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Wednesday, September 26, 2001

The Little Girls Understand . . .

In Big Books Intro

Perhaps little girls are behind the popularity of memoirs. Long before the American Girls books, before the Babysitters Club series, before the crossover success of the Harry Potter books, little girls read about Laura Ingalls Wilder and wished they could grow up on the frontier. They bugged their m... [MORE]

Next of Kin

Big Books Feature: Rick Bragg Gives His Family Tree Another Shake in Ava's Man [9/26/2001] by Frank Diller

Speak, Memory

Big Books Feature: Bashed By Oprah and Other Tales From the Memoir Trade [9/26/2001] by Wendy Ward

First Persons

Big Books Reviews: A Sampling of the Best Modern Memoirs [9/26/2001]

I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie

Big Books Reviews: Better than the recent ego-stoked memoirs of the musicians she aspired to, uhh, know, "Miss Pamela"'s account of her reign as a top groupie scores big--and not only with cheap thrills. The 1987 memoir [9/26/2001] by Stacey Mink

Goodbye to All That

Big Books Reviews: First published in 1929, this memoir by the poet and novelist (I, Claudius) remains the most immediate account we have of a British officer's experiences during the First World War. Robert Graves enli [9/26/2001] by Mahinder Kingra

Autobiography of a Face

Big Books Reviews: Poet Lucy Grealy survived cancer and wrote a book about it, like other fortunate hundreds before and since. It's what happened to her as a result of her malady and how she deals with it on the page th [9/26/2001] by Lee Gardner

Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

Big Books Reviews: Though dirt poor and living in total obscurity when she died in 1960, Zora Neale Hurston had spent decades writing about black culture, creating an enduring literary legacy. Equal parts artist and ant [9/26/2001] by Afefe Tyehimba

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Big Books Reviews: Kay Redfield Jamison undertook to write about her personal experiences with manic depression after she had investigated and explained the illness from every other vantage point--as a researcher, as a [9/26/2001] by Eileen Murphy

Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity

Big Books Reviews: Primo Levi's memoir of his 10 months in Auschwitz is a masterpiece of Holocaust literature--not simply a recounting of personal tragedies and historical atrocities, but a remarkably clear-eyed and rig [9/26/2001] by Sandy Asirvatham

Harpo Speaks!

Big Books Reviews: Whether Harpo Marx's 1961 autobiography qualifies as a memoir is open to question, given that there's a good chance the subject didn't pen it himself. (Marx, whose formal schooling lasted a year and a [9/26/2001] by Adele Marley

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

Big Books Reviews: Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930, but his parents reversed the usual Irish-American immigrant tale and returned to their native Limerick, naively hoping to find a better life there during th [9/26/2001] by Heather Joslyn

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

Big Books Reviews: At the start of this Memoir of Madness, novelist William Styron is about to receive the prestigious Prix Mondial del Duca. That event, which should have been one of the high points of his literary car [9/26/2001] by Eileen Murphy

My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

Big Books Reviews: Born of Indian parents and raised in Ethiopia, Abraham Verghese could hardly find a place less his own than Johnson City, Tenn. But it was in that "typical" Southern town that Verghese discovered a se [9/26/2001] by Eileen Murphy

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