Memoirs

1. Memoirs Grade 10 2013-2014

2. Live, Laugh, Love

3. Walden on Wheels by Ken Ilgunas "In this frank and witty memoir, Ken Ilgunas lays bare the existential terror of graduating from the University of Buffalo with $32,000 of student debt. Ilgunas set himself an ambitious mission: get out of debt as quickly as possible. Inspired by the frugality and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Ilgunas undertook a 3-year transcontinental journey, working in Alaska as a tour guide, garbage picker, and night cook to pay off his student loans before hitchhiking home to New York.” 296 pages

4. DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS By Edward Abbey “An account of the author's existence, observations and reflections, as a seasonal park ranger in southeast Utah.” 337 pages

5. All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot Delve into the magical, unforgettable world of James Herriot, the world's most beloved veterinarian, and his menagerie of heartwarming, funny, and tragic animal patients. 499 pages

6. A BIG LITTLE LIFE: A MEMOIR OF A JOYFUL DOG NAMED TRIXIE BY DEAN KOONTZ The author presents a tribute to his late golden retriever, Trixie, that describes his family's adoption of the retired service animal, the numerous lessons he learned throughout their relationship, and the family's grief upon her passing. 271 pages Interlibrary Loan at Voorheesville Public Library

7. Thunder Dog: the True Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust at Ground Zero by Michael Hingson 232 pages Interlibrary Loan at the Voorheesville Public Library

8. My Life in France by Julia Child The legendary food expert describes her years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence and her journey from a young woman who could not cook or speak any French to the publication of her cookbooks and becoming "The French Chef.“ 317 pages Available at the Voorheesville Public Library 921 CHILD

9. HOW STARBUCKS SAVED MY LIFE: A SON OF PRIVILEGE LEARNS TO LIVE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE BY MICHAEL GATES GILL In his 50’s, Michael Gates Gill had it all. By the time he turned 60, he had lost everything. Then as he sat in a Manhattan Starbucks, the manager, half joking, offered him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from a Brooks Brothers suit to serving coffee in a green uniform. 265 pages Interlibrary Loan at the Voorheesville Public Library

10. JOURNALS BY KURT COBAIN Kurt Cobain filled dozens of notebooks with lyrics, drawings, and writings about his plans for Nirvana and his thoughts about fame, the state of music, and the people who bought his music….his journals reveal an artist who loved records, who knew the history of rock, and was determined to define his place in that history. 294 pages

11. Clapton: the Autobiography “One of the very best rock autobiographies ever.” 343 pages Available at the Voorheesville Public Library 921 CLAPTON

12. Pink Boots and a Machete: My Joruney from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer by Mireya Mayor 301 pages

13. Growing Up Amish: a Memoir by Ira Wagler One fateful starless night, 17-year-old Ira Wagler got up at 2 AM, left a scribbled note under his pillow, packed all of his earthly belongings into in a little black duffel bag, and walked away from his home in the Amish settlement of Bloomfield, Iowa. 271 pages

14. Tuesdays with Morrieby Mitch Albom Recounts his weekly visits with a dying teacher who years before had set him straight. “A wonderful book, a story of the heart told by a writer with soul.” 192 pages

15. Lost in Place by Mark Salzman The oldest child in a middle class household in Connecticut, the son of a piano teacher and a social worker, by age six the author was an eccentric with enormous aspirations – none of them ever fulfilled – who stood out not only from his more conventional parents and brother and sister but from everyone else in his suburban neighborhood. A hilarious memoir. 269 pages

16. TRUE NOTEBOOKS: A WRITER’S YEAR AT JUVENILE HALL BY MARK SALZMAN In 1997, the author paid a reluctant visit to a writing Class at L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for violent teenage offenders, many of them charged with murder. What he found so moved and astonished him that he began to teach there regularly. 330 pages Available at the Voorheesville Public Library NF PB SAL

17. The Hungry Ocean: a Swordboat Captain’s Journey by Linda Greenlaw She's smart, hard-working and good at what she does, though sometimes she wishes she had a life. Greenlaw is captain of the Hannah Boden, sister ship to the Andrea Gail, the sword- fishing boat whose disappearance was described with agonizing verisimilitude in Sebastian Junger's bestseller, The Perfect Storm. Greenlaw tells a comparatively quotidian tale, "the true story of a real, and typical, sword- fishing trip, from leaving the dock to returning.“ 258 pages

18. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson  After living for many years in England, Bill Bryson moved back to the United States and decided to reacquaint himself with his country by taking to this uninterrupted "hiker's highway." Before long, Bryson and his infamous walking companion, Stephen Katz, are stocking up on insulated long johns, noodles and manuals for avoiding bear attacks as they prepare to set off on a walk that is both amusingly ill-conceived and surprisingly adventurous. 276 pages

19. Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: a Memoir about Men and Motorcycles by Gary Paulsen At 57, with heart disease and a bad case of wanderlust, Gary Paulsen decided to get himself the motorcycle of his dreams and take it to Alaska from his home in New Mexico. This is his story. 179 pages

20. A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period-people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.  Available at the Voorheesville Public Library 921 KIMMEL

21. Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, Jr. 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided in 1957 to build his own rockets. They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, a mining town that everyone knew was dying…He grew up to be a NASA engineer and his memoir of the bumpy ride. 368 pages

22. Identical Strangers: a Memoir of Twins Separated & Reunited by Elyse Schein Elyse had always known she was adopted, but it wasn't until her mid-thirties that she searched for her biological mother. She was not prepared for the life-changing news: she had an identical twin sister. 270 pages Interlibrary Loan at the Voorheesville Public Library

23. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed Facing down rattlesnakes & black bears, intense heat & snowfalls, beauty & loneliness, Strayed pieces her life back together again. 315 pages Available at the Voorheesville Public Library 921 STRAYED

24. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X BY MALCOLM X If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was Malcolm X. His “Autobiography” is the result of a unique collaboration between Alex Haley and Malcolm X, whose voice and philosophy resonate from every page, just as His experience and his intelligence continue to speak to millions. 500 pages Available at the Voorheesville Public Library 921 X

25. Soul On IceBy Eldridge Cleaver “By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.” 242 pages

26. BLACK LIKE ME by John Howard Griffin “In 1959, Griffin headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin and immersed himself in black society, then traveled to several states until he could no longer stand the racism, segregation and degrading living conditions.” 200 pages

27. Colored People by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. America's most celebrated black scholar reminisces to his daughters about his boyhood in the polluted, dying Allegheny Mountains' papermill town of Piedmont, West Virginia.…a world shifting from segregation to integration and from colored to Negro to black, Gates evokes a bygone time and place as he moves from his birth in 1949 to 1969, when he goes off to Yale University after a year at West Virginia's Potomac State College…. a story of boyhood, family, segregation, the pre-Civil Rights era, and the era when Civil Rights filtered down from television to local reality. 216 pages Available at the Voorheesville Public Library 921 GATES

28. THE WOMAN WARRIOR: MEMOIRS OF A GIRLHOOD AMONG GHOSTS By Maxine Hong Kingston “A fiercely honest autobiography of growing up Chinese-American in California chronicles Kingston's struggle to balance the “ghosts'' of her Chinese tradition with her new American values.” 209 pages

29. Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos Just 20 years old, Gantos was in a medium security prison for his participation in a get rich-quick drug scam. Scared silly by the violence he saw around him daily, Gantos's only lifeline was a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which he painstakingly turned into an impromptu journal by scratching his own thoughts into the tiny spaces between the lines. 200 pages

30. This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff “His experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes – running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self- invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.” 288 pages

31. Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody The story of a black girl growing up in the desperate poverty of rural Mississippi….To read her book is to know what it is to have grown up black in Mississippi in the forties and fifties -- and to have survived with pride and courage intact. In this now classic autobiography, She details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of a black girl who had the courage to challenge it. 384 pages 

32. The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist by Mary Manhein When a skeleton is all that's left to tell the story of a crime, Mary H. Manhein, otherwise known as "the bone lady," is called in. For almost two decades, Manhein has used her expertise in forensic pathology to help law enforcement agents--locally, nationally, and internationally--solve their most perplexing mysteries. 137 pages

33. On Wiritng: a Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King The author shares his insights into the craft of writing and offers a humorous perspective on his own experience as a writer. 291 pages

34. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers A compelling voice for Generation X, Eggers here recounts his early 20s, caring for his younger brother after their parents' unexpected deaths and his endeavors in a variety of media. 437 pages