Memoirs: Home

A virtuoso performance, the 508-page equivalent to one of Springsteen and the E Street Band's famous four-hour concerts: Nothing is left onstage, and die-hard fans and first-timers alike depart for home sated and yet somehow already aching for more. Bruce Springsteen proves that he has taken on life fully engaged both in living and examining it, and in doing so, he's delivered a story as profoundly inspiring as his best music.

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. "Hillbilly Elegy" is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Whether it's asking tough questions during a presidential debate or pressing for answers to today's most important issues, Megyn Kelly has demonstrated the intelligence, strength, common sense, and courage that have made her one of today's best-known journalists, respected by women and men, young and old, Republicans and Democrats. In "Settle for More", the anchor of The Kelly File reflects on the enduring values and experiences that have shaped her, from growing up in a family that rejected the "trophies for everyone" mentality, to her father's sudden, tragic death while she was in high school. She goes behind-the-scenes of her career, sharing the stories and struggles that landed her in the anchor chair of cable's #1 news show.

"On Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate." On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris's wife was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife's killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son's life be defined by his mother's murder. He refused to let the killers have their way: "For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom." Instantly, that short Facebook post caught fire, and was reported on by newspapers and television stations all over the world. In his determination to honor the memory of his wife, he became an international hero to everyone searching desperately for a way to deal with the horror of the Paris attacks and the grim shadow cast today by the threat of terrorism.

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

Bryan Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father cast him in a United Way commercial. Acting was clearly the boy's destiny, until one day his father disappeared. Destiny suddenly took a backseat to survival. Now, in his riveting memoir, Cranston maps his zigzag journey from abandoned son to beloved star by recalling the many odd parts he's played in real life.

A unique and exquisitely wrought story of one multiracial woman's journey to discover and embrace herself in a family that sought to deny her black heritage, Sil Lai Abrams shares her story in "Black Lotus: A Woman's Search for Racial Identity", an account that will undoubtedly ignite conversation on race, racial identity, and the human experience.

As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories --when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father's role in State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old.

One of nine children born into a penniless North Dublin family, Nuala O'Faolain was saved from a harrowing childhood by her love of books and reading. Though she ultimately became one of Ireland's best-known columnists, her professional success did little to ease her loneliness and longing for a deep connection to the world. "Are You Somebody?" distills her experiences into a wisdom that can only come from an obstinate refusal to shrink from life.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in "The Executioner's Song", campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In "Shot in the Heart", he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, "Shot in the Heart" exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.

In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

"The Woman Warrior" is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward.

The dazzling, prizewinning, wickedly funny tale of Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood--the book that sparked a renaissance in memoir.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." Ernest Hemingway's classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s,

"Night" is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent.