Very Special Child


Mary MacCracken - 1976
    Everyone agreed on that - public school authorities, psychiatrists, even the mother who loved her but could not reach her. Everyone, except one remarkable teacher who understood what it was like to be eight years old and hurt and angry and confused. A teacher who saw Hannah as she could be rather than what she seemed to be.One child. One teacher. Just enough to add up to a very human miracle..."-from the back cover-

The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow


Opal Whiteley - 1976
    Opal's childhood diary, published in 1902, became an immediate bestseller, one of the most talked-about books of its time. Wistful, funny, and wise, it was described by an admirer as "the revelation of the ...life of a feminine Peter Pan of the Oregon wilderness—so innocent, so intimate, so haunting, that I should not know where in all literature to look for a counterpart." But the diary soon fell into disgrace. Condemning it as an adult-written hoax, skeptics stirred a scandal that drove the book into obscurity and shattered the frail spirit of its author.Discovering the diary by chance, bestselling author Benjamin Hoff set out to solve the longstanding mystery of its origin. His biography of Opal that accompanies the diary provides fascinating proof that the document is indeed authentic—the work of a magically gifted child, America's forgotten interpreter of nature.

Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder


Donald Zochert - 1976
    Wilder's unpublished memoirs to picture the people, places, and events that informed her ninety years and inspired her well-beloved Little House books

Christopher and His Kind


Christopher Isherwood - 1976
    His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Letters of E.B. White


E.B. White - 1976
    They evoke E.B. White's life in New York and in Maine at every stage of his life. They are full of memorable characters: White's family, the New Yorker staff and contributors, literary types and show business people, farmers from Maine and sophisticates from New York–Katherine S. White, Harold Ross, James Thurber, Alexander Woolcott, Groucho Marx, John Updike, and many, many more.Each decade has its own look and taste and feel. Places, too–from Belgrade (Maine) to Turtle Bay (NYC) to the S.S. Buford, Alaska–bound in 1923–are brought to life in White's descriptions. There is no other book of letters to compare with this; it is a book to treasure and savor at one's leisure.As White wrote in this book, "A man who publishes his letters becomes nudist–nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin....a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time."

Daughter of Destiny: Kathryn Kuhlman


Jamie Buckingham - 1976
    Jamie Buckingham's book is the definitive biography of Kathryn Kuhlman, perhaps the foremost woman evangelist of our century.

Generations: A Memoir


Lucille Clifton - 1976
    A father’s funeral. Memory. In Generations, Lucille Clifton’s formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, “born among the Dahomey people in 1822,” who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author’s grandmother. Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. “I look at my husband,” Clifton writes, “and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”

My Life and Ethiopia's Progress: The Autobiography of Emperor Haile Sellassie I Volume One: 1892-1937


Haile Selassie I - 1976
    Indeed, a remarkable and outstanding world leader. Got to read it. First time ever in paperback.

Elia Kazan: A Life


Elia Kazan - 1976
    He reveals his working relationships with his many collaborators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes his directing "style" as he sees it, in terms of position, movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces his own decision to inform for the House Un-American Activities Committee, illuminating much of what may be obscured in McCarthy literature.

Women of the Left Bank


Shari Benstock - 1976
    Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."

Harvest of Yesterdays


Gladys Taber - 1976
    Taber shares memories of her childhood in the Southwest and Mexico as well as her married life and early pursuit of a writing career.

The Wind is Howling: The Autobiography of a Japanese Novelist


Ayako Miura - 1976
    'What am I really doing here? What does it mean to live? What are we living for?...''I wonder if man can ever lose his loneliness? The wind is howling.' "Ayako Miura is a well-known Japanese novelist and poet. Her first novel received first prize in a Japanese national competition in 1964. In a later novel, Shiokari Pass (published in English in 1974), the Christianity she expressed aroused intense interest among her readers. The present book, partly an answer to that interest, is an account of her own life in Japan's turbulent postwar period. It explains her pathway to Christ and helps Western readers understand from the inside much of the Japanese attitude to life."But more than this, we see Christ himself, patiently leading, prompting, pursuing, revealing himself as Ayako-san argues and fights for life. In the deepest and starkest crises of life, of human love and relationships, in serious illness and physical weakness, in suffering and loss: in all of this God reveals himself to her." (Back cover)

The Start: 1904-30


William L. Shirer - 1976
    In Munich as Chamberlain abandoned the Czechs, in Vienna during the Anschluss, in Berlin when Germany blitzed Poland...Shirer was there.If ever a journalist was at the right place at the right time, it was Shirer. In this second volume of his memoirs, he provides an eyewitness and intensely personal interpretation of Hitler.Shirer knew Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Heydrich and Eichmann, and with them often observed Hitler at first hand...close enough, he noted, "to kill him."

Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist


Martha Kearns - 1976
    Concentrating on the more "democratic" media-especially etchings, lithographs, posters, and woodcuts, as well as sculpture and bronze reliefs-Kollwitz always created for the people, rather than for the upper class collector. Unlike the volputuous odalisques so often depicted by male artists, Kollowitz's women are joyous or grief stricken, thoughtful or shielding mothers; forlorn, pregnant, widows; tender friends; prostitutes; militant pacifists or revolutionaries in action. In her sensitive narrative, Martha Kearns establishes Kollwitz's contributions to western art, and especially to women's art. This original paperback is generously illustrated with many striking, seldom-see reproductions from private collections, assembled in one volume for the first time.

Dawns + Dusks: Taped Conversations with Diana Mackown


Louise Nevelson - 1976
    Taped conversations with artist Louise Nevelson who is known largely for her abstract expressionist boxes.

