Biography+&+Memoir


 * [[image:malala.jpeg width="180" height="273"]] || **__I Am Malala: the Girl who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban__ by Malala Yousafzai.**

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.

Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.

//I Am Malala // is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons. ||


 * [[image:http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511tKEgX9zL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg width="205" height="311"]] || ===**__ Four Years in the Mountains of Kurdistan: An Armenian Boy's Memoir of Survival __**===

Armenian Aram Haigaz was only 15 when he lost his father, brothers, many relatives and neighbors, all killed or dead of starvation when enemy soldiers surrounded their village. He and his mother were put into a forced march and deportation of Armenians into the Turkish desert, part of the systematic destruction of the largely Christian Armenian population in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire. His mother urged Aram to convert to Islam in order to survive, and on the fourth day of the march, a Turk agreed to take this young convert into his household. Aram spent four long years living as a slave, servant and shepherd among Kurdish tribes, slowly gaining his captors’ trust. He grew from a boy to a man in these years and his narrative offers readers a remarkable coming of age story as well as a valuable eyewitness to history. Haigaz was able to escape to the United States in 1921. ||


 * [[image:this star won't.jpg width="209" height="315"]] || ====**__This Star Won't Go Out__ by Esther Earl**====

"Just so you can’t say we didn’t warn you, //This Star Won’t Go Out // will make you sob... But it will also make you smile, as one of those rare books that will change the way you look at the world. The true story of Esther, a teen with cancer, this book is a compilation of her essays, short fiction, journal entries and family photos. You might not expect a 16-year-old with a terminal illness to be funny, but Esther is cleverly so while eschewing bitterness.

Author John Green got to know Esther after meeting her at a Harry Potter convention, and they formed a meaningful friendship. So meaningful, in fact, that he dedicated The Fault in Our Stars to her and wrote the foreword to this book. Just released, // This Star Won’t Go Out // is one book that will stick with you long after you finish it." — //Metro New York // ||


 * [[image:escape14.jpg width="209" height="289"]] || ===__**Escape from Camp 14**__ **by Blaine Harden**===

North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">In //Escape From Camp 14//, Blaine Harden unlocks the secrets of the world’s most repressive totalitarian state through the story of Shin’s shocking imprisonment and his astounding getaway. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence—he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">The late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was recognized throughout the world, but his country remains sealed as his third son and chosen heir, Kim Jong Eun, consolidates power. Few foreigners are allowed in, and few North Koreans are able to leave. North Korea is hungry, bankrupt, and armed with nuclear weapons. It is also a human rights catastrophe. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people work as slaves in its political prison camps. These camps are clearly visible in satellite photographs, yet North Korea’s government denies they exist. ||


 * [[image:hhearts.JPG width="215" height="329"]] || **__Healing Hearts: a Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon__ by Kathy Magliato, M.D.**

When a female resident seeks entry into that rarefied boys’ club of heart surgeons, fasten your seat belt for a bumpy ride. Only her custom self-constructed “full-metal jacket” (“No one could get close to me. . . . I had a force field around me and I liked it that way”) worn as the first woman accepted into surgical training at Akron’s General Medical Center, held Magliato together. Her impoverished early childhood of working long hours affected her profoundly as she became an undaunted physician “utterly focused as a lead surgeon of a seventeen-hour artificial heart implant case.”

Impassioned about the heart, she completed her cardiothoracic training in 1998; then followed a year in heart transplantation, finally achieving a “real job” with a paycheck at 36. But for her it’s not about money but “the thrill of touching the human heart” while balancing her professional life sans “jacket” and her personal roles as wife and mother, never easily but with hectic good humor, authentic caring, and in this book, fast-paced, smooth writing that never bores (Booklist). ||


 * [[image:Glass_Castle.jpeg]] || **__The Glass Castle__ by Jeannette Walls**

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination; Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict."

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home (Amazon.com). ||


 * [[image:just kids.jpeg width="203" height="288"]] || __**Just Kids**__ **by Patti Smith**

In 1967, 21-year-old singer–song writer Smith, determined to make art her life and dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities in Philadelphia to live this life, left her family behind for a new life in Brooklyn. When she discovered that the friends with whom she was to have lived had moved, she soon found herself homeless, jobless, and hungry. Through a series of events, she met a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe who changed her life—and in her typically lyrical and poignant manner Smith describes the start of a romance and lifelong friendship with this man: It was the summer Coltrane died. Flower children raised their arms... and Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. It was the summer of //Elvira Madigan//, and the summer of love... (PW). ||


 * [[image:Diving_Bell.jpeg width="177" height="273"]] || **__The Diving Bell and the Butterfly__ by Jean-Dominique Bauby**

Two days after this remarkable book was published in France to great acclaim, its author died of heart failure. What caused such a stir was the method Bauby used to write it. For in December 1995, the 44-year-old former editor-in-chief of the French Elle magazine had suffered a severe stroke that left his body paralyzed but his mind intact, a condition known as "locked-in syndrome." Able to communicate only by blinking his left eyelid, he dictated this book letter by letter to an assistant who recited to him a special alphabet. The result is a marvelous, compelling account of Bauby's life as a "vegetable," full of humor and devoid of self-pity. Although he was trapped in the diving bell of his body, Bauby's imagination "takes flight like a butterfly....You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court" (SLJ). ||


 * [[image:American_Childhood.jpeg]] || __**An American Childhood**__ **by Annie Dillard**

Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard's mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity. The events of childhood often loom larger than life; the magic of Dillard's writing is that she sets down typical childhood happenings with their original immediacy and force (PW). ||


 * [[image:Autobiography_of_a_Face.jpeg]] || __**Autobiography of a Face**__ **by Lucy Grealy**

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasure of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect (Amazon.com). ||