Library Guide:
Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs

    This list is simply a guide to some of the biographies, autobiographies and memoirs in the COS Library collection. Once you have identified a topic that interests you go to the call number section indicated and browse the shelf for more titles.  This is an ongoing project so check back for new titles.

Biography:  A written record of the life of an individual.
Autobiography: The writing of one's own history: the story of one's life written by him/herself.
Memoir: A person's written account of special events in his/her own life, and of the people he/she has known.

* indicates Hispanic/Middle & South American 
 # indicates African/African-American   
% indicates Asian/Asian-American
@ indicates Native American
+ indicates Jewish heritage                   

Topics
You may scroll down the page or click on a topic and jump to that section.

Anthropology

Title: Mary Leakey: Disclosing the Past   Autobiography
Author: Mary Leakey      Publisher: Doubleday, 1984      Pages: 215
Call Number: 306.0924 L435
   "Mary's outstanding ability to draw stone implements brought about her meeting with Louis Leakey, and heralded the second phase of her life. In 1935 she visited Kenya and Tanzania with him, and in 1936 they married and moved to East Africa where they formed a brilliant partnership spanning more than thirty years."

Title: One Life: Richard E. Leakey    Autobiography
Author: Richard E. Leakey    Publisher: Salem House, 1984    Pages: 202
Call Number: 306.092 L461
  "Richard Leakey learned from both his parents, Louis and Mary, about prehistoric Africa, and he relates how he finally became involved in the study of human ancestry. This involvement ultimately led to his leadership of Kenya's museums; and these, together with his development of laboratories in Nairobi, have made Kenya one of the world's major centers for the study of evolution and human origins."

Art

Title: Ansel Adams: An Autobiography      Autobiography
Author: Ansel Adams    Publisher: Little, Brown & Co., 1985   Pages: 326
Call Number: 770.92 A211
  This autobiography was completed shortly before his death. Photographer, Ansel Adams, discusses his life, career, friendships and concerns.

Title: Dorthea Lange: A Photographer's Life   Biography
Author: Milton Meltzer   Publisher: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978    Pages: 359
Call Number: 770.924 M528
  "Dorothea Lange is best known as the graphic chronicler of rural Americans who were victims of the Depression of the Thirties." Milton Meltzer has used Lange's letters and journals, the interviews recorded in her last years, and hundred of personal connections to document a painful as well as triumphant life."

Title: Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A life of Diego Rivera  Biography *
Author: Patrick Marnham   Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1998     Pages: 341
Call Number: 795.972 M353
  "Patrick Marnham brings the art, the politics and the complexity of the man into vivid focus. His beautifully demonstrates that just as Rivera mythologized himself, the artist also endowed the Mexican people with a national myth, melding a troubled revolutionary history and an Indian culture obsessed with death into something bold and visionary."

Title: Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream        Biography
Author: Sue Prideaux          Publisher: Yale University Press, 2005     Pages: 328
Call Number: 709.2  P947
"Although almost everyone recognizes Edward Munch's famous painting The Scream, hardly anyone knows much about the man. What kind of person could have created this universal image, one that so vividly expressed all the uncertainties of the twentieth century? What kind of experiences did he have?"

Biodiversity

  Title: Naturalist            Autobiography
Author: Edward Osborne Wilson      Publisher: Island Press, 1994    Pages: 364
Call Number: 508 W747
     “In Naturalist, Wilson describes for the first time both his growth as a scientist and the evolution of the science he helped define…..an eloquent champion of biodiversity.”

Civil Rights

Title: A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait       Biography #
Author: Jervis Anderson    Publisher: Harcourt, 1972       Pages: 352
Call Number: 323.4 A547
     “This is a book about the transforming difference the dignity and persistence of one man has made to the cause of social justice and black liberation in America.”

Title: For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer   Biography #
Author: Chana Kai Lee    Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2000   Pages: 181
Call Number: 973 L477
   " For Freedom's Sake documents Fannie Lou Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South."

Title: King: A critical biography           Biography #
Author: David Lewis        Publisher: Praeger, 1970          Pages: 397
Call Number: 323.4 Ki53
     A biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Title: Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael     Autobiography #
Author: Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell       Publisher: Scribner, 2003     Pages: 784
Call Number: 973.0496073 C287
 ".....chronicles the legendary civil rights leader's work as chairman of SNCC, patriarch of Black Power, Pan-African activist, and social revolutionary.  He recounts the course of his own experience and struggles, ranging from the prison farms and lynch mobs of Mississippi through the firefights and political intrigue of the African liberation wars to Black Power and Pan-Africanism."

Title: The Rest of the Dream        Biography  #
Author: Wade Hall       Publisher: University Press of Kentucky, 1988     Pages: 224
Call Number: 185.97 H181
    The life of Lyman Johnson, a grassroots civil rights leader. Born in 1906, his grandparents were slaves yet his father was a college graduate. This book is an account of his fight for racial justice.

Title: Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union    Biography
Author: Peggy Lamson        Publisher:Houghton Mifflin, 1976        Pages: 291
Call Number: 323.4 L241
    Roger Baldwin “established the Civil Liberties Bureau during World War I to protect the rights of conscientious objectors. He himself spent ten months in prison as a C.O.  After the war, the Bureau was reorganized, largely through his efforts, to become the ACLU, with the purpose of safeguarding the constitutional rights of every American citizen.”

Dance

Title: Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Balanchine    Biography  Russian
Author: Moira Shearer      Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1986     Pages: 176
Call Number: 792.82 S539
  "George Balanchine, who died in 1983, was a father of modern ballet and one of the greatest choreographers of all time. Moira Shearer was one of the leading ballerinas of her generation and as a young dancer she danced for Balanchine in London."

Title: Martha: The Life and work of Martha Graham    Biography
Author: Agnes De Mille     Publisher: Random House, 1991     Pages: 424
Call Number: 793.32 D359
  "Graham was the choreographer and dancer who single-handedly invented a revolutionary new dance language and stage aesthetic. She was also a tempestuous innovator and an unrelenting taskmaster, who would sacrifice everything - love, friendship, money- for the sake of her art."

Title: Ted Shawn: Father of American Dance   Biography
Author: Terry Walter         Publisher: Dial Press, 1976     Pages: 179
Call Number: 793.32 T329
   "Using exclusive materials (oral, written, photographic), America's most important dance critic explores Shawn's enormous influence on the entire spectrum of the dance. It was Ted Shawn who brought the concept of virility to male dancing in American and made it thereby (especially through his later all-male dance groups) both exciting as theater and respectable as a career."

Economics/Business  

Title: Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management    Biography
Author: Charles D. Wredge     Publisher: Business One Irwin, 1991   Pages: 260
Call Number: 670.92 W944
    "Frederick Taylor, the controversial industrial reformer, developed the methods of scientific management, and transformed the industrial revolution by analyzing work."

Title: The Flamboyant Mr. Colt and his Six-shooter     Biography
Author: Bern Keating     Publisher: Doubleday and Co., 1978     Pages: 226
Call Number:  683.43 Ke25
    "When Sam Colt perfected the six-shooter, the firepower it unleashed drove the Mexicans from Texas and the Indians from the Plains. It revolutionized warfare world wide."

Title: Mother Jones: The Miners' Angel     Biography
Author: Dale Fetherling     Publisher: So. Illinois Univ. Press, 1974    Pages: 215
Call Number: 331.88 F419
    "Mother Jones was a labor agitator. Her life has been ignored largely because she was not important to the labor movement in an institutional or intellectual sense. She did not shape organizations or fashion movements or create new concepts. Her skill was the invaluable but incalculable one of tending to men's spirits, or buoying them, of goading them to fight even though the battle seemed hopeless."

