One Hundred Autobiographies

Author: David Lehman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501746472
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery. This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

Neil Patrick Harris

Author: Neil Patrick Harris
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0385347014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
“Neil Patrick Harris’s Choose Your Own Autobiography is one of the best celeb memoirs I’ve ever read.”—The Phoenix News Seeking an exciting read that puts the “u” back in “aUtobiography”? Look no further than Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography! In this entertaining and innovative memoir, Neil Patrick Harris shares intimate and hilarious stories about everything from his early days in LA, life on the How I Met Your Mother set, secrets from backstage at award shows, and family life with David, Harper, and Gideon. In a fresh spin on the typical celebrity narrative, he lets you, the reader, choose which path you want him to follow. All this plus magic tricks, cocktail recipes, embarrassing pictures from his time as a child actor, and even a closing song!

Book

Author: John Agard
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 076367236X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Books contain countless tales--but what if Book told its own story? From clay tablets to e-readers, here is a quirky, kid-friendly look at the book. Books are one of humankind's greatest forms of expression, and now Book, in a witty, idiosyncratic voice, tells us the inside story. A wonderfully eccentric character with strong opinions and a poetic turn of phrase, Book tells of a journey from papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts to printed paper and beyond--pondering, along the way, many bookish things, including the evolution of the alphabet, the library (known to Egyptians as "the healing place of the soul"), and even book burning. With bold, black-and-white illustrations by Neil Packer, Book is a captivating work of nonfiction by one of England's leading poets.

Book: My Autobiography

Author: John Agard
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763678872
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Books contain countless tales—but what if Book told its own story? From clay tablets to e-readers, here is a quirky, kid-friendly look at the book. Books are one of humankind’s greatest forms of expression, and now Book, in a witty, idiosyncratic voice, tells us the inside story. A wonderfully eccentric character with strong opinions and a poetic turn of phrase, Book tells of a journey from papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts to printed paper and beyond—pondering, along the way, many bookish things, including the evolution of the alphabet, the library (known to Egyptians as "the healing place of the soul"), and even book burning. With bold, black-and-white illustrations by Neil Packer, Book is a captivating work of nonfiction by one of England's leading poets.

The Book of Myself

Author: David Marshall
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 9780316534499
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Have you ever wanted to create your own autobiography or wished you could read about the life of a relative or friend? The Book of Myself is a do-it-yourself memoir that helps you record and preserve the experiences, relationships, and lessons that define you. Created by a grandson who wanted to capture his grandfather's life story for future generations, The Book of Myself offers 201 memory-evoking prompts on family, friends, and the journey you take through all of life's stages. It is the perfect way for you -- or someone close to you -- to record life's highlights and everyday moments that can slip through your fingers if not written down.

The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou

Author: Maya Angelou
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 030743205X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1186

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou’s classic memoirs have had an enduring impact on American literature and culture. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. This Modern Library edition contains I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and A Song Flung Up to Heaven. When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to widespread acclaim in 1969, Maya Angelou garnered the attention of an international audience with the triumphs and tragedies of her childhood in the American South. This soul-baring memoir launched a six-book epic spanning the sweep of the author’s incredible life. Now, for the first time, all six celebrated and bestselling autobiographies are available in this handsome one-volume edition. Dedicated fans and newcomers alike can follow the continually absorbing chronicle of Angelou’s life: her formative childhood in Stamps, Arkansas; the birth of her son, Guy, at the end of World War II; her adventures traveling abroad with the famed cast of Porgy and Bess; her experience living in a black expatriate “colony” in Ghana; her intense involvement with the civil rights movement, including her association with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; and, finally, the beginning of her writing career. The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou traces the best and worst of the American experience in an achingly personal way. Angelou has chronicled her remarkable journey and inspired people of every generation and nationality to embrace life with commitment and passion.

History, Historians, and Autobiography

Author: Jeremy D. Popkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226675432
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

Red Autobiographies

Author: Igal Halfin
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
In Red Autobiographies, Igal Halfin reads admission records to Soviet Communist party cells in the 1920s for what they reveal about the politics of self-representation in Bolshevik political culture. He identifies ways of speaking about oneself as a central arena of the Soviet revolution's drive for discovering, changing, and perfecting the self. The study is based on archival sources -- many of which are no longer as freely accessible as they were during the heydays of the Soviet "archival bonanza" -- in provincial party archives in Leningrad, Smolensk, and Tomsk. But the principle merit of this study is Halfin's masterful handling and interpretation of the sources. As such, the study serves as a popular "short course" on Halfin's seminal contributions to the historiographies of Russia, Communism, and modern subjectivity. Igal Halfin is a professor of modern history in Tel Aviv University.

Autobiographies of Others

Author: Lucia Boldrini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415507375
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
This book studies the tension between historicity and the desire to free the subject from historical necessity that defines novels that are presented as if they were the autobiographies of historical personages, novels that gesture towards historical factuality and literary fictionality. Boldrini visits autobiographies of others, or ‘heterobiographies,’that are distinguished by the acknowledgment in their fictional structure and ideological premises of the operation involved in assuming another’s voice, of the historical and philosophical gap inherent in the ‘double I’ they stage. Unlike more traditional examples of the historical/biographical novel, their aim is not so much the reconstruction of a historically believable context and individual, but the very exploration of that gap: of changing conceptions of selfhood; of the relationships between writing, history, and subjectivity; and of the intellectual categories that shape our understanding of these relationships. The analysis of texts by authors such as David Malouf, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Gilbert Adair, Anna Banti, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán shows that heterobiography is a powerful literary and intellectual tool employed to reflect critically on cultural, historical, and philosophical constructions of the human; on individual identity, its representations, and its formation through dialogue with the other; on the relationships of power that define the subject socially and legally; of the ethics of the voice and the ethical implications of literary practices of representation; and, therefore, also on the social, political, and cultural role of the literary writer.

Autobiography of a Disease

Author: Patrick Anderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351720996
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
Autobiography of a Disease documents, in experimental form, the experience of extended life-threatening illness in contemporary US hospitals and clinics. The narrative is based primarily on the author’s sudden and catastrophic collapse into a coma and long hospitalization thirteen years ago; but it has also been crafted from twelve years of research on the history of microbiology, literary representations of illness and medical treatment, cultural analysis of MRSA in the popular press, and extended autoethnographic work on medicalization. An experiment in form, the book blends the genres of storytelling, historiography, ethnography, and memoir. Unlike most medical memoirs, told from the perspective of the human patient, Autobiography of a Disease is told from the perspective of a bacterial cluster. This orientation is intended to represent the distribution of perspectives on illness, disability, and pain across subjective centers—from patient to monitoring machine, from body to cell, from caregiver to cared-for—and thus makes sense of illness only in a social context.