19 Steps Up The Mountain: The Story of the DeBolt Family


Joseph P. Blank - 1976
    Dorothy and Bob DeBolt, founders of the non-profit organization Aid to the Adoption of Special Kids, have parented, in addition to their own six children by previous marriages, thirteen others, most of whom were considered unadoptable; and this is the story of their household.

Meaning a Life: An Autobiography


Mary Oppen - 1976
    The wife of the American poet George Oppen tells of their experiences traveling throughout America and of their associations with the Communist Party.

Prisoner of Mao


Bao Ruo-Wang - 1976
    He was a prisoner from 1957–1964, including 15 months of interrogation that led to a 700 page confession."I would defy any man, Chinese or not, to hold out against them. Their aim is not so much to make you invent nonexistent crimes, but to make you accept your ordinary life, as you led it, as rotten and sinful and worthy of punishment." — Prisoner of Mao

Summoned by Bells


John Betjeman - 1976
    Summoned by Bells

Kym: the true story of a Siamese cat


Joyce Stranger - 1976
    A more accident-prone cat never lived. Even on holidays he managed to turn their caravan into an ambulance—or a peep-show. A born eccentric and voluble talker, a cat with the grace of a dancer and the instincts of a prizefighter.An endearing story of the misadventures of a unique pet, seen through Kym’s blue-eyed squint, and his owner’s humourous and observant eyes.

Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45


Vere Hodgson - 1976
    we had the first air raid of the war on London. My room is just opposite the police station, so I got the full benefit of the sirens. It made me leap out of bed...' The war continued for five more years, but Vere's comments on her work, friends, what was happening to London and the news ('We hold our breath over Crete', 'There is to be a new system of Warning') combine to make Few Eggs and No Oranges unusually readable. It is a long - 600 page - book but a deeply engrossing one. The TLS remarked: 'The diaries capture the sense of living through great events and not being overwhelmed by them... they display an extraordinary - though widespread - capacity for not giving way in the face of horrors and difficulties.' 'A classic book that still rings vibrant and helpful today... a heartwarming record of one articulate woman's coping with the war,' wrote the Tallahassee Democratic Review.

Voices of the Civil War


Richard Wheeler - 1976
    These searingly vivid eyewitness reports form a continuous narrative of the war on all fronts, in the east and west, on land and sea, in battle and behind the lines in both South and North, from the first guns fired at Fort Sumter to the final stillness at Appomattox. The voices belong to the leaders and the generals, common soldiers and ordinary civilians, all caught up in the tumult and tidal movement of vast events. The result is the Civil War as it really was and what it really meant to America and Americans.

Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965


Tennessee Williams - 1976
    In addition to scenes of backstage drama with Williams' many producers, directors, associates and lovers, we catch glimpses of Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, Leonard Bernstein, and Greta Garbo...

Madam Secretary, Frances Perkins


George W. Martin - 1976
    

A Priest Forever


Carter Heyward - 1976
    AcknowledgementsFor My Sister Priests (poem)QuotationsTextAppendixNotes

Antonin Artaud


Martin Esslin - 1976
    Today his pre-eminence as a founder of modern theatrical style is rivalled only by Brecht, with whom he has much in common.The man and his work, as Martin Esslin persuasively argues in this perceptive study, are inseparable and must be considered together. Genius or madman, everything about Artaud is fascinating - his extraordinary life, his passions, his wide-ranging interests, the brilliance and originality that he brought to his plays, his productions and his other writings. Artaud died in 1948 at the age of fifty-two, but accomplished a revolution in his short life that is still bearing fruit today.This compact, carefully researched study is an invaluable guide, combining readability with a sympathetic and authoritative study of its subject.

Seeds of Man: An Experience Lived and Dreamed


Woody Guthrie - 1976
    Nineteen-year-old Woody, accompanied by family members, drives from Pampa in the Panhandle to the rugged Big Bend country in a wheezing Model-T Ford truck. They are searching for a silver mine that Uncle Jeff had discovered and then lost. This autobiographical novel, originally published in 1976—nearly ten years after Woody Guthrie’s death—shows how his father’s search for riches was a dead-end street. The characters dare and do, drink Papa’s high-proof whiskey, eat out of cans, meet real characters, make love, and sing the lively songs composed by Woody along the way.

Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma


George Michael Sinclair Kennedy - 1976
    Lauded as nothing less than the "greatest musical figure" of his time by Canadian musician, Glenn Gould, in 1962, Strauss also has attracted his share of posthumous epithets: in summary, an artist who lived off his own fat during his later years. As recently as 1995, the English critic Rodney Milnes wrote, "the court of posterity is still reserving judgment." In Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma, biographer Michael Kennedy demonstrates that the many varying shades of criticism that have painted this figure in the past half century resemble the similar understandings and misunderstandings held by his contemporaries--perceptions that touched almost every aspect of Strauss' life and career. Introducing his detailed work more as a broad explication than a firm answer to the Straussian riddle, Kennedy's scope includes the exuberant, extroverted Strauss of young adulthood as well as the phlegmatic and aloof middle-aged man who resembled a "prosperous bank manager;" the arch-fiend of modernism and the composer who redefined the term; a man who professed to lack all spiritual curiosity and a musician who penned the touching ballet Der Kometentanz; an at times almost humble family man and an artist who claimed to be as interesting as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. Kennedy clearly elucidates his enigmatic subject by building his analysis around the few constants in Strauss' life: his profound admiration for German culture, his dependence on his own family for guidance, and his "Nietzschean total absorption in art." This frame offers everyone from Straussian scholars to general readers an insightful and easy-to-follow biographical narrative. Kennedy also deals at length with Strauss' problematic relationship with Nazi authorities, detailing his incompatible roles as the father-in-law of a Jewish woman and as one of the country's leading composers. Michael Kennedy is the chief music critic of the (London) Sunday Telegraph and the author of many books about music.