Title: The Lion of Wall Street      Autobiography
Author: Jan Dreyfus     Publisher: Regnery Publishing       Pages: 327
Call Number: 332.092 D778
    "-a man of many talents whose financial genius and compassionate spirit has led to astonishing achievements."  

Title: Ralph Nader       Biography
Author: Patricia Cronin Marcello      Publisher: Greenwood Press, 2004       Pages: 159
Call Number: 343.7307 M314
   "The son of civic-minded immigrant parents, Ralph Nader was taught from an early age to appreciate the citizen's role in a democracy. For over four decades, Nader has dedicated his life to challenging government and industrial practices---from protecting the environment and battling for consumer and automotive safety to blowing the whistle on corporate corruption. In spite of Congressional distaste for Nader, he has sought the presidency three times and remains a prominent and polarizing figure in U.S. politics."

Education

Title: Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano   Autobiography *
Author: Ruben Navarrette, Jr.    Publisher: Bantam Books, 1993     Pages: 268
Call Number: 378.198 N321
"For Latinos, who will soon be the largest minority group in America, the doors of higher education have opened only a crack. But in 1985 an ambitious young Mexican-American from California's rural San Joaquin Valley became one of the few to enter America's most prestigious university."

Title: Up From Slavery       Autobiography #
Author: Booker T. Washington      Publisher: Bantam Pathfinder, 1970      Pages: 227
Call Number: 378.111 W228
  "The son of a slave woman, Booker T. Washington struggled to acquire an education for himself, then dedicated his life to educating others. His is a story of almost unbelievable devotion and selflessness, an inspiration to people all over the world as long as men recognize the value of courage and human dignity." Booker T. Washington was the founder of the Tuskegee Institute.

Entertainment

Title: All-American: Paul Robeson  Biography #
Author: Dorothy Butler Gilliam    Publisher: The New Republic Book Company, 1976  Pages: 186
Call Number: 790.2 G481
 "Paul Robeson was one of the most admired and best-known figures of his time. The youngest son of a black preacher, this gifted athlete, scholar, actor, and singer rose quickly to the heights of international adulation and celebrity. Then, for his political convictions, he was vilified at home and spent the last fifteen years in exile abroad and as a recluse in Philadelphia."

Title: Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Balanchine    Biography  Russian
Author: Moira Shearer      Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1986     Pages: 176
Call Number: 792.82 S539
  "George Balanchine, who died in 1983, was a father of modern ballet and one of the greatest choreographers of all time. Moira Shearer was one of the leading ballerinas of her generation and as a young dancer she danced for Balanchine in London."

Title: Cary Grant: a biography    Biography
Author: Marc Eliot     Publisher: Harmony Books, 2004    Pages: 384
Call Number: 791.4302 E42
  "He is Hollywood's most fascinating and timeless star. Although he came to personify the debonair American, Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach on January 18, 1904 in the seaport village of Bristol, England."

Title: Cary Grant: A Class Apart    Biography
Author: Graham McCann     Publisher: Columbia University Press, 1996    Pages: 232
Call Number: 791.43 M122
  "Grant's exceptionally broad appeal was in part to do with his bright roundedness, the promise of completion, showing the coarse how to have class and the over-refined how to have the common touch, teaching the unruly how to behave and the repressed how to have fun."

Title: Chaplin, the Mirror of Opinion   Biography
Author: David Robinson     Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1984     Pages: 179
Call Number: 791.43 R659
 "From a childhood of acute poverty he became, by this twenty-fifth year, the best-known and best-loved figure in the world. His films always revealed his own awareness of the unpredictable oddity of fate: another quarter of a century was to see him rejected and reviled by a considerable section of the American public and, eventually exiled from the land which he had adopted and where he had made some of the most famous and enduring films in cinema history."

Title: Child Star     Autobiography
Author: Shirley Temple Black    Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 1988    Pages: 517
Call Number: 791.43028 T287
  "For the first time, Shirley Temple Black - the quintessential child star of the 30s and 40s- tells in her own words the colorful story of her life as an actress."

Title: The Cowboy and the Senorita: A Biography of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans      Biography
Author: Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss     Publisher: Twodot, 2005   Pages: 210
Call Number:  791.4302 K23
"In 1944 Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lit up the silver screen in The Cowboy and the Senorita, making their names--and lives--inseparable. It was the start of a fifty-six-year partnership that included thirty motion pictures, a long-running hit television series and a family of nine children."

Title: Diana Chronicles   Biography
Author: Tina Brown     Publisher: Doubleday, 2007    Pages: 482
Call Number: 941.085 B881
  "Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she "the people's Princess," who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?"

Title: Eddie Murphy: The Life and Times of a Comic on the Edge    Biography  #
Author: Frank Sanello     Publisher: Birch Lane, 1997      Pages: 236
Call Number: 792.7 S223
  This book "reveals the private demons and public outbursts that have created one of the most complex - and successful - figures in the entertainment industry today."

Title: Goddess: Inside Madonna   Biography
Author: Barbara Victor   Publisher: Cliff Street Books, 2001
Call Number: 782.42166 V642
  "In this extraordinary biography, Barbara Victor taps into previously unexplored sources to unmask the private person behind the public image."

Title: Harry Houdini: A Photographic Story of a Life   Biography
Author: Vicki Cobb    Publisher: DK Publishing, 2005     Pages: 123
Call Number: 709.2 P947
"Harry Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss, left his home in Wisconsin at the age of 12 to seek his fortune. But the factory work he found was dreary, and young Ehrich longed for excitement. Find out how he went from practicing coin tricks in his spare time to selling out the theaters of Europe--and how this son of poor immigrants transformed himself into the greatest magician in the world."

Title: James Stewart   Biography
Author: Donald Dewey    Publisher: Turner Publishing, 1996   Pages: 499
Call Number: 791.43 D519
  "This riveting biography follows Stewart from his hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and a childhood shaped by a strong-willed father, to the fateful encounter at Princeton University with actress Margaret Sullavan, to his first professional theatrical experiences on Cape Cod, and the forging of a remarkable life-long friendship with Henry Fonda in New York City, to his unexpected stardom at MGM."

Title: Lucky Man: a memoir
Author: Michael J. Fox    Publisher: Hyperion, 2002    Pages: 255
Call Number: 791.43028 F793
  "In September 1998, Michael J. Fox stunned the world by announcing that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease--a degenerative neurological condition. In fact, he had been secretly fighting it for seven years. He tells the story of his life, his career, and his campaign to find a cure of Parkinson's."

Title: Me: Stories of My Life   Biography
Author: Katharine Hepburn     Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991   Pages: 413
Call Number: 791.43092 H529
  "In that inimitable Hepburn voice--witty, intelligent, candid, immediate--she tells us the stories of her life ("And when I say stories I'm afraid I mean flashes--this--that--no no the other things") and takes us back to her childhood, into her family life...to her early days in New York and Hollywood...through the ups and downs of her career...into the sanctuaries of her private life...through her long friendship with Spencer Tracy...into her close collaboration with many of the leading actors, directors and producers of the past sixty years..."

Title: My Life So Far    Autobiography/Memoir
Author: Jane Fonda     Publisher: Random House, 2005   Pages: 571
Call Number: 791.4302 F673
  "She is one of the most recognizable women of our time. America knows Jane Fonda as an actress and an activist, a feminist and a wife, a workout guru and a role model. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, Fonda reveals that she is so much more. From her youth among Hollywood's elite and her early film career to the challenges and triumphs of her life today, Jane Fonda reveals intimate details and universal truths that she hopes "can provide a lens through which other can see their lives and how they can live them differently.""

