World's Best Memoir Writing

by Claxton, Eve

• ISBN13: 9781402209758
• ISBN10: 1402209754
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-01
• Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc

Summary

Eve Claxton has taken the most intriguing portions of the world's most famous memoirs and compiled them in this volume. The reader experiences world history as the authors lived it and gains rare insight into the lives and personalities of some of the world's most important writers, thinkers, athletes and artists. From Charlie Chaplin's childhood walks through Victorian London and Alan Bennett's wartime boyhood in Yorkshire to the day Muhammad Ali discovered boxing and Mahatma Gandhi experimented with cigarettes; from Primo Levi's capture of fascist militia at twenty-one and Katherine Hepburn's first acting job at the same age to Charles Darwin on his lifelong love-his work-and Nelson Mandela on being released from prison at seventy-one. The World's Best Memoir Writing is a uniquely enjoyable immersion into some of the world's best, and most personal, writing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Publisher's Note

Beginnings: Birth Through Age Twelve

Birth

St. Augustine: The Confessions of St. Augustine

Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

Harriet Martineau's Autobiography

Autobiography of a Child

Reminiscences

A Small Boy and Others

Lost in America: A Journey with My Father

My Autobiography

Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition

"A Felt Hat Worker"

Without Stopping

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Before Night Falls: A Memoir

Six Records of a Floating Life

The Confessions

My Life

Father and Son

Loitering with Intent: The Child

The Liars' Club

The Story of My Life

AkÃâ©: The Years of Childhood

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.