Best of
Memoir

1990

Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor's Memoir


David Faber - 1990
    This is the riveting, true story of a young boy's survival in the face of Nazi atrocities. In the mid-1960s, the German government contacted David Faber to testify against Nazi war criminals. Until then, he did not know that his older brother, Romek, whom the Nazis had tortured to death many years earlier, had been involved in a Polish Underground plot to avert Nazi Germany's ability to create an atomic bomb. When David finally agreed to testify, he began to relive all the horrors of his experiences during the war: concentration camps, murders, tortures, starvation, and disease. When David Faber was 13 years old, he had witnessed the Nazi murders of his parents, brother Romek, and five of his six sisters. He survived nine concentration camps between the ages of 13-18, from 1939 to 1945, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald. When he was liberated in 1945 from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, he weighed a mere 72 pounds. Because of Romek fulfills David's promise to his dead mother that he would survive and tell the world about the horrors committed against him and his family. This moving narrative is also a useful tool for educators. To today's students, the Holocaust too often seems to be an abstract event in the dim past. Because of Romek pulls the reader into the story, thereby illuminating the past and putting a face on history.

Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black


Cookie Mueller - 1990
    The echoes of her passionate commitments will ring in your ears. It is a tragedy to have lost her. Fortunately, along with the memories, she left us this marvellous testament to her intrepid zest for living.

My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience


Rian Malan - 1990
    Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of uneasy exile. Armed with new insight and clarity, Malan explores apartheid's legacy of hatred and suffering, bearing witness to the extensive physical and emotional damage it has caused to generations of South Africans on both sides of the color line. Plumbing the darkest recesses of the white and black South African psyches, Malan ultimately finds his way toward the light of redemption and healing. My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing book -- beautiful, horrifying, profound, and impossible to put down.

Eichmann in My Hands: A First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner


Peter Z. Malkin - 1990
      1n 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street—and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there—was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin’s identity as Eichmann’s captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story—from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.   The result is a portrait of two men. One, a freedom fighter, intellectually curious and driven to do right. The other, the dutiful Good German who, through his chillingly intimate conversations with Malkin, reveals himself as the embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Singular, riveting, troubling, and gratifying, Eichmann in My Hands “remind[s] of what is at stake: not only justice but our own humanity” (New York Newsday).   Now Malkin’s story comes to life on the screen with Oscar Isaac playing the heroic Mossad agent and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley playing Eichmann in Operation Finale.

The Long Haul: An Autobiography


Myles Horton - 1990
    A major catalyst for social change in the United States for more than 70 years, this school has touched the lives of so many people, including Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Pete Seeger. Filled with disarmingly honest insight and gentle humor, The Long Haul is an inspiring hymn to the possibility of social change. It is the story of Myles Horton, in his own words: the wise and moving recollections of a man of uncommon determination and vision.

Assault on Lake Casitas


Brad Alan Lewis - 1990
    He would be too old for the 1988 games and the 1980 team had been lost to world politics.Devastated after losing a critical race by nine-tenths of a second, Lewis went to the Olympic selection camp in hopes of earning his way into a national boat. He was not chosen.But Lewis was not to be denied, and his story is more than quest for the gold medal. It is about challenging convention, overcoming and working outside the system."Lewis is a great athlete, highly individualistic and subversive of the established athletic bureaucracy. Even rarer, he tells a great story. This book does for the Olympian rowing establishment what LIAR'S POKER did for Salomon Brothers." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

The Sun in the Morning: My Early Years in India and England


M.M. Kaye - 1990
    Kaye's fiction will discover here the source of the characters, settings, and certain incidents of her novels. Most of all, they will bask in this warm account of a young woman's remarkable life--and the beginnings of a love affair with an India whose time has passed but which has not been forgotten. 24 pages of black-and-white photographs.