Title: A Private Family Matter  Memoir/Autobiography  *
Author: Victor Rivas Rivers     Publisher: Atria Books, 2005     Pages: 364
Call Number: 362.764 R622
  " A powerful chronicle of how Victor Rivers escaped the war zone of Domestic violence--too often regarded as a "private family matter"-- and went on to become a good man, a film star, and a prominent activist."

Title: Rosie: Rosie O'Donnell's Biography    Biography
Author: James Robert Parish      Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc,1997   Pages: 253
Call Number: 792.7 P233
   This biography covers Rosie O'Donnell's life from childhood to the mid 1990's.

Title: Sinatra: the Life   Biography
Author: Anthony Summers   Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005    Pages: 363
Call Number: 782.42164 S955
  "Sinatra is the story of an American icon who held the imagination of millions for more than fifty years and who influence in popular music was unsurpassed in the twentieth century. As a child, he said, he had heard "symphonies from the universe" in his head. No one could have imagined where those sounds would lead him. Tracing the arc of this incredible life, from the humble beginnings in Hoboken to the twilight years as a living legend in Malibu, Sinatra, follows a career built on raw talent, sheer willpower--and criminal connections."

Title: Singin' and Swingin' and Getting' Merry Like Christmas   Autobiography  #
Author: Maya Angelou     Publisher: Random House, 1976    Pages: 269
Call Number: 790.2092 A584
   "In this third, and again self-contained, volume of her autobiography, begun in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, Ms. Angelou moves into the adult world, and the white world as well---as she marries, enters show business and tours Europe and Africa in Porgy and Bess."

Title: Steven Spielberg   Biography
Author: Joseph McBride    Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997    Pages: 448
Call Number: 791.43 M119
 "Drawing a vivid and highly detailed portrait of Spielberg's extraordinary childhood and his early amateur filmmaking, McBride uncovers the cultural and personal influences that came together to form Spielberg's artistic personality."

Fashion

Title: Bare Blass   Autobiography
Author: Bill Blass  Editor: Cathy Horyn   Publisher: Harper Collins, 2002   Pages: 167
Call Number: 746.92092 B664
"Bare Blass reveals a complex human being whose character was hugely shaped by his Depression-era childhood and by his riveting experiences as a member of a secret army unit during World War II."

Title: Chanel: A Woman of Her Own     Biography
Author: Alex Madsen      Publisher: Henry Holt & Co., 1990  Pages: 337
Call Number: 746.92 M183
  "From her penniless start as a bastard and an orphan to her death at age eighty-eight, wealthy and famous yet very much alone, Coco Chanel led an extraordinary life. She began as a kept woman making hats for her lover's other mistresses and went on to become fashion's greatest career woman."

Title: Oscar: The Style, Inspiration and Life of Oscar De La Renta  Biography
Author: Sarah Mower         Publisher: Assouline, 2002    Pages: 191
Call Number: 0 746.92 M936
  "Oscar de la Renta is the Renaissance man of American fashion. Born in the Dominican Republic, he grew up to witness the splendor of Paris haute couture in its heyday and has gone on to play a central role in the New York fashion scene for the last forty years. This spectacular volume traces the designer's creative inspirations, from the vivid, colorful Spanish influences of his childhood to the extraordinary women - his muses - who shine in the dazzling social scenes of Europe and America."

Health

Title: My Name is Bill: Bill Wilson: His life and the Creation of Alcoholic Anonymous       Biography
Author: Susan Cheever        Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004      Pages: 257
Call Number: 362.292 C515
"Alcoholics Anonymous is a worldwide organization that since 1935 has helped people break free from the destructive influence of intoxicating and addictive substances. This great wave of comfort and help that has covered the world had its beginnings in one man, born shortly before the twentieth century. Utilizing exhaustive research, Cheever traces Bill Wilson's life beginning with his birth in a small town in Vermont, where, following the breakup of his parents' marriage, he was raised primarily by his grandparents. Handsome and intelligent, with a wit and charm that both women and men responded to, he seemed at the outset to be capable of achieving anything he wants. Wilson, however also suffered from deep-seated insecurity, and once he was away from the provincial Vermont town, he found that alcohol helped relieve his self-doubts and brought out the charm and wit that had made him a favorite in school."

 History - England

Title: Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia    Biography
Author: Janet Wallach        Publisher: Anchor Books, 2005      Pages: 377
Call Number: 956.02 W195
  "Turning away from the privileged world of 'eminent Victorians,' Gertrude Bell (1868 - 1926) explored, mapped, and excavated the world of the Arabs. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence's brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire."

Title: Diana Chronicles   Biography
Author: Tina Brown     Publisher: Doubleday, 2007    Pages: 482
Call Number: 941.085 B881
  "Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she "the people's Princess," who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?"

  Title: Elizabeth of York   Biography
Author: Nancy Lenz Harvey     Publisher: Macmillan, 1973       Pages: 202
Call Number: 942.051 H342
     “Elizabeth of York lived at the center of the vortex of one of England’s most turbulent eras. Elizabeth’s story is told here by letting the reader see her life as she might have reviewed it herself as she lay mortally ill after the birth of her eighth child.”

Title: Lilibet: An Intimate Portrait of Elizabeth II    Biography
Author: Carolly Erickson      Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2004    Pages: 329
Call Number: 941.085  
  "Lilibet shows us an Elizabeth we thought we knew--but shows her in a different light: as a small, shy women with a sly and at times raucous sense of humor. A women who appears stiff in public, but in private enjoys watching wrestling on TV. A woman most at home among her horses and dogs. And a woman long annealed to heartbreak and sorrow, who has presided over the decline of Great Britain and the decline in prestige of her own Windsor dynasty."
 

Title: Mary Tudor: A Life       Biography
Author: David Loades     Publisher: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989     Pages: 345
Call Number: 942.054 L795
      “How this pious and, by contemporary accounts, gentle woman aroused an antipathy that survives until the present is a central question in David Loades sensitive new biography. Based on research into documents of the time (many newly uncovered) the compelling story of Mary’s life is revealed here in unprecedented detail and depth, packed with incident and intrigue, and enmeshed in the politics of secular and religious struggle in England and Europe.”

  Title: Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate        Biography
Author: Harry Kelsey     Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998    Pages: 399
Call Number: 942.05 K329
    “In this lively, engaging new biography, Harry Kelsey shatters the familiar image of Sir Frances Drake. Kelsey paints a different and far more interesting picture of Drake as an amoral privateer at least as interested in lining his pockets with Spanish booty as in forwarding the political goals of his country.”

  Title: The Young Elizabeth: The First Twenty-five Years of Elizabeth I    Biography
Author: Alison Plowden     Publisher:  Sutton, rev.ed. 1999     Pages: 216
Call Number: 942.055 P732
     “Alison Plowden charts the history of Elizabeth’s first twenty-five years, telling the tale of Elizabeth’s difficult childhood, and her alternate status as princess and bastard, culminating in her coronation and the beginning of the legend.”

History - Germany

Title: Goring   Biography
Author: David Irving    Publisher: William Morrow, 1989    Pages: 511
Call Number: 943.086 I72
  "Goring was one of the twentieth century's most influential and colorful villains--Hilter's partner and alter ego. He became head of a secret intelligence-gathering agency and was architect of the Gestapo and the concentration camps. He was a near transvestite, a megalomaniac, and a morphine addict who became grotesquely fat and corrupt."

History - Italy

Title: Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy     Biography
Author: Sarah Bradford      Publisher: Viking, 2004     Pages: 366
Call Number: 945.606 B799
"The very name Lucrezia Borgia conjures up everything that was sinister and corrupt about the Renaissance -- incest, political assassination, papa; sexual abuse, poisonous intrigue, and unscrupulous power grabs. Neither a vicious monster, nor a seductive pawn, Lucrezia Borgia was a shrewd, determined woman who used her beauty and intelligence to secure a key role in the political struggles of her day."

