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Thanks for the Memories
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Monday, May 7, 2018
New and notable biographies and memoirs. Published every other month.
View more Thanks for the Memories: Blog View | Archived Newsletter View | Insider
Questions? Email madtech@madisonpubliclibrary.org
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Freud: The Making of an Illusion
by Frederick Crews
Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud's scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin--but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curinga wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud's fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.
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Grant
by Ron Chernow
Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.
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Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance
by Iris Graville
Knocked off her feet after twenty years in public health nursing, Iris Graville quit her job and convinced her husband and their thirteen-year-old twins to move to Stahekin, a remote mountain village in Washington State's North Cascades. They sought adventure; she yearned for the solitude of this community of eighty-five residents accessible only by boat, float plane, or hiking. "Hiking Naked" chronicles Graville's journey through questions about work and calling as well as how she coped with ordering groceries by mail, black bears outside her kitchen window, a forest fire that threatened the valley, and a flood that left the family stranded for three days.
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In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
by Rana Awdish
A riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient and her revelation of the horribly misguided standard of care in the medical world.
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Leonardo da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.
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Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night
by Jason Zinoman
New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman delivers the definitive story of the life and artistic legacy of David Letterman, the greatest television talk show host of all time and the signature comedic voice of a generation.
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Love Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival
by Jeffrey Gettleman
"A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past twenty years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling a teenage dream. At nineteen, Gettleman fell in love, twice. On a do-it-yourself community service trip in college, he went to East Africa--a terrifying, exciting, dreamlike part of the world in the throes of change that imprinted itself on his imagination and on his heart. But around that same time he also fell in love with a fellow Cornell student--the brightest, classiest, most principled woman he'd ever met. To say they were opposites was an understatement. She became a criminal lawyer in America; he hungered to return to Africa. For the next decade he would be torn between these two abiding passions.
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Love in a Time of Hate: The Story of Andre and Magda Trocmé and the Village That Said No to the Nazis
by Hanna Schott
ove in a Time of Hate tells the gripping tale of Magda and Andr Trocm , the couple that transformed a small town in the mountains of southern France into a place of safety during the Holocaust. At great risk to their own lives, the Trocm s led efforts in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon to hide more than three thousand Jewish children and adults who were fleeing the Nazis. In this astonishing story of courage, romance, and resistance, learn what prompted Andr and Magda to risk everything for the sake of strangers who showed up at their door. Building on the story told in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed , German journalist Hanna Schott portrays a vivid story of resisting evil and sheltering refugees with striking resonance for today.
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Prairie Fires: The American Dream of Laura Ingalls Wilder
by Caroline Fraser
Spanning nearly a century of epochal change, from the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wilder's dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance. With fresh insights and new discoveries, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman whose classic stories grip us to this day.
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Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas
by Donna M. Lucey
In this seductive, multilayered biography, based on original letters and diaries, Donna M. Lucey illuminates four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny intuition, Sargent hinted at the mysteries and passions that unfolded in his subjects' lives. ... Like characters in an Edith Wharton novel, these women challenged society's restrictions, risking public shame and ostracism. All had forbidden love affairs; Lucia bravely supported her family despite illness, while Elsie explored Spiritualism, defying her overbearing father. Finally, the headstrong Isabella outmaneuvered the richest plutocrats on the planet to create her own magnificent art museum. These compelling stories of female courage connect our past with our present--and remind us that while women live differently now, they still face obstacles to attaining full equality.
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Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away: A Memoir
by Alice Anderson
What ensues is an epic battle--emotional, psychological, spiritual, and legal--for her children's welfare, for self-preservation, and ultimately for redemption. It's an unrelenting battle that persists even as life goes on, finally coming full circle when the same son who saved Alice ten years before endures an eerily-familiar violent encounter at his father's hands. Yet even as she confronts the harsh realities of high-powered Southern lawyers and an inadequate legal system, Alice forges a new life with her blossoming children and an ultimate reclamation of her true self.
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Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941/ Volume 2
by Stephen Kotkin
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history.
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Village with My Name: A Family History of China’s Opening to the World
by Scott Tong
When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start up the first full-time China bureau for "Marketplace," the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the United States. But for Tong the move became much more--it offered the opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who had remained in China after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. By uncovering the stories of his family's history, Tong discovered a new way to understand the defining moments of modern China and its long, interrupted quest to go global.
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Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife
by Vivian Bannos
Many know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. When the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives, Maier shot to stardom almost overnight. Bannos contrasts Maier's life has been created, mostly by the men who have profited from her work. Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it.
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Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
by Amy Tan
In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels.
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