Holding On to the Air


Suzanne Farrell - 1990
    This memoir, first published in 1990 and reissued with a new preface by the author, recounts Farrell's transformation from a young girl in Ohio dreaming of greatness to the realization of that dream on stages all over the world. Central to this transformation was her relationship with George Balanchine, who invited her to join the New York City Ballet in the fall of 1961 and was in turn inspired by her unique combination of musical, physical, and dramatic gifts. He created masterpieces for her in which the limits of ballet technique were expanded to a degree not seen before. By the time she retired from the stage in 1989, Farrell had achieved a career that is without precedent in the history of ballet. One third of her repertory of more than 100 ballets were composed expressly for her by such notable choreographers as Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Maurice Bejart. Farrell recalls professional and personal attachments and their attendant controversies with a down-to-earth frankness and common sense that complements the glories and mysteries of her artistic achievement.  Suzanne Farrell has staged Balanchine’s ballets in New York, Boston, Seattle, and Miami and for the Vienna Opera Ballet, the Kirov, and the Bolshoi. She is the subject of an Academy Award nominated documentary, Suzanne Farrell--Elusive Muse.

Letters from Provence


Vincent van Gogh - 1990
    It reproduces extensive extracts from his correspondence and is illustrated with his paintings, drawings and facsimile letters. Van Gogh's letters are a testimony to his struggle to survive and work. Here, the combination of letters and illustrations, concentrating on the period when he painted his greatest works, aims to provide an insight into his daily life in Arles and St-Remy, his spiritual torment and the process of artistic creation itself. The author is an "Observer" journalist specializing in the arts, and has published four previous books, including "Young Vincent: The Story of Van Gogh's Years in England".

Ramakrishna As We Saw Him


Chetanananda - 1990
    Some of these people know Ramakrishna well - they lived with him twenty-four hours a day. Others stayed with him inly occasionally. Each chapter provides a vivid picture of Ramakrishna's life from a different, and intensely personal, perspective. Description: Swami Chetanananda has helped to uncover that hidden personal life by editing and translating the reminiscences of forty people who knew Ramakrishna.

Voices in the Mirror


Gordon Parks - 1990
    Refusing to succumb to despair, he instead transformed his anger at poverty and racism into a creative force and went on to break down one barrier after another. He was the first black photographer at Vogue and Life, and the first black screenwriter and director in Hollywood, at the helm of such projects as the award-winning Shaft. And his novel, The Learning Tree, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies.Spanning the major events of five decades, Voices in the Mirror takes readers from Minnesota and Washington, D.C., to the glamour of Paris and the ghettos of Rio and Harlem. His intimate portrayals of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini; of the Muslim and African American icons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali; of the young militants of the civil rights and black power movements; and of the tragic experiences of the less famous, like the Brazilian youngster Flavio, combine to form an unforgettable story.Gordon Parks’s life is a metaphor for the courageous vision and extraordinary resilience of the African American community, while also serving as a testament to the spirit and generosity that are its hallmarks.

You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions


Anthony Burgess - 1990
    Rarely, if ever, has a writer exposed his inner life so completely and with such vigour, humour and linguistic verve.

Beyond Survival


Gerald Coffee - 1990
    Here he narrates his own shocking story of what really happened in the prisons of North Vietnam.

Quench The Lamp


Alice Taylor - 1990
    Her tales of childhood in rural Ireland hark back to a timeless past, to a world now lost, but ever and fondly remembered. The colorful characters and joyous moments she offers have made her stories an Irish phenomenon, and have made Alice herself the most beloved author in all of the Emerald Isle.

From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences


Elie Wiesel - 1990
    Included are Wiesel's landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the trial of Klaus Barbie and his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers


Moritz Thomsen - 1990
    Offers a personal look at the people, poverty, beauty, and passion of South America by an expatriate American who left his farm in Ecuador at the age of sixty-three to embark on a journey through Brazil on the Amazon River.