History - Russia

Title: Peter: The Revolutionary Tsar  Biography
Author: Peter Brock Putnam    Publisher: Harper & Row, 1973    Pages: 241
Call Number: 947.05 P992
  "A physical giant, Peter possessed appetites and ambitions to match. He worked and played at a furious pace, He dreamed on a vast scale. He was a builder and a destroyer, a visionary and a realist, a genius and a buffoon, Russia's most tireless servant and her most terrible taskmaster."

Title: Stalin: Man & Ruler    Biography
Author: Robert H. McNeal    Publisher: New York University Press, 1988   Pages: 316
Call Number: 947.084 M169
  "Even-handed, thoughtful, unpolemical, McNeal's account of Stalin the man and of Stalin the ruler, is a major reassessment of the man who more than anyone other than perhaps Lenin himself shaped the Soviet Union."

Title: Shostakovich: A Life    Biography
Author: Laurel E. Fay       Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2000    Pages:287
Call Number: 780.92 F282
  "For this authoritative post-cold-war biography of Shostakovich's illustrious but turbulent career under Soviet rule, Laurel E. Fay has gone back to primary documents: Shostakovich's many letters, concert programs and reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of his contemporaries. Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule."

History - Pacific Coast States

Title: Vizcaino and Spanish expansion in the Pacific Ocean  Biography *
Author: Michael W. Mathes    Publisher: California Historical Society, 1968  Pages: 170
Call Number: 979.4 M427
    "No single individual had more contact with California during the first two and one-half centuries following its discovery than Vizcino, and, while monuments and parks have been named for his predecessor, Rodriguez Cabrillo, few monuments have been named for Vizcaino; and the fact that almost all major place names along the California coast were given by him is often not remembered."

Title: To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman  Memoir @
Author: Lucy Thompson    Publisher: Heyday Books, 1991   Pages: 284
Call Number: 979.4 T473
    "Lucy Tompson is, even today, one of the few Native American women to have written a book about her people." Originally written in 1916, this edition has a new introduction but the text remains the same. "Concerned about the survival of her people and their customs, and concerned also that the true story of the Yurok was not being told - not by the popular press, not by the anthropologists - she took it upon herself to write this remarkable book."

Title: Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman Memoir  *
Author: Frances Esquibel Tywoniak and Mario T. Garcia    Publisher: Univ. of CA Press, 2000     Pages: 236
Call Number: 979.4 T997
    "Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a means of breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effects of migration on family and culture."

Title: The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta: California's Gold Rush Bandit   Biography  *
Author: James F. Varley   Publisher: Big Lost River Press, 1995  Pages: 173
Call Number: 979.4 V315
    "For three years, beginning, in 1850, an Hispanic bandit--believed to be a man named Joaquin Murrieta--terrorized the gold mining regions of California, murdering and robbing helpless victims in their camps. From this rampage of crime arose a legend unlike any other of the 19th century."

Title: Evans & Sontag: the Famous Outlaws of California    Biography
Author: Hu Maxwell     Publisher: Panorama West Books, 1981   Pages: 258
Call Number: 979.4009 M465
    Outlaws of Central California, Evans and Sontag were "accused of a host of crimes capped by train robbery, the team was reviled and admired, protected and stalked, publicized and, ultimately, mythologized."

Title: Give Me a Mountain Meadow: A Biographical Account of a Remarkable Man  Biography
Author: M. Nona McGlashan      Publisher: Fresno Valley Publishers, 1977   Pages: 248
Call Number: 979.437 M145
    "Editor, scientist, lawyer, journalist, inventor, legislator, astronomer-MacGlashan was all of these and more." This biography, written by his granddaughter, covers the life of a prominent Californian of the High Sierras.

Title: Mourning Dove, 1888-1936    Autobiography  @
Author: Mourning Dove      Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990   Pages: 187
Call Number: 979.7 M931
    "Mourning Dove is widely known as the first Indian woman to publish a novel, Cogewea, (1927) was a romantic, and autobiographical to the extent that she blended family events with Salishan folklore and identified with her half-blood heroine. Many readers were curious about the author's real story. Responding to them and angered by charges that the novel was not hers, mourning Dove began to write about her life among her people, the Colviles near Kettle Falls on the upper Columbia River."

History - United States - 20th Century

Title: Waiting on the Bounty   Biography
Author: Mary Knackstedt Dyck   Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 1999   Pages: 328
Call Number: 978.1415 D994
  "A powerful document...that provides true insight not only into rural life in Kansas but also into the innermost thoughts and concerns of a farm woman. At the same time, the diary gives an incredibly realistic view of the physical hardships on the Great Plains during the dust storms."

History - United States - Western

Title: Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History  Biography
Author:  Joy S. Kasson       Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2000      Pages: 273
Call Number 791.84 K19
     This book "traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's 'authenticity,' yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of American tradition."

Title: Evans & Sontag: the Famous Outlaws of California    Biography
Author: Hu Maxwell     Publisher: Panorama West Books, 1981   Pages: 258
Call Number: 979.4009 M465
    Outlaws of Central California, Evans and Sontag were "accused of a host of crimes capped by train robbery, the team was reviled and admired, protected and stalked, publicized and, ultimately, mythologized."

Title: The Flamboyant Mr. Colt and his Six-shooter     Biography
Author: Bern Keating     Publisher: Doubleday and Co., 1978     Pages: 226
Call Number:  683.43 Ke25
    "When Sam Colt perfected the six-shooter, the firepower it unleashed drove the Mexicans from Texas and the Indians from the Plains. It revolutionized warfare world wide."

Title: Hanging the Sheriff: A Biography of Henry Plummer    Biography
Author: R.E. Mather and F.E. Boswell     Publisher: University of Utah Press, 1987  Pages: 199
Call Number: 978.601 M427
    "Historians have long considered Henry Plummer to be the leader of a murderous band of robbers. Mather and Boswell present a revisionist view of Plummer's role and his hanging in this engaging book."

Title: Jim Bridger: Mountain Man   Biography
Author: Stanley Vestal      Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1946      Pages: 300
Call Number: 978.02 V583
  "Even among the mighty mountain men, Jim Bridger was a towering figure. Fur trapper and Indian fighter extraordinary, her was one of the greatest explorers and pathfinders in American history."

Title: Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes     Biography
Author: Thelma S. Guild & Harvey L. Carter     Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1984   Pages: 284
Call Number: 978.02 G955
  "Carefully separating myth from fact. the authors draw on a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, including private letters. Their scrupulous restoration of Kit Carson in his geographical and historical setting proves that scholarship can have entertaining results: Kit Carson: A Patter for Heroes is a cracking good adventure story."

Title: The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta: California's Gold Rush Bandit   Biography  *
Author: James F. Varley   Publisher: Big Lost River Press, 1995  Pages: 173
Call Number: 979.4 V315
    "For three years, beginning, in 1850, an Hispanic bandit--believed to be a man named Joaquin Murrieta--terrorized the gold mining regions of California, murdering and robbing helpless victims in their camps. From this rampage of crime arose a legend unlike any other of the 19th century."

Title: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley    Biography
Author: Glenda Riley       Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994  Pages: 235
Call Number 796.3092 R573
"Annie Oakley was an athlete, a businesswoman, and a genteel lady, the whole unlikely combination held together by her own steely determination and a passion for privacy."

