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Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir - Poe Ballantine,...

If you’re planning on writing a true crime memoir reflecting on relationships, neural development disorders, small town life, and the American dream, I have bad news. Poe Balentine just wrote the...

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Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life - Berel Lang

A chemist before World War II, Primo Levi added a second career as a writer after it, publishing If this be a Man, the first of his dozen-plus books of memoir, fiction, and poetry, in 1947. Was Levi’s...

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Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade - Rachel Cohen

The son of a Jewish émigré peddler from Vilna, Bernard Berenson (Yale Univ., $25), known for his endless, mesmerizing talk, seldom mentioned his childhood or his family. When his career as an art...

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An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist - Richard Dawkins

The man who called attention to both the selfish gene and the meme grew up in colonial Kenya, still delights in songs and nicknames, is keen on the evolution of languages, reads Wodehouse, and for a...

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The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood - Roger Rosenblatt

“What do you think, pal?” That’s the genial, solicitous voice of Roger Rosenblatt, talking to you, reader. And so engaging is this voice that you feel he really wants to know and is right there,...

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Men We Reaped: A Memoir - Jesmyn Ward

In just four years, National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward lost five people: her younger brother, her cousin, and three friends. All were between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five. All were black...

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Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from...

In order to publish The Myth of Sisyphus in occupied France, Camus had to comply with Nazi censors and cut his chapter on Kafka. This is one of many startling details—Camus, after all, considered...

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Wilson - A. Scott Berg

Woodrow Wilson came to politics from the academy, and undoubtedly his university experiences prepared him for the political challenges of the presidency. As unlikely a president as he was, his success...

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Attempting Normal - Marc Maron

Marc Maron is his own worst enemy which is probably why he's such a great comedian and host of the no-holds-barred WTF podcast. Maron's inability to get out of his head or his own way is what makes...

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Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time - Joseph Frank, Mary Petrusewicz

In college, I'd wander into the library stacks to write papers only to be distracted by Joseph Frank’s brilliant concatenation of intellectual history, literary criticism, painstaking archival work and...

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A Place in the Country - W.G. Sebald

“Seboldian” is virtually a genre in its own right. It means an intimate and authoritative voice, one equally at home in memoir, travelogue, history, and fiction—usually all at once. It’s as...

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Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War -...

Plenty of Time When We Get Home is an exceptionally revealing and powerful follow-up memoir to Williams’s first book, Love My Rifle More Than You. In this one, Williams, who was an Arab linguist in a...

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Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America - Brian Benson

To go somewhere with Brian Benson is a downhill coast, albeit winding, complete with diesel exhaust and all the saddle cramps one can endure in a two-thousand-mile bike trek—all the while trying to...

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Country Girl: A Memoir - Edna O'Brien

A writer as prolific as Edna O’Brien—author of novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, and biographies --whose first book appeared in 1960,when she was thirty, and her latest just last year, would...

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Lawrence in Arabia - Scott Anderson

A veteran war correspondent and author of both fiction and nonfiction, Anderson infuses the familiar story of T. E. Lawrence with fresh energy and insight, setting the famous Englishman’s exploits in...

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Stephanie LaCava - An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an...

Stephanie LaCava tantalizes with a rendition of her adolescent years in France that is both haunting and strange. She clutches at the strange objects she surrounds herself with as she struggles to...

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My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War - Anne Sinclair

This family memoir of art, war, and illustrious personages recalls Edmund de Waal’s similarly multifaceted The Hare with Amber Eyes. Sinclair’s eponymous grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, was one of the...

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A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir - Daisy Hernandez

For those whose parents immigrated to this country, A Cup of Water Under My Bed captures what it means to grow up caught between two worlds; between English and Spanish, between America and our...

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Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History - Rhonda K. Garelick

Whether it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, or being the person we would have had to invent had she not existed, Coco Chanel defined an era, one that would be impossible to...

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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal - Ben Macintyre, John...

A Spy Among Friends (Random House, $27) is the year’s best thriller—and it’s all true. Just why Kim Philby became a double agent who willfully gave away American and British secrets to the Soviets is...

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The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames - Kai Bird

Kai Bird is back. In The Good Spy (Crown, $26) Bird, co-author of the definitive Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus, tells another riveting, true story filled with enough thrilling intrigue to...

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Fire Shut Up in My Bones - Charles M. Blow

The visual op-ed columnist for The New York Times since 2008, Charles M. Blow first made his name using charts as a form of opinion journalism. Since 2014 he has published more conventional-looking, if...

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The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered - Laura Auricchio

Commended by James Madison for being “as sincere an American as any Frenchman can be,” Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), was nineteen when he joined the...

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Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" - Lena...

Not That Kind of Girl (Random House, $28), by Lena Dunham, perhaps best known for her HBO show, Girls, is a collection of “coming-of-age” essays from a millennial’s point of view. Roughly stylized...

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Isabella: The Warrior Queen - Kirstin Downey

“There was no test of wills that Queen Isabella did not win,” Kirstin Downey notes in this colorful biography of Isabella (Nan A. Talese, $35). The Queen of Castile and León (1451-1503) didn’t just...

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Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured - Kathryn Harrison

Joan of Arc is a historical figure often treated as a mythical hero. Her latest biographer, Kathryn Harrison, a versatile writer of fiction and nonfiction, has undertaken the gargantuan task of...

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Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life - Hermione Lee

Sometimes you read a biography as much for its author as for its subject. That’s true for the masterful Hermione Lee; following rich portraits of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, Lee brings her...

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Seriously...I'm Kidding - Ellen DeGeneres

In her collection of short essays, Ellen Degeneres comically goes from mundane to valuable topics and lessons learned throughout her career. Degeneres includes learned wisdom and optimism from failures...

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah

Beah's memoir offers true accounts of his experiences at a young age fleeing Sierra Leone and being forced to become a rebel fighter in the early 90s. Soon enough, Beah is brainwashed as a child...

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Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him - David Henry, Joe...

There’s been a memoir and a couple other biographies, but Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him is written by songwriting, producing and screenwriting brothers Joe and David Henry....

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