Memoirs


Andrei D. Sakharov - 1990
    The late Soviet physicist, activist, and Nobel laureate describes his upbringing, scientific work, rejection of Soviet repression, peace and human rights concerns, marriage and family, and persecution by the KGB.

Here at Eagle Pond


Donald Hall - 1990
    In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the ancestral New Hampshire place formerly worked as a dairy farm by his grandparents; of the comforts and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. These essays are also Donald Hall's letters to friends, answers to such life-altering questions as: "What would our lives be like, living here at Eagle Pond, in solitude among relics and memories, in a countryside of birches and GMC pickups?" And they are ghost stories as well: vivid descriptions of Hall's intimate connection with the land and with his family past. Most importantly, HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's coming home to language.

When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions


Sue Monk Kidd - 1990
    That was the moment... I understood. Really understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping– they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.Blending her own experiences with an intimate grasp of contemplative spirituality, Sue Monk Kidd relates the passionate and moving tale of her spiritual crisis at midlife, when life seemed to have lost meaning and how her longing for hasty escape from the pain yielded to a discipline of "active waiting." Comparing her experience to the formative processes inside a chrysalis on a wintry tree branch, Kidd reflects on the fact that the soul is often symbolized as a butterfly. The simple cocoon, a living parable of waiting, becomes an icon of hope for the transformation that the author sought. Kidd charts her re–ascent from the depths and offers a new understanding of the passage away from the self, which is based upon others' expectations, to the true self of God's unfolding intention. Her wise, inspiring book helps those in doubt and crisis recognize the opportunity to "dismantle old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self."

How I Became Hettie Jones


Hettie Jones - 1990
    Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir


Charles Simic - 1990
    Included in this collection of essays is an autobiographical sketch of the poet's early years in Yugoslavia during World War II

Tales from the Night Rainbow


Koko Willis - 1990
    An oral history as told by Kaili'ohe Kame'ekua of Kamalo, Moloka'i, 1816-1931.

Red Rowans and Wild Honey


Betsy Whyte - 1990
    She recounts in vivid detail the heady years of her adolescence, her courtship and her mother's struggle to bring up four children in the only way a travelling woman knew: hawking wares, fruit picking, tatty howking—in fact any kind of work that would provide the next meal.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness


William Styron - 1990
    Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth


Anne Finger - 1990
    

A Life Worth Living: The Selected Letters


John C. Holt - 1990
    Holt findings and making his 'life worth living and work worth doing' and those that in some way look at the relation between struggling for an individual life worth living and a collective one, at what it means to see one's own life's work in terms of the larger world. Holt had an interest in schools, coming to understand what was wrong with schools, struggling to fix those wrongs, and finally realizing that some of the wrongs could not be fixed and that something entirely different was necessary.

The Elm at the Edge of the Earth


Robert D. Hale - 1990
    A shy and painfully sensitive only child, David slowly blossoms among the lonely, loving adults of the county home, where his Aunt Maude is head cook.

Shantyboat on the Bayous


Harlan Hubbard - 1990
    Not content simply to advocate a life of simplicity and self-sufficiency, Hubbard and his wife Anna in 1944 built with their own hands a houseboat on the banks of the Ohio near Cincinnati and in 1946 set out on a leisurely, five-year journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Shantyboat, Hubbard's recounting of their journey to New Orleans, and Payne Hollow:

M.D.: One Doctor's Adventures Among the Famous and Infamous from the Jungles of Panama to a Park Avenue Practice


B.H. Kean - 1990
    

The Story of Your Life: Writing A Spiritual Autobiography


Dan Wakefield - 1990
    "What a wonderful book is Dan Wakefield's The Story of Your Life. Surely it will help many people to write their own spiritual autobiographies, and so to become more aware of their own journeys."-Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time

Churchill: His Life as a Painter


Mary Soames - 1990
    Sure to appeal to history and art enthusiasts alike. 60 color illustrations.

Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors


Gerald Vizenor - 1990
    Discusses the life and career of the part-Indian author.