History - United States - Wars

Civil War

Title: Harriet Tubman, the Moses of her People   Biography  #
Author: Sarah Elizabeth Bradford   Publisher: Carol Publishing Company, 1997   Pages: 131
Call Number: 326.B799
   "Harriet Tubman was the ultimate example of the humanitarian spirit. What better evidence of this does one need that the absence of bitterness over the government's persistent refusal to reward her for four years of service as occasional agent behind enemy lines, as scout for union troops in the unfamiliar swamplands of the south, and as practical nurse in the union camp hospitals, ministering to all alike - Yankee soldier, captured rebel, and fleeing slave."

Title: Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories    Biography #
Author: Jean M. Humez        Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003     Pages: 275
Call Number: 973.7115
  "Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850's and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union army."

Title: Rebel: The Life and Times of John Singleton Mosby   Biography
Author:  Kevin H. Siepel       Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1983     Pages: 291
Call Number: 973.745 S572
 "John Singleton Mosby, the "Gray Ghost," was the Confederacy's most daring and effective guerrilla commander. Famous for his audacious surprise attacks behind Yankee lines, Mosby led his ragtag band of raiders through the Virginia countryside, inflicting impressive damage on the vulnerable flanks of the Federal Army."

World War II

 Title: A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman   Memoir  #
Author: Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Dryden    Publisher: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1997      Pages: 390
Call Number: 940.54 D799
     “A-Train is the story of one of the black Americans who during WWII, graduated from Tuskegee Army Flying School and served as a pilot. Dryden has prepared an honest, fast-paced, balanced, vividly written, and very personal account of what it was like to be a black soldier, and specifically a pilot, during WWII and the Korean War.”

Title: Goring   Biography
Author: David Irving    Publisher: William Morrow, 1989    Pages: 511
Call Number: 943.086 I72
  "Goring was one of the twentieth century's most influential and colorful villains--Hilter's partner and alter ego. He became head of a secret intelligence-gathering agency and was architect of the Gestapo and the concentration camps. He was a near transvestite, a megalomaniac, and a morphine addict who became grotesquely fat and corrupt."

Industry

Title: Andrew Carnegie : and the Rise of Big Business  Biography
Author: Harold C. Livesay    Publisher: Little, Brown & Company     Pages: 189
Call Number: 338.767 L784
    "Carnegie was involved in reorganizing the whole pattern of industrial activity. Early in his career he changed jobs moving from textiles to the telegraph office and then to the railroads.  Much of what he learned about communication and transportation he later ingeniously adapted to the steel industry."

Title: The Duponts: Portrait of a Dynasty    Biography
Author: Marc Duke         Publisher: Dutton, 1976      Pages: 309
Call Number: 338.092 D877
    "On December 14, 1739, a second son was born to a Parisian watchmaker, named Samuel Dupont, and his wife. He was called Pierre Samuel, and he was to found one of the most famous dynasties in the world."

Title: Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness  of Howard Hughes   Biography
Author: Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele     Publisher: W.W. Norton, 1979  Pages: 627
Call Number: 338.767 B257
    "Howard Hughes lived  one of the greatest, most heroic, misunderstood mysterious, bizarre and tragic lives in American history. Here, at last, in a uniquely full and brilliantly documented biography by a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team, the mythology that surrounded that life is disentangled from the truth."

Title: Hammer     Autobiography
Author: Armand Hammer with Neil Lyndon    Publisher: Putnam's Sons, 1987     Pages: 526
Call Number: 338.092 H224
    "From Lenin to Gorbachev, FDR to Reagan: from presidents and prime ministers to shahs, sheiks and monarchs, he has known all the great leaders of the world. In the rough, raw Russia of 1921, Lenin asked Hammer to bring capitalism to the Soviet Union. In the turbulent days before Pearl Harbor, he helped Roosevelt put together the Lend Lease destroyer deal that rescued England. In the Cold War '60s, '70s, '80s, president after president awaited his briefings as he shuttled back and forth from Moscow, promoting peace initiatives, cultural exchanges, and every sort of mercy mission."

Title: Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Deams     Biography
Author: Michael D'Antonio     Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006      Pages: 267
Call Number: 338.7664 D194
"Hershey. The name means chocolate to America and the world, but, as Michael D'Antonio reveals, it also stands for an inspiring man and a uniquely successful experiment in community and capitalism that produced a business empire devoted to a higher purpose."

Title: Howard Hughes: Hell's Angel: America's Notorious Bisexual Billionaire         Biography
Author: Darwin Porter        Publisher: Blood Moon Productions, Ltd., 2005       Pages: 797
Call Number: 338.7092 P844
"This is a journey into the private and shadowy world of Howard Hughes, revealing for the first time the inside details about destructive and usually scandalous associations with other Hollywood players."

Title: Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart, Living Omnimedia         Biography
Author: Christopher Bryon    Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2002      Pages: 345
Call Number: 338.7616 B996
  "...traces Martha's journey from the troubled world of a working class family in New Jersey to the pinnacle of fame and power as the head of the billion dollar business bearing her name."

Title: The Mellon Family: A Fortune in History     Biography
Author: Burton Hersh       Publisher: Morrow, 1978    Pages: 588
Call Number: 338.092 H572
    "For almost a century now the chronicle of the Mellon family has remained our greatest uncracked historical vault. This is no accident: wealth avoids attention. Massive wealth--unequaled wealth in the Mellons' case--shun publicity on reflex."

Title: The Man and His Wonderful Shaving Device: King Gillette    Biography
Author: Russell Adams   Publisher: Little, Brown & Company, 1978   Pages: 289
Call Number: 338.768 A216
    "This book chronicles Gillette's struggles, to build first a better world and then a better razor.. It is the beguiling and entertaining story of a visionary who who could, and did practice free enterprise and preach vigorously against it with equal enthusiasm."

Title: The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century   Biography
Author: Steven Watts      Publisher: Alfred A. Knof, 2005      Pages: 536
Call Number: 338.76292 W353
 "Ford was the entrepreneur who first made the automobile affordable but who grew skeptical of consumerism's corrosive impact on moral values, an employer who insisted on a living wage for his workers but stridently opposed unions, who established the assembly line but worried about its effect on the work ethic, who welcomed African Americans to his company in the age of Jim Crow but was a rabid anti-Semite."

Inventors

Title: Alexander Graham Bell   Biography
Author: Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson   Publisher: Abrams, Inc, 1997   Pages: 289
Call Number: 0 621.385 G879
  "At the center of the book is Alexander Graham Bell himself, whose remarkably fertile imagination spawned a raft of inventions most of us have never associated with his name. Working in the United States and Canada, he devised the first practical phonograph, the metal detector, the hydrofoil, and the respirator."

Title: George Washington Carver: His Life and Faith in His Own Words      Biography #
Author: William J. Federer      Publisher: Amerisearh,  2002     Pages: 86
Call Number: 630.92 F293
George Washington Carver's life told through his letters and speeches.

Title: Lightning Man: the Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse  Biography
Author: Kenneth Silverman     Publisher: Knopf, 2003     Pages: 445
Call Number: 621.383 S587
"Pulitzer Prize-winning Kenneth Silverman presents the biography of the long and amazing life of Samuel F. B. Morse. Although he is remember as the person who invented the Morse Code is was also a gifted and prolific painter, photographer and politician. But Morse viewed his existence as accursed rather than illustrious, his every achievement seeming to end in loss and defeat."

Journalism

Title: American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood  Autobiography  *
Author: Marie Arana   Publisher: Dial Press, 2001  Pages 305
Call Number: 070.92 A662
Marie was raised in two cultures as a child. "When she immigrated with her family to the United States she comes to realize she is a hybrid American, an individual whose cultural identity was split in half."

  Title: Cronkite Remembers      Autobiography
Author: Walter Cronkite     Publisher: Alfred A. Knoff, 1996     Pages: 384
Call Number: 070.92 C947
    “Now at the age of eighty, Cronkite has written his life story- the personal and professional odyssey of the original anchorman for whom that very word was coined.”

