Free Shipping by Amazon. Elie Wiesel’s memoir is a powerful, painful, intense, and terrifying account of his own personal experience of surviving the Holocaust. You begin this memoir thinking it will be about one thing, and it turns into something else altogether — a book at once more ordinary and more extraordinary than any first impressions might allow. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi In her grief, seeking escape into something, she began to train one of nature’s most vicious predators, a goshawk. 1-16 of over 1,000 results for "best memoirs of all time" Skip to main search results Eligible for Free Shipping. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. It’s a troubled, meditative book, in which Didion writes of what it feels like to have “cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad.”. He went on a yearlong trip around the world between graduating from prep school and attending Harvard. Embedded in Cusk’s chiseled sentences are her attempts to engage with a roiling vulnerability. Her small family was religious. It includes a portrait, both cleareyed and affectionate, of the author’s father, the comic novelist and poet Kingsley Amis. — Dwight Garner. The book covers everything in her life from growing up as a chubby first-generation Indian-American, to impersonating Ben Affleck in her off-Broadway play, to landing her gig on The Office—told with her self-deprecating wit and conversational-quirky-BFF voice. This is an amazingly hilarious, uplifting, and bizarre read for anyone who needs the reminder that fitting in is overrated. This book is heavily illustrated, and traces her growth as an artist. “I think it a sound and honorable niche.” — Dwight Garner. What comes as a shock is the book’s directness and deep feeling — its innocence. What memoirs do you think are indispensable? Her anecdotes have snap. âWe do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.â Already a master of writing about loss, this memoir is an essential addition to Didionâs oeuvre. One of the most readable classics, it consists of two parts: A young Orwell slaves for subsistence wages in the bowels of a Paris restaurant, and then tramps around London among the most destitute. It contains story after story about men who told her she couldn’t do things that she did anyway. David Sedaris trains his humorists' eye on his experience in Europe, trying to learn a second language — with hilarious results. As ever, Nabokovâs prose is unimpeachable, brilliant, devastating, and his almost petulant, playful manner makes even lists of relatives seem fascinating. When he awoke, the French Elle editor and father of two was paralyzed except for his left eyelid—his brain remained fully functional.
“Of course you do,” Vidal responded soothingly. “Years ago I heard that Abraham Lincoln freed the colored people,” Cobb says, “but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” About his white neighbors, he declares, “Any way they could deprive a Negro was a celebration to ’em.” This book is not always easy reading, but it is the real deal, an essential American document. But the sharp, ironic, and funny writing is timeless. 20 Best Memoirs to Make You Laugh, Cry, and Think, According to Goodreads Users. Vance $10.00
It’s an enviably full life, with a long marriage, four children and Morris’s determinedly sunny disposition and ability to regard every second of her life, however difficult — especially if difficult — as a species of grand adventure.