The Ponds of Kalambayi


Mike Tidwell - 1990
    A hilarious and wrenching memoir from a peace Corps volunteer in Zaire.

A Cape Cod Journal


Erma J. Fisk - 1990
    Shortly before her death, Jonnie completed this journal about her later years facing the aggravations of growing old, the challenge of sustaining her spirited commitment to family and friends, and the novelty of embarking on a writing career.

Making of a Paratrooper


Kurt Gabel - 1990
    These forces were often dropped behind enemy lines, and despite casualties they triumphed in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. One such paratrooper was Kurt Gabel, and this is his story.

Sympathy of Souls


Albert Goldbarth - 1990
    Goldbarth splices together Jewish history, the history of physics, art history, mythology, and layman's anthropology with a writing style that combines elements of the literary memoir, the short story, the research essay, and the prose poem. What results is a heady, expansive mix which fuses the ideas and figures of this age and past ages with one man's life. In these essays, images of the shtetl, Marie Curie's laboratory, 1950s toy stores, and Leonardo da Vinci's studio seamlessly merge, demonstrating that the lives and ideas of "souls in sympathy" resonate one off of the other.

"We Will Stand by You": Serving in the Pawnee, 1942-1945


Theodore C. Mason - 1990
    A Navy radio man, Ted Mason recalls his years of action in the Pacific with candor and humor, offering perceptive evaluations of shipmates and exhibiting cool skepticism toward his leaders. The USS Pawnee rescued many ships during her 25-month tour of the South and Western Pacific, and this story of the heroics performed by her crew makes intriguing reading.

From Russia to the West: The Musical Memoirs and Reminiscences of Nathan Milstein


Nathan Milstein - 1990
    16 pages of black-and-white photographs.

Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel


Lee Maracle - 1990
    A tough autobiography of an Indian woman's life from the mud flats of Second Narrows Bridge, Vancouver, to the Toronto of the sixties and seventies, Lee Maracle gives us an important sense of the tough terrain of struggle toward political consciousness which all oppressed peoples undertake. Bobbi Lee is a hopeful work for recovering the possibilities of envisioning a world where we are not beaten down every day."- Dionne Brand

My Russian Yesterdays


Catherine de Hueck Doherty - 1990
    The faith of Old Russia endured through the Revolution and the Communist era and still endures today. My Russian Yesterdays is a book of the ordinary Russian people and of the solid, simple, yet abiding faith which was the joy and inspiration of their life. Is this the sort of example which will lead us to Gods peace and order in the midst of our modern, complex, and fear-burdened world?

Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness


John M. Hull - 1990
    The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its thorough navigation of the world of blindness—a world in which stairs are safe and snow is frightening, where food and sex lose much of their allure and playing with one's child may be agonizingly difficult. As he describes the ways in which blindness shapes his experience of his wife and children, of strangers helpful and hostile, and, above all, of his God, Hull becomes a witness in the highest, true sense. Touching the Rock is a book that will instruct, move, and profoundly transform anyone who reads it.

Astronomer By Chance


Bernard Lovell - 1990
    

Maps to Anywhere


Bernard Cooper - 1990
    Writing on subjects ranging from his family to the origin of the barbershop pole, Bernard Cooper digs into the glimmering surface of the southern California landscape, observing the collision of the American Dream with the realities of everyday life. From the fragments, he discovers landmarks by which he attempts to make sense of contemporary America.

The Evening Gull


Derek Tangye - 1990
    This is the 17th book in his series about their experiences. It is both a celebration of the beauties of Cornwall and a tribute to his wife, who died in 1986. Since her death, the author has lived at Minack alone, welcoming visitors eager to see for themselves the haven described in The Minack Chronicles. It was Jeannie Tangye's wish to preserve Minack for future generations to enjoy, and in this book her husband describes his efforts to fulfill that wish, while struggling to cope with bereavement and loneliness.