  Title: Daughter of the Queen of Sheba    Memoir
Author: Jacki Lyden    Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1997   Pages: 257
Call Number: 070.92 L983
     “As a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Jacki Lyden has spent her adult life on the frontlines in some of the most dangerous war zones in the world.” Her mother suffered from what is now called manic depression and this is a memoir of a mother-daughter story “a testimony to obstinate devotion in the face of bewildering illness.”

Title: Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life  Biography
Author: Caroline Moorehead    Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2003    Pages: 424
Call Number: 070.92 M825
"Martha Gellhorn's heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. The preeminent--and often the only--female correspondent on the scene, she broke new ground for women in the male preserve of journalism."

Title: In My Place        Autobiography #
Author: Charlayne Hunter-Gault           Publisher: FarrarStraus Giroux, 1992   Pages: 257
Call Number: 070.92 H945
    Charlayne Hunter-Gault, an AfricanAmerican, is a national correspondent for PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. “In this direct, winning memoir, she tells the story of her life from her birth in the deep South still living out her legacy of the Civil War to her role in desegregating the University of Georgia, a high point in the Civil Rights Movement.”

Title: Means of Escape       Memoir
Author: Philip Caputo    Publisher: HarperCollins 1991    Pages: 405
Call Number: 070.4 C255
     “Means to Escape is an an adventure on multiple levels. It is a harrowing journey through lands torn by war. It is also Caputo’s own intensely personal voyage from a quiet, secure upbringing in suburban Chicago to the shadowed, dangerous world of the international terrorist.”

Title: No Borders: A Journalist's Search for Home    Autobiography *
Author: Jorge Ramos   Publisiher: HarpersCollins, 2002    Pages: 302
Call Number: 070.092 R175
  "Never before has Jorge Ramos, award-winning anchorman for America's top-rated Spanish-language nightly newscast, let readers into so personal a space. From the loves he's had throughout his life to his passion for journalism to his own sense of spiritual fulfillment, Ramos allows us to personally know a man we've trusted to deliver the news for years." Ramos then invites us into the early days of Spanish-language news and media - an industry that most early critics thought was useless and irrelevant- whose now skyrocketing popularity has made it a powerful player in American culture."

  Title: The Wars of Peggy Hull: the life and times of a War Correspondent   Biography
Author: Wilda M. Smith       Publisher: Texas Western Press, 1991    Pages: 269
Call Number: 070.4 S663
     Peggy Hull became the first woman accredited as a correspondent by the U.S. War Department. She covered the 1916 revolution on the Mexican border through WW II.

Law

Title: Ralph Bunche: UN Peacemaker    Biography #
Author: Peggy Mann   Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan    Pages: 363
Call Number: 341.233 M282
    "Ralph Bunch's amazing career was studded with "firsts." The first black man to hold a vitally important job in the U.S. State Department,, he was also one of the founders of the United Nations and the first American to be appointed Under-Secretary of the UN."

Title: Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice   Biography
Author: Joan Biskupic       Publisher: Harper/Collins, 2005      Pages: 338
Call Number: 347.73 B622
"The portrait that emerges is of a complex and multifaceted woman: lawyer, mother, A-list society hostess, and competitive athlete. To all appearances, she was the polite lady in pearls, handbag on her arm. But in the back rooms of politics and the law, she was a determined, focused strategist. O'Connor was the feminist who, rather than rebel against the male-dominated system, worked from within--and succeeded."

Life Sciences

  Title: Charles Darwin: A New Life          Biography
Author: John Bowlby        Publisher: W.W. Norton, 1990   Pages: 442
Call Number: 575.0092 B787
    “John Bowlby presents Charles Darwin—son, brother, husband, father, in an intimate and human portrait.”

  Title: Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist        Biography
Author: Adrian Desmond and James Moore    Publisher: W.W. Norton, 1991   Pages: 677
Call Number: 575 D464
     “The author brings to life Darwin’s reckless student days in Cambridge, his epic five-year voyage on the Beagle, and his grueling struggle to develop this theory of evolution.”

Title: George Washington Carver: Scientist & Symbol   Biography #
Author: Linda O. McMurry     Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1981    Pages: 313
Call Number: 630.924 M168
  "George Washington Carver captured the imagination of the American people. The romance of his life story and the eccentricities of his personality led to his metamorphosis into a kind of folk saint both in his lifetime and after. Carver made science seem more human and understandable."

 Title: Reason for Hope A Spiritual Journal         Memoir
Author: Jane Goodall with Phillip Berman      Publisher:  1999      Pages: 280
Call Number: 590.92 G646
     “Dr. Jane Goodall’s revolutionary study of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Preserve forever altered the very definition of ‘humanity.’ Now, in a poignant and insightful memoir, Jane Goodall explores her extraordinary life and personal spiritual odyssey, with observations as profound as the knowledge she has brought back from the forest.”

Title: Woman in the Mists: The story of Diane Fossey and the Mountain Gorillas of Africa       Biography
Author: Farley Mowat          Publisher: Warner, 1987       Pages: 371
Call Number: 599.88 M936
    "Deep in the mist-shrouded Virunga volcano country of Central Africa live some of the rarest, most intriguing animals on earth: the Mountain gorillas. And the extraordinary American woman who pursued her dreams into the very heart of Africa to study them was Dian Fossey. Here she fought for their survival against poachers and tribesmen, scientists and zoo collectors, and here, finally, she died for them, brutally murdered on December 28, 1985."
 

 Literature

Title: Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries  Biography
Author: Gillian Gill    Publisher: The Free Press, 1990    Pages: 204
Call Number: 823.912 G475
   "The author Gil goes beyond the cardboard image of a benign and timid Christie to discover a brilliant and eccentric woman whose passionate search for success was balanced by an obsession with privacy."

Title: The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life  Autobiography +
Author: Marjorie Agosin     Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1999    Pages: 187
Call Number: 861  A275
  "Agosin's childhood and early adolescence were spent with her Jewish family in Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. While her family raised her to regard her Jewish heritage with loving awareness, they also appreciated the dominant Catholic culture."
When Pinochet came to power the family was forced into exile in the United States. Agosin discusses all the cultures and the impact they had on her life.

Title: Bellow, a biography          Biography
Author: James Atlas     Publisher: Random House, 2000     Pages: 597
Call Number: 813.52 A881
"James Atlas gives here the first definitive account of Saul Bellow's turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events."

Title: Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel   Biography
Author: Judith and Neil Morgan    Publisher: Random House, 1995   Pages: 288
Call Number: 813.52 M848
  " Judith and Neil Morgan knew Ted Geisel in the latter half of his life, and here they merge their firsthand insights with scholarly research, drawing material from hundreds of letters and interviews, as well as from their subject's notes for an unpublished autobiography. The result is a frank and felicitous biography as unique as its subject."

Title: Teacher Man       Autobiogrpahy
Author: Frank McCourt       Publisher: Scribner, 2005    Pages: 257
Call Number: 371.10092 M131
"McCourt pays deep homage to the three decades he spent teaching English...punctuated by moments of crisis, connection and transcendence."

Title: Hans Christian Andersen    Biography
Author: Jackie Wullschlager    Publisher: Knopf, 2001   Pages: 440
Call Number: 839.8136 W964
  "Others before him collected and retold folk stories and fairy tales, but Hans Christian Andersen was the first to create them by himself. The universal familiarity of such stories as "The Ugly Duckling", "The Little Mermaid", and "The Emperor's New Clothes" shows how successful he was. By the time he reached middle age in the 1840's, in fact, he was probably the most famous writes in Europe, on familiar terms with kings and princes and eagerly read by a huge audience."

Title: Little Wilson and Big God  Autobiography
Author: Anthony Burgess    Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicoloson, 1986     Pages: 448
Call Number: 823.914 B955
  "Anthon Burgess, is widely recognized as one of the foremost writers in the English-speaking world. Little Wilson and Big God offers an unforgettable portrait of his first forty years, from his childhood in Manchester to the moment when, having been told he was dying of a brain tumor, he seriously began to write."

Title: Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott    Biography
Author: Martha Saxton     Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1977     Pages: 377
Call Number: 813.54 S518
  "Through no fault of her own, Louisa May Alcott is mainly remembered for a book which she despised as much as she loathed the celebrity it brought her: Little Women. Now, Martha Saxton has written the first modern biography of the ambivalent rebel and irreverent feminist who became our most popular author, in spite of herself."

Title: The Man Who Was Dr. Seuss  Biography
Author: Thomas Fensch   Publisher: New Century Books, 2000   Pages: 176
Call Number: 813.52 F341
  "A personal and literary biography of Theodor "Dr. Suess" Geisel. This book will show you: the origins of the hypnotic, galloping rhyme scheme which he used in his first book and in many thereafter, how a happy accident of fate resulted in the publication of his first book and more."

Title: Mourning Dove, 1888-1936    Autobiography  @
Author: Mourning Dove      Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990   Pages: 187
Call Number: 979.7 M931
    "Mourning Dove is widely known as the first Indian woman to publish a novel, Cogewea, (1927) was a romantic, and autobiographical to the extent that she blended family events with Salishan folklore and identified with her half-blood heroine. Many readers were curious about the author's real story. Responding to them and angered by charges that the novel was not hers, mourning Dove began to write about her life among her people, the Colviles near Kettle Falls on the upper Columbia River."

Title: The Passion of Ayn Rand   Biography
Author: Barbara Branden   Publisher: Doubleday & Company, 1986   Pages: 422
Call Number: 813.52 B817
  "The life of Ayn Rand was the material of fiction. But if one attempted to write it as a novel, the result would be preposterously unbelievable. Everything about her life and her person was of an epic scale..."

Title: Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography      Biography
Author: Peter Conn    Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1996    Pages: 382
Call Number: 813.52 C752
  "Peter Conn's spacious and scholarly study of Pearl S. Buck is in part, as one would expect, a book about the many faces of the American missionary world in China, and of a remarkable woman's attempt to draw creative sustenance from her experiences in that world. It is also a moving study of families under pressure, and of loss and love inside those families."

Title: The Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography   Biography
Author: Margaret Lane     Publisher: Federick Warne, 1968     Pages: 165
Call Number: 823.912 L266
  "Few lives have been more jealously hidden from the public eye than Beatrix Potter's. Even in old age, when she had long been famous, and the children of two generations had been brought up on Peter Rabbit and her other nursery masterpieces, she preferred to remain unknown, and behind her everyday character of a lakeland farmer--crusty, humorous, locally formidable--to conceal the artist."

Title: Tolkien    Biography
Author: Humphrey Carpenter     Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1977   Pages: 256
Call Number: 828.9  C295
   "Few writers of this century have had as much impact on the public as J.R.R. Tolkien, whose epic The Lord of the Rings has transcended the limitations of time, age and nationality to become required reading to millions."

Title: Virginia Woolf       Biography
Author: Mary Ann Caws       Publisher: Overlook Press, 2001    Pages: 126
Call Number: 823.912 C383
 "Virginia Woolf was one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century and a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Circle. While Woolf delighted in the friendships and intrigues of her literary mileu, her life was marred by mental illness, and in 1941 she drowned herself. Her life and work reveal her feminist ideals, her modernism, and her acute sensitivity to the minute details of human life."

Mathematics

Title: A Beautiful Mind     Biography
Author: Sylvia Nasar      Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998    Pages: 390
Call Number: 510.92 N243
A biography of John Nash, a mathematical genius that slipped into schizophrenia at the age of thirty. "He emerged after decades of ghost-like existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim." This book was an inspiration for a major motion picture.

Title: Julia: A Life in Mathematics    Biography
Author: Constance Reid   Publisher: Mathematical Association of America, 1996   Pages: 116
Call Number: 510.92 R353
   "Julie remains a heroine both for her mathematical achievement and for the barriers to women mathematicians that she brought down by becoming the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Science and the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society."

Medicine

Title: A Fortunate Man      Biography
Author: John Berger and Jean Mohr     Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1967   Pages: 147
Call Number: 610.924 B496
    This book is not so much a biography as it is short stories that describe his practice in a rural area of England. 

Title: Harvest of Hope: The Pilgrimage of a Mexican-American Physician  Autobiography *
Author: Jorge Prieto     Publisher: Univ. of Notre Dame, 1989        Pages: 157
Call Number: 610.92 P949
    "There is no nonsense or arrogance as this eminent physician relates his struggle to bring healing to all who came to him. He voices fierce emotions against needless poverty in the midst of affluence, and against racism in a land where freedom is so often mocked and where lack of love and concern breed ignorance and suffering."

Title: The Legacy of Dr. Lamaze: The Man who Changed Childbirth     Biography
Author: Caroline Gutmann       Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1999       Pages: 206
"....in the 1950's a revolutionary new technique for dealing with it. It is named for its inventor and tireless promoter, a French doctor named Fernand Lamaze. Lamaze proposed a simple yet radical way by which women could not only ease their labor but also take control over it." He was also the first doctor to insist that the father's presence was crucial in the delivery room.

Title: Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America       Biography
Author: Ellen Chesler        Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1992    Pages: 468
Call Number: 613.94 C525
    "Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives."

Title: Robert Koch: A Life in Medicine and Bacteriology   Biography
Author: Thomas Brock     Publisher: Science Tech, 1988    Pages: 302
Call Number: 616.014 B864
    "Robert Koch's story is a stirring example of how a lone country doctor can rise above all odds to become a true scientific revolutionary. Koch was the founder of the discipline of bacteriology, and his work formed the basis for all modern ideas of hygiene and public health."

Military

Title: A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman   Memoir  #
Author: Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Dryden    Publisher: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1997      Pages: 390
Call Number: 940.54 D799
     “A-Train is the story of one of the black Americans who during WWII, graduated from Tuskegee Army Flying School and served as a pilot. Dryden has prepared an honest, fast-paced, balanced, vividly written, and very personal account of what it was like to be a black soldier, and specifically a pilot, during WWII and the Korean War.”

Title: My American Journal       Autobiography #
Author: Colin L. Powell with Joesph E. Persico   Publisher: Random House, 1995    Pages: 612
Call Number: 355.0092 P882
  "Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history--"

Music

Title: And a Voice to Sing With    Memoir
Author: Joan Baez   Publisher: Summit Books, 1987     Pages: 378
Call Number: 784.4924 B142
  "In this disarmingly frank, moving, and sometimes very funny memoir, Joan Baez tells the story of her life, her loves, her beliefs, and her music."

Title: Dark Star: The Roy Orbison Story   Biography
Author: Ellis Amburn      Publisher: Carol Publishing Group, 1990     Pages: 236
Call Number: 782  A497
  "Dark Star follows Roy through his awkward childhood in the 1940s, the breakup of his band 'The Teen Kings', and the lurching ride toward fame and wealth. It also examines Roy's addictions to hard work, heavy touring schedules, fast motorcycles, smoking and speed, all of which would contribute to great personal tragedies, including the loss of his first wife and then two of his children in the late 1960s."

