Biography

=Biography or Autobiography=

Have you read a great biograhy lately? Tell about it below and add a picture of the book if you'd like. Be sure to tell us what you thought of the book and that you added it.

//I Have Lived A Thousand Years// by Livia Bitton-Jackson A really good biography about World War II is called "I Have Lived A Thousand Years" by Livia Bitton-Jackson. She tells of herself as a young Hungarian Jewish girl, and her home town has been raided and taken over by the Nazis. The Holocaust treats her like a starved stray dog; the question is, Does she survive?

Added by Jackson Barnett

//Eat, Pray, Love// by Elizabeth Gilbert This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali.

Added by Jennifer Barnett

//Angela's Ashes// by Frank McCourt "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy - exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling - does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Added by Jennifer Barnett

//Mornings on Horseback// by David McCullough Winner of the 1982 National Book Award for Biography, Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Mornings on Horseback is about the world of the young Theodore Roosevelt. It is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and nearly fatal attacks of asthma, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household (and rarefied social world) in which he was raised. The book spans seventeen years -- from 1869 when little "Teedie" is ten, to 1886 when, as a hardened "real life cowboy," he returns from the West to pick up the pieces of a shattered life and begin anew, a grown man, whole in body and spirit. The story reveals the inner man through his battle against dreadful odds.

Added by Jennifer Barnett

Losing It and Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time by Valerie Bertinelli

Most young readers probably won't remember the show "One Day at a Time," but Valerie Bertinelli played a teenage daughter of Bonnie, a single mom. That's not a big deal today, but in the early 70s there were very few single moms portrayed on a primetime sit-com series. Young readers may know Valerie's husband of 22 years, Eddie Van Halen, founder and guitarist for the rock legend band Van Halen. This is an incredible look at the life led as one of Hollywood's and rock and roll's elite citizens, but it is also an insightful look at the real life that she led and all its flaws and fears.
 * )Added by Sharon Wright

All But My Life by Gerda Weissmen Klein This memoir is sweet, funny, sad, moving; in fact it covers every emotion you could imagine from cover to cover, especially the hopelessness of a little girl sent to a concentration camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Mrs. Klein takes the reader on the journey of her coming-of-age story from the tender age of 11; through a Nazi occupation, a forced move to a ghetto, an internment in Auschwitz, until we finally experience one of the most gruesome events of the Holocaust: a death march. Gerda's life is saved because her father insisted that she wear her ski boots when the Nazis forced them out of their home in the middle of the summer of 1940. The best part of this book is knowing that she lived to write it and to share her story with all of us. By the time you finish this book, Gerda is not just a character or the author; she is your friend.
 * )Added by Sharon Wright