The 9/11 Report


Sid Jacobson - 2006
    Here is stunning evidence that Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, with more than sixty years of experience in the comic-book industry between them, were right: far, far too few Americans have read, grasped, and demanded action on the Commission’s investigation into the events of that tragic day and the lessons America must learn.Using every skill and storytelling method Jacobson and Colón have learned over the decades, they have produced the most accessible version of the 9/11 Report. Jacobson’s text frequently follows word for word the original report, faithfully captures its investigative thoroughness, and covers its entire scope, even including the Commission’s final report card. Colón’s stunning artwork powerfully conveys the facts, insights, and urgency of the original. Published on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, an event that has left no aspect of American foreign or domestic policy untouched, The 9/11 Report puts at every American’s fingertips the most defining event of the century.

Believe in Me: A Teen Mom's Story


Judith Dickerman-Nelson - 2012
    When her 17-year-old boyfriend, Kevin O'Brien, gives her a diamond ring the summer before her senior year, she feels as if her life is perfect. But her pregnancy changes everything. Kevin's parents don't want him to start a family at such a young age, and Mrs. O'Brien tells Judith to get an abortion. As a Catholic and an adopted child, Judith must look within her own heart and decide what to do. This beautifully written coming-of-age story will appeal to students of women's studies as well as teenagers and their parents and grandparents."Believe in Me is the honest and courageous story of 16-year-old Judith's transformation into a responsible young woman. Highly recommended reading for teens, parents, and educators."--Joyce Allan, R.N., author of Because I Love YouReviewDickerman-Nelson takes the reader along with her 16-year-old self on the roller coaster of joy, confusion, pain, rejection and hope she rode during her senior year of high school. Although the book is a story about teen pregnancy, it touches on many themes and situations to which a wide audience can relate, including adoption, adolescence, young love and the conflict between maturing teens and their parents, and within the teens themselves. --The Lowell Sun About the AuthorJudith Dickerman-Nelson became a mother at age 17. She later earned her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell and her MFA from Emerson College. For 15 years, she worked with young parents at the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, Mass. A poet and educator, she lives in Townshend, Vermont, with her husband, Bill.

Marzi


Marzena Sowa - 2008
    My father works at a factory, my mother at a dairy. Social problems are at their height. Empty stores are our daily bread.I’m scared of spiders and the world of adults doesn’t seem like a walk in the park.”Told from a young girl’s perspective, Marzena Sowa’s memoir of a childhood shaped by politics feels remarkably fresh and immediate. Structured as a series of vignettes that build on one another, MARZI is a compelling and powerful coming-of-age story that portrays the harsh realities of life behind the Iron Curtain while maintaining the everyday wonders and curiosity of childhood. With open and engaging art by Sylvain Savoia, MARZI is a moving and resonant story of an ordinary girl in turbulent, changing times.

The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler


John Hendrix - 2018
    Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who was shocked to watch the German church embrace Hitler's agenda of hatred. He spoke out against the Nazi party and led a breakaway church that rebelled against racist and nationalist beliefs of the Third Reich. Struggling with how his faith interacted with his ethics, Bonhoeffer eventually became convinced that Hitler and the Nazi Party needed to be stopped--and he was willing to sacrifice anything and everything to do so.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge


Josh Neufeld - 2009
    follows each of the six from the hours before Katrina struck to its horrific aftermath. Here is Denise, a sixth-generation New Orleanian who will experience the chaos of the Superdome; the Doctor, whose unscathed French Quarter home becomes a refuge for those not so lucky; Abbas and his friend Mansell, who face the storm from the roof of Abbas's family-run market; Kwame, a pastor's son whose young life will remain wildly unsettled well into the future; and Leo, a comic-book fan, and his girlfriend, Michelle, who will lose everything but each other. We watch as they make the wrenching decision between staying and evacuating. And we see them coping not only with the outcome of their own decisions but also with those made by politicians, police, and others like themselves—decisions that drastically affect their lives, but over which they have no control.Overwhelming demand has propelled A.D. from its widely-read early Internet installments to this complete hardcover edition. Scheduled for publication on the fourth anniversary of the hurricane, it shines an uncanny light on the devastating truths and human triumphs of New Orleans after the deluge.

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas


Jim Ottaviani - 2013
    These three ground-breaking researchers were all students of the great Louis Leakey, and each made profound contributions to primatology—and to our own understanding of ourselves.Tackling Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas in turn, and covering the highlights of their respective careers, Primates is an accessible, entertaining, and informative look at the field of primatology and at the lives of three of the most remarkable women scientists of the twentieth century. Thanks to the charming and inviting illustrations by Maris Wicks, this is a nonfiction graphic novel with broad appeal.

Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution


Julia Alekseyeva - 2017
    She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB) and later as a lieutenant for the Red Army. Her family, including 4-year-old Yulia, moved to the U.S. in the wake of Chernobyl and forged a new life. Soviet Daughter united two generations of strong, independent women against a sweeping backdrop of the history of the USSR. Like Sarah Glidden in How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less , or Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis , Alekseyeva deftly combines compelling stories of women finding their way in the world with an examination o the ties we all have with out families, ethnicities, and the still-fresh traumas of the 20th century.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes


Mary M. Talbot - 2008
    Atherton. Social expectations and gender politics, thwarted ambitions and personal tragedy are played out against two contrasting historical backgrounds, poignantly evoked by the atmospheric visual storytelling of award-winning graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot. Produced through an intense collaboration seldom seen between writers and artists, Dotter of Her Father''s Eyes is smart, funny, and sad - an essential addition to the evolving genre of graphic memoir.

