Book picks similar to
Letters from Cairo by Pauline Kaldas


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Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters


Jeannine Atkins - 2010
    Her daughter, Rose, thought those stories might make a good book, and the two created the beloved Little House series.Sara Breedlove, the daughter of former slaves, wanted everything to be different for her own daughter, A'Lelia. Together they built a million-dollar beauty empire for women of color. Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel prizes in science. Inspired by her mother, Irène too became a scientist and Nobel prize winner.Borrowed Names is the story of these extraordinary mothers and daughters. Borrowed Names is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living


Elyakim Kislev - 2019
    Happy Singlehood challenges readers to rethink how single people organize social and familial ties in new ways, and illuminates how educators, policymakers, and urban planners should cater to their needs.

Baby Girl


Lenora Adams - 2007
    I never thought I would run away. For some reason I thought you, of all people, would see and know. Sheree has always been a tough girl, able to take care of herself. Then she finds herself in a situation where she can't. She needs help. She needs answers. But she can't get either from the people she she turns to -- her parents, her friends, and especially, her boyfriend, who calls her Baby Girl and treats her like she's disposable. So who can Sheree turn to? Maybe the answer lies deep within herself, and it's truly time for her to grow up. In a voice that rings strong ant true, debut novelist Lenora Adams tells a story that is rich, complex, and achingly real.

101 Poems


Gordon S. McCulloch - 2021
    McCulloch covering a wide range of topics such as love, romance, relationships, religion, prayers, the meaning of life, death and our relationship with God. Some have been written in a manner that will provoke your innermost emotions, while others dig into the amusing side of life. All have been composed under the auspices of the Muse.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing


Eimear McBride - 2013
    Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny – and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs


Beth Ann Fennelly - 2017
    Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys.Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal the humor buried in our everyday interactions. Heating Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments, and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

Samba


Alma Guillermoprieto - 1990
    For one year, Alma Guillermoprieto lived in Manguiera, a village near Rio de Janeiro, to learn the ritual of samba--the sensuous song and dance marked by a rapturous beat--and to take part in Rio's renowned carnivale parade.

Dylan Thomas in America


John Malcolm Brinnin - 1955
    Angelic, devilish, immoral, charming, self-destructive, given to alcoholic binges, he was not what the sober world of American academe had expected. Students loved him—although after his first few encounters with them, the girls had to be protected. And he made quick friends with countless American writers, journalists, and barflies, instantly creating a pop-culture mythology of the doomed artist for the late 20th century. The man who was Thomas’ patron and guide was the young poet John Malcolm Brinnin, who watched horrified—though utterly beguiled by the poet’s charm and genius—at Thomas’ slow descent into hell. This is his harrowing account of the poet’s tragic last years.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker: Notes


Neil McEwan - 1998
    

حیدر بابایه سلام


شهریار - 1954
    Published in 1954 in Tabriz, it is about Shahriyar's childhood and his memories of his village Khoshgenab near Tabriz. Heydar Baba is the name of a mountain overlooking the village.In Heydar Babaya Salam Shahriar narrates a nostalgia from his childhood in a village in Iranian Azerbaijan.

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics


Miriam Engelberg - 2006
    Like anyone faced with a life-altering personal trauma, she sought out a coping mechanism. While fellow patients championed the benefits of support groups and hypnotherapy, Engelberg found her greatest comfort in drawing, her lifelong passion.Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person puts Engelberg's life in focus the best way she knows how - with cartoons. Her graphic approach to a very serious subject follows in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's award-winning Maus, but in her own offbeat, on-target, and darkly, devastatingly humorous style. From sex and wigs to nausea and causes - Was it overzealous cheese consumption or not enough multivitamins? - Engelberg leaves no aspect of cancer unexamined.

Year of the Monkey


Patti Smith - 2019
    Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs–including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” For Smith–inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing–the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world. Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.

The Portable Henry Rollins


Henry Rollins - 1997
    punk rocker into a universal soldier.  His enemies: slackers and hypocrites.  His mission: to steel your soul and rock your world."Rollins was frontman for the seminal punk band Black Flag, and since 1987 has led the Rollins Band, whose ninth album, Come In and Burn, was just released by DreamWorks.As a spoken-word artist, he regularly performs at colleges and theaters worldwide and has released eight spoken-word audiotapes.  His album Get in the Van won the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for 1995.  As an actor, he has appeared in The Chase, Johnny Mnemonic, Heat, and David Lynch's forthcoming film, Lost Highway.  From his days as front man for the band Black Flag and the current Rollins Band to his books and spoken-word audiotapes, Henry Rollins is the music, the attitude, and the voice that takes no prisoners.  In his twelve books, he has led us on a hallucinatory journey through the decades--and his mind--with poems, essays, short stories, diary entries, and rants that exist at "the frayed edges where reality ends and imagination begins" (Publishers Weekly).  For the first time, the best of his legendary, no-holds-barred writings are available.  This collection includes new photos and works from such seminal Rollins books as:High Adventure in the Great OutdoorsArt to Choke HeartsBang!Black Coffee BluesGet in the VanDo I Come Here Often?SolipsistPlus never before released stories and more...

Sniper Ace


Bruno Sutkus - 2009
    Each success noted had to be verified by a witness and signed by a superior officer.The journal of Sutkus is one of only a few such books to have survived the war. It records more than 200 kills, placing him as one of the wars most successful snipers. A large part of his journal is reproduced for the first time here.As a Hitler Youth member his skill as a marksman was quickly noted and, in July 1943, aged 19, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. A month later he was sent on a five month snipers course in Wilna, after which he was posted to the Eastern Front. He was so successful that his superiors sent him to crucial positions. Despite his age, he was regarded as one of Germanys best snipers and in November 1944 he was awarded the Scharfshtzenabzeichen 3 Stufe the highest award for a sniper.After being wounded in January 1945, Sutkus was given time to recuperate away from the Eastern Front. During this time he met a Red Cross nurse, to whom he gave all his journal.When the war finished, Sutkus was forced to join the Red Army. He deserted to join the Lithuanian resistance fighters. After being captured again he was tortured by the KGB and deported to Siberia to endure forced labor. It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that he was able return to Germany and find his journal, still in the hands of the same nurse.Introduction written by David L. Robbins.

Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story


Jewel - 2015
    In the tradition of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell (she has been compared to both), a singer-songwriter of her kind had not emerged in decades. Now, with over 30 million albums sold worldwide, Jewel tells the story of her life and the lessons learned from her experience and her music.Living on a homestead in Alaska, Jewel learned to yodel at age three and joined her parents' act, working in hotels, honky-tonks, and biker bars. Behind a strong-willed and independent family life, with an emphasis on music and artistic talent, was also instability, abuse, and trauma.At age 15 Jewel was accepted into the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where she began writing her own songs as a means of expression. She was 18, homeless, and living out of her car in San Diego when a radio DJ aired a bootleg version of one of her songs. It was requested in the top-10 countdown, something unheard of for an unsigned artist. By age 21, her debut album went multiplatinum.There is so much more to Jewel's story, one complicated by family and financial woes, by crippling fear and insecurity, by parents who forced a child to grow up far too quickly, and by the extraordinary circumstances in which she became a world-famous singer and songwriter. Here Jewel reflects on how she survived and how writing songs, poetry, and prose have saved her life many times over. She writes beautifully about the natural wonders of Alaska, about pain and childhood trauma, and about discovering her own identity years after the entire world had discovered the beauty of her songs.