Skip to Main Content

Rapid Readers' Advisory: Auto-/Biography & Memoir

This LibGuide helps librarians and library patrons quickly connect with popular and relevant books and eBooks by genre, theme, medium, or language.

decorative

Chita : a memoir / Chita Rivera, with Patrick Pacheco

 "She was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero--until the entertainment world renamed her. But Dolores--the irreverent side of the sensual, dark, and ferocious Chita--was always present and influential in creating some of Broadway's most iconic roles, including Anita in West Side Story, Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie, Velma in Chicago, Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Claire in The Visit. Written in gratitude to her fans and with the hope that new generations may learn from her experience, Chita takes us backstage to reveal the highs and lows of one extraordinary show business career--the creative fermentation, the ego clashes, the miraculous discoveries." #Actress #Autobiography #Dancer

Unforgivable blackness : the rise and fall of Jack Johnson

This biography presents the life of the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Jackson, nicknamed the Galveston Giant, whose flamboyant personality and defiance of racial stereotypes in the early twentieth century often made him the object of public outrage and a target of law enforcement officials. #Galveston #Texas #BlackHistory #TexasHistory

Brown boy : a memoir / Omer Aziz.

"Omer Aziz was born to working-class Pakistani-Canadian parents in Toronto and was educated through scholarships at Queen's University, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the University of Cambridge, and Yale Law School. He worked for Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, and has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic. Through a powerful personal narrative, Omer Aziz delivers a memoir that wrestles with the tensions inherent in the pursuit of belonging in a Western world. Brown boy is a poetic debut about the price of upward mobility, the quest for knowledge, and the politics of being Brown and coming of age at a time of change and upheaval." #Biography #Canadian #Immigrant #Pakistani

The disabled child : memoirs of a normal future / Amanda Apgar

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children's exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class. #Disability #DisabledChildren #Parenthood #eBook

Making it so : a memoir / Patrick Stewart

"From his acclaimed stage triumphs to his legendary onscreen work in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, Sir Patrick Stewart has captivated audiences around the world and across multiple generations with his indelible command of stage and screen. Now, he presents his long-awaited memoir, Making It So, a revealing portrait of an artist whose astonishing life--from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire, England, to the heights of Hollywood and worldwide acclaim--proves a story as exuberant, definitive, and enduring as the author himself." #Actor #English #StarTrek

How to think like a woman : four women philosophers who taught me how to love the life of the mind / Regan Penaluna

"An exhilarating account of the lives and works of influential seventeenth- and eighteenth-century feminist philosophers Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Catharine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a searing look at the author's experience of patriarchy and sexism in academia. Growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions. In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academician, the first step, she believed, to living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn't realize was that the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would grind her down through its misogyny, its harassment, and its devaluation of women and their intellect. Where were the women philosophers?" #Philosophers #Women #eBook

Some people need killing : a memoir of murder in my country / Patricia Evangelista

 "'My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don't wait very long.' Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte. Some People Need Killing is Evangelista's meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines' drug war and Duterte's assault on the country's struggling democracy. For six years, Evangelista had the distinctive beat of chronicling the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte's war on drugs - a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands - immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others." #DrugControl #Journalist #Memoir #Philippines #PoliceBrutality #Vigilantes

Warren Buffett : investor and entrepreneur / Todd A. Finkle

Warren Buffett is perhaps the most accomplished investor of all time. The CEO and chair of Berkshire Hathaway has earned admiration for not only his financial feats but also the philosophy behind them. Todd A. Finkle provides striking new insights into Buffett's career through the lens of entrepreneurship. This book demonstrates that although Buffett is thought of primarily as an investor, one of the secrets to his success has been running Berkshire as an entrepreneur. #Capitalist #Financier #Wealth #eBook

©2022 Houston Community College Libraries