The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Man, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito: a Graphic Memoir


Shing Yin Khor - 2019
    The first looked a lot like Hollywood, full of beautiful people and sunlight and freeways. The second looked more like The Grapes of Wrath―a nightmare landscape filled with impoverished people, broken-down cars, barren landscapes, and broken dreams. This book chronicles Shing's solo journey (small adventure-dog included) along the iconic Route 66, beginning in Santa Monica and ending up Chicago. What begins as a road trip ends up as something more like a pilgrimage in search of an American landscape that seems forever shifting and forever out of place.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden


Mannie Murphy - 2021
    This work of graphic nonfiction, told in the style of an illustrated diary, begins as an affectionate reminiscence of the author’s 1990s teenage infatuation with the late actor River Phoenix but morphs into a remarkable, sprawling account of the city of Portland and state of Oregon's dark history of white nationalism. Murphy details the relationship between white supremacist Tom Metzger (former KKK Grand Wizard and founder of the White Aryan Resistance) and the "Rose City" street kids like Ken Death that infiltrated Van Sant's films -- a relationship that culminates in an infamous episode of Geraldo. Murphy brilliantly weaves 1990s alternative culture, from Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs to Keanu Reeves and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with two centuries of the Pacific Northwest's shameful history as a hotbed for white nationalism: from the Whitman massacre in 1847 and the Ku Klux Klan's role in Portland's city planning in the early 1900s to the brutal treatment of Black people displaced in the 1948 Vanport flood and through the 2014 armed standoff with Cliven Bundy's cattle ranch. In Murphy's personal reflections and heart-racing descriptions of scenes like infamous campfire kiss in My Own Private Idaho, the artist's story becomes a moral anchor to a deeply amoral regional history and marks the incredible debut of a talented new voice to the graphic medium.

Kampung Boy


Lat - 1979
    With masterful economy worthy of Charles Schultz, Lat recounts the life of Mat, a Muslim boy growing up in rural Malaysia in the 1950s: his adventures and mischief-making, fishing trips, religious study, and work on his family's rubber plantation. Meanwhile, the traditional way of life in his village (or kampung) is steadily disappearing, with tin mines and factory jobs gradually replacing family farms and rubber small-holders. When Mat himself leaves for boarding school, he can only hope that his familiar kampung will still be there when he returns. Kampung Boy is hilarious and affectionate, with brilliant, super-expressive artwork that opens a window into a world that has now nearly vanished.

Thoreau at Walden


John Porcellino - 2008
    In this graphic masterpiece, John Porcellino uses only the words of Thoreau himself to tell the story of those two years off the beaten track. The pared-down text focuses on Thoreau's most profound ideas, and Porcellino's fresh, simple pictures bring the philosopher's sojourn at Walden to cinematic life. For readers who know Walden intimately, this graphic treatment will provide a vivid new interpretation of Thoreau's story. For those who have never read (or never completed!) the original, it presents a contemporary look at a few brave words to live by.

Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir


Stan Lee - 2015
    The most legendary name in the history of comic books, he has been the leading creative force behind Marvel Comics, and has brought to life—and into the mainstream—some of the world’s best-known heroes and most infamous villains throughout his career. His stories—filled with superheroes struggling with personal hang-ups and bad guys who possessed previously unseen psychological complexity—added wit and subtlety to a field previously locked into flat portrayals of good vs. evil. Lee put the human in superhuman and in doing so, created a new mythology for the twentieth century.In this beautifully illustrated graphic memoir—illustrated by celebrated artist Colleen Doran—Lee tells the story of his life with the same inimitable wit, energy, and offbeat spirit that he brought to the world of comics. Moving from his impoverished childhood in Manhattan to his early days writing comics, through his military training films during World War II and the rise of the Marvel empire in the 1960s to the current resurgence in movies, Amazing Fantastic Incredible documents the life of a man and the legacy of an industry and career.This funny, moving, and incredibly honest memoir is a must-have for collectors and fans of comic books and graphic novels of every age.

American Widow


Alissa Torres - 2008
    The next morning, he said goodbye to his 7½-months-pregnant wife, Alissa, and headed out the door.In an instant, Alissa's world was thrown into chaos. Forced to deal with unimaginable challenges, Alissa suddenly found herself cast into the role of 9/11 widow, tossed into a storm of bureaucracy, politics, patriotism, mourning, consolation, and, soon enough, motherhood.Beautifully and thoughtfully illustrated, American Widow is the affecting account of one woman's journey through shock, pain, birth, and rebirth in the aftermath of a great tragedy. It is also the story of a young couple's love affair: how a Colombian immigrant and a strong-minded New Yorker met, fell in love, and struggled to fulfill their dreams. Above all, American Widow is a tribute to the resilience of the human heart and the very personal story of how one woman endured a very public tragedy.

The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir


Laurie Sandell - 2009
    As a young woman, Laurie unconsciously mirrors her dad, trying on several outsized personalities (Tokyo stripper, lesbian seductress, Ambien addict). Later, she lucks into the perfect job--interviewing celebrities for a top women's magazine. Growing up with her extraordinary father has given Laurie a knack for relating to the stars. But while researching an article on her dad's life, she makes an astonishing discovery: he's not the man he says he is--not even close. Now, Laurie begins to puzzle together three decades of lies and the splintered person that resulted from them--herself.