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Peter Biskind. Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America [1]
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Paula Butturini. Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy [2] |
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Stephen Feinstein. Marco Polo: Amazing Adventures in China [3] |
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Noel Riley Fitch. Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child [4] |
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Nick Flynn. The Ticking is the Bomb [5] A dazzling, searing, and inventive memoir about becoming a father in the age of terror. |
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William Kamkwamba. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind [6] An enterprising teenager in Malawi builds a windmill from scraps he finds around his village and brings electricity, and a future, to his family. |
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James McBride. The Color of Water [7] This is a book that will "make you proud to be a member of the human race," says Mirabella, and countless readers have already discovered its power. Written in remembrance of his Polish-born, Southern-raised Jewish mother-who married a black man and raised twelve children, all of whom completed college-The Color of Water is a classic of the memoir genre, a testament to love, and a truly American story. |
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Giulia Melucci. I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti [8] A Brooklyn-based publicist's account of her relationships gone awry, and the food that sustained her through it all. |
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Robyn Okrant. Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk [9] What happens when a woman spends one year following every piece of Oprah Winfrey's advice on how to "live your best life"? Robyn Okrant devoted 2008 to adhering to all of Oprah's suggestions and guidance delivered via her television show, her Web site, and her magazine. Living Oprah is a month-by-month account of that year, including enrollment in Oprah's Best Life Challenge for physical fitness and weight control, a vegan cleanse, and participating in Oprah's Book Club. After 366 days, Okrant reflects on the rewards won and lessons learned as well as the tolls exacted by the experiment. |
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Malika Oufkir. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail [10] Malika Oufkir was the eldest daughter of General Oufkir, the King of Morocco's closest aide in 1960s Morocco. As upper-class citizens, family members were treated to opulent luxuries. The King raised Malika as his own daughter and as a companion to his children, only sending her to live with her blood family again when she reached her teenage years. But when the King died and his son took the throne, Malika's father, the General, staged an ill-fated coup and was subsequently assassinated. Then her foster-brother "disappeared" the innocent Oufkir family, including Malika's mother and siblings, to progressively-worse conditions in desert penal colonies. This is the story of their pain, isolation, deprivation, and ultimate daring escape from lives as political prisoners. |
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Roger Rosenblatt. Making Toast [11] When his daughter, Amy - a gifted doctor, mother, and wife - collapsed and died from an asymptomatic heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, left their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren, six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one year-old James, known as Bubbies. Long past the years of nappies, homework, and recitals, Roger and Ginny - Boppo and Mimi to the kids - quickly reaccustomed themselves to the world of small children: bedtime stories, talking toys, playdates, nonstop questions, and nonsequential thought. Though still reeling from Amy's death, they carried on, reconstructing a family, sustaining one another, and guiding three lively, alert, and tenderhearted children through the pains and confusions of grief. |
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Dava Sobel. Galileo's Daughter [12] Galileo's Daughter introduces us to the man whose belief that the Earth moved around the sun caused him to be brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and threatened with torture. In contrast, his daughter Virginia chose the quiet life of a cloistered nun. Sobel takes us through the trials and triumphs of Galileo's career and his familial relationships, and simultaneously illuminates an entire era of flamboyant Medici Grand Dukes, the bubonic plague, and history's most dramatic collusion between science and religion. |
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Terry Teachout. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong [13] Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies--without a collaborator--and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew. |
