Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Beginnings: A Memoir by Horton Foote
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 2.5 MB
Overview: Since 1939, Horton Foote, “the Chekhov of the small town,” has chronicled with compassion and acuity the experience of American life both intimate and universal. His adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and his original screenplay Tender Mercies earned him Academy Awards. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and the President’s National Medal of Arts.

Beginnings is the story of Foote’s discovery of his own vocation. He didn’t always want to write. When he left Wharton, Texas, at the age of sixteen to study at the Pasadena Playhouse, Foote aspired to be an actor. He remembers the terror and excitement of leaving home during the Depression, his early exposure to the influences of German theater, and the speech lessons he took to “cure” him of his Southern drawl. He eventually arrives in New York to search for acting jobs and to study with some of the great Russian and American teachers of the 1930s. But after mixed results on the stage, he finally recognizes his true passion, writing.

From Martha Graham to Tennessee Williams, from Agnes de Mille to Lillian Gish, Horton collaborates with great artists in both dance and theater. The world he describes of fierce commitment and passion regardless of financial rewards is both captivating and inspiring. Through it all Horton maintains his genuine Southern charm, and he often travels home to Wharton, the town that nurtured him as a storyteller and has inspired his writing for the past sixty years. From one of the most moving and distinctive voices of our time, Beginnings is a rare, personal look at a fascinating era in American life, and at the making of a writer.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye by John Moss, Tobi Kozakewich
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 3.4 MB
Overview: Margaret Atwood enjoys a unique prominence in Canadian letters. With over thirty books to her credit, in genres ranging from children’s writing to dystopic novels, she is as creatively diverse as she is internationally acclaimed. Her success, however, has been double-edged: the very popularity that makes her such a prominent figure in the literary world also renders her vulnerable to claims of being a “sell-out,” as she relates in her Empson lectures. The Open Eye negotiates the space between these positions, acknowledging Atwood’s remarkable achievement while considering how it impacts on national politics and identity.

The range of perspectives in this volume is stimulating and enlightening. The Open Eye begins with a focus on Atwood as she presents herself and is presented in Canada and abroad, and then proceeds to consider, more broadly, the intersection of life and literature that Atwood’s works and persona effect. It offers fresh insight into Atwood’s early writing, redresses the critical void regarding her poetry and shorter prose pieces, and provides a critical base from which readers can assess Atwood’s most recent novels.

A common thread throughout these essays is the recognition of Atwood’s importance in the literary realm in general, and in Canadian literature more particularly.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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Tears of the Silenced: A True Crime and an American Tragedy; Severe Child Abuse and Leaving the Amish by Misty Griffin
Requirements: .ePUB, .PDF reader, 2.8 Mb
Overview: One freezing morning in early March I made a dash for a tiny police station in rural Minnesota. I was a frightened Amish girl with nowhere to go, a second-grade education and no ID or social security card. Based on the Author’s tragic true life story.

When I was six years old my family started to live and dress like the Amish. A few years later we moved to a mountain ranch where my sister and I were subjected to almost complete isolation, sexual abuse, and extreme physical violence. We knew that no rescue would ever come because only a handful of people even knew we existed and they did not know us well enough to care.

In my late teens, my parents feared we would escape and took us to an Amish community where we were adopted and became baptized members.I was devastated to once again find myself in a world of fear, animal cruelty and sexual abuse. Going to the police was severely frowned upon. A few years later I was again sexually assaulted, I knew I had to get help and one freezing morning in early March I made a dash for a tiny police station in rural Minnesota. As a result, I found myself plummeted into the strange modern world with only a second-grade education and no ID or social security card.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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The Glory Road: A Gospel Gypsy Life by Anita Faye Garner
Requirements: .PDF reader, 17.3 MB
Overview: Stories and songs from a childhood spent in a vanished world of revivals and road shows

Anita Faye Garner grew up in the South—just about every corner of it. She and her musical family lived in Texarkana, Bossier City, Hot Springs, Jackson, Vicksburg, Hattiesburg, Pascagoula, Bogalusa, Biloxi, Gulfport, New Orleans, and points between, picking up sticks every time her father, a Pentecostal preacher known as “Brother Ray,” took over a new congregation.

In between jump-starting churches, Brother Ray took his wife and kids out on the gospel revival circuit as the Jones Family Singers. Ray could sing and play, and “Sister Fern” (Mama) was a celebrated singer and songwriter, possessed of both talent and beauty. Rounding out the band were the young Garner (known as Nita Faye then) and her big brother Leslie Ray. At all-day singings and tent revivals across the South, the Joneses made a joyful noise for the faithful and loaded into the car for the next stage of their tour.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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Leonardo da Vinci by Anna Abraham
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 5.5 Mb
Overview: Leonardo da Vinci personified the Renaissance, the extraordinary age in which he lived. Best known as one of the world’s greatest painters, he sketched the foundations for inventions that would not come to fruition for centuries.

Born a bastard in a hillside village in northern Italy, Leonardo became the protégé of princes, popes, and kings. He mastered so many branches of science that scholars still debate whether he was greater as an anatomist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, or naturalist.

Nevertheless, he died unhappy, believing he had failed to work the miracles of which he had dreamed. Here is his extraordinary story.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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