Title: Fats Waller    Biography #
Author: Maurice Waller      Publisher: Schirmer Books, 1977     Pages: 182
Call Number: 785.42 W198
 "Thomas "Fats" Waller began his jazz career early, learned fast, rose quickly, lived hard, and died young. A child prodigy who was playing piano at age six, his life was a furious burst of energy --- and it was all reflected in his music. A genius of the stride piano, Fats was admired and loved in jazz circles everywhere. He was known for his infectious good spirits, his crazy antics as a performer, the derby hat cocked to one side, his spoofing of sappy lyrics, his ability to consume massive quantities of food and liquor and his songs."

Title: Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980's    Biography
Author: Dave Marsh    Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1987   Pages: 452
Call Number: 784.54 M365
  "Marsh does more than tell the story; he also probes its meaning for Bruce Springsteen as an artist and a very private human being, and its consequences for the millions of Springsteen fans."

Title: Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray  Autobiography #
Authors: Albert Murray and Count Basie   Publisher: Random House, 1985    Pages: 385
Call Number: 786.42 B311
  "Good Morning Blues gives the fascinating life and times of one of the pre-eminent figures in jazz history, leader of perhaps the greatest precision brass ensemble of the century, the relaxed power of whose swing is immediately recognizable to all music lovers."

Title: If you Could See What I Hear   Autobiography
Author: Tom Sullivan and Derek Gill    Publisher: Harper & Rowe, 1975   Pages: 184
Call Number: 784.092 S952
 "This is the autobiography of a gifted young man who became blind shortly after birth. Possessing a rare combination of guts and natural talent, Tom Sullivan refused to accept the limits of his handicap."

Title: Judy Garland: a biography     Biography
Author: Anne Edwards     Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1975   Pages: 306
Call Number: 784.092 Ed26
  "Anne Edwards has re-created the life, loves, the sorrows, the joys and the disasters of a legendary woman."

Title: Just Mahalia, Baby      Biography
Author: Laurraine Goreau     Publisher: Word Books, 1975   Pages: 610
Call Number: 784.0924  G661
"Rich in poetic condensation and vivid imagery, it reaches back to recreate an era and a way of life that no longer exist: it surfaces hidden folk lore and cultural patterns; it delves into Voodoo and a secret psychic world. It shows you jazz at its root when it was "jass" the Devil's temptation; first-hand, it gives you the surprising sociological significances of the whole gospel movement..."

Title: The Life of Verdi   Biography
Author: John Rosselli     Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2000   Pages: 186
Call Number: 782.1092  R828
  "Verdi's long life spanned Napoleonic rule and the age of broadcasting. He was the last great composer to give direct voice to basic human emotions, yet he was not always as straightforward as the directness of his work suggest: he is neither the uneducated peasant he claimed to be nor the conservative nationalist he seemed to become in his later years."

Title: Long Ago and Far Away: James Taylor, his life and music    Biography
Author: Timothy White     Publisher: Omnibus Press, 2002    Pages: 322
Call Number: 782.4216 W588
"In the major biography, Timothy White explores both the career and the troubled personal journey of the Legendary singer-songwriter."

Title: Paul Robeson: All-American  Biography  #
Author: Dorothy Butler Gilliam     Publisher: New Republic Book Company, 1976   Pages: 189
Call Number: 790.2  G481
   "Paul Robeson was one of the most admired and best-known figures of his time. The youngest son of a black preacher, this gifted athlete, scholar, actor, and singer rose quickly to the heights of international adulation and celebrity. Then, for his political convictions, he was vilified at home and spent the last fifteen years abroad  as a recluse in Philadelphia."

Title: Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie    Biography
Author: Ed Cray     Publisher: W.W. Norton, 2004     Pages: 392
Call Number: 782.42162 C911
  "Woody Guthrie was, is, America's balladeer. During the epoch of our deepest despair, the Great Depression, his were the songs that lifted the lowly spirits of the 'ordinary,' the millions of dispossessed. They may have lacked for bread, but he offered them something else: self-esteem, hope, and a laugh or two along the way...."

Title: September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle  Biography
Author: Peter J. Levinson    Publisher: Billboard Books, 2001    Pages: 303
Call Number: 780.92 L665
"September in the Rain is the first biography of the most highly respected arranger in the history of American music."

Title: Shostakovich: A Life    Biography
Author: Laurel E. Fay       Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2000    Pages:287
Call Number: 780.92 F282
  "For this authoritative post-cold-war biography of Shostakovich's illustrious but turbulent career under Soviet rule, Laurel E. Fay has gone back to primary documents: Shostakovich's many letters, concert programs and reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of his contemporaries. Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule."

Title: To BE or not to BOP     Autobiography #
Author: Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser   Publisher: Doubleday, 1979      Pages: 497
Call Number: 785.42 G478
  "The autobiography of jazz genius, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, a man know internationally as an ambassador of American entertainment, a trumpet player whose style changed for good that instrument's capabilities, and a musician whose contribution to the music call "Bebop" makes him a founding father of modern jazz."

Title: Trust Your Heart; an autobiography      Autobiography
Author: Judy Collins    Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1987   Pages: 266
Call Number: 784.0024
  "Writing in the form of a journal, Ms Collins speaks of the joys and the pains of her childhood--of her family's move to Los Angeles, where at age five she began to study classical piano, and of the blind, demanding father she adored. At age thirteen she performed a Mozart piano concerto with a Denver symphony orchestra, but, still in her tees, she abandoned her future as a classical pianist for a new discovery--folk music and the guitar."

Title: Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole  Biography #
Author: Leslie Gourse   Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1991    Pages: 243
Call Number: 782.42164 G717
  "Nat King Cole made his mark as one of the greatest singers of this century. Yet Cole's honeyed singing style belied a complicated, often tortured route to stardom. For it Nat King Cole achieved more than most poor blacks living in 1920s Chicago ever dreamed of, he paid a heavy price for that success. His life embraced may contradictions."

Title: The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin'   Biography
Author: Bill Zehme    Publisher: HarperCollins, 1997    Pages: 236
Call Number: 782.42164 Ze44
  "Leader. Voice. Swinger. Fighter. Drinker. Actor. Prankster. Gentleman. Father. Lover. Friend. The most important entertainer of the twentieth century, Frank Sinatra did nothing small. The Way You Wear Your Hat is a fresh, insightful look at the man and the way he swaggered."

Title: Zappa     Biography
Author: Barry Miles      Publisher: Grove Press, 2004
Call Number: 782.42166 M643
  "This biography brings the many different personalities of this music legend together for the first time: the self-taught musician and composer who gained fame with the "rock" band the Mothers of Invention; the political antagonist who mocked presidents while being invited by Vaclav Havel to represent Czechoslovakia's cultural interests in the United Stated, and Zappa the family man who was married to the same woman for over thirty years."
 

Native Americans

Title: Grandmother's Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life  Autobiography  @
Author: Alma Hogan Snell      Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2000    Pages: 182
Call Number: 978.6 S671
  "Grandmother's Grandchild is the remarkable story of Alma Hogan Snell, a Crow woman brought up by her grandmother, the famous medicine woman Pretty Shield. Snell grew up during the 1920's and 1930's, part of the second generation of Crows to be born into reservation life. Like many of her contemporaries, she experienced poverty, personal hardships and prejudice and left home to attend federal Indian schools. What makes Snell's story particularly engaging is her exceptional storytelling style."

Title: Lakota Woman   Autobiography  @
Author: Mary Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes   Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1990    Pages: 263
Call Number: 978.362 B826
   "Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on a South Dakota reservation. Rebelling against the aimless drink, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopelessness of reservation life, she joing the new movement of a tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies and eventually married Leonard Crow Dog, the movement's chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance."

Title: Mourning Dove, 1888-1936    Autobiography  @
Author: Mourning Dove      Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990   Pages: 187
Call Number: 979.7 M931
    "Mourning Dove is widely known as the first Indian woman to publish a novel, Cogewea, (1927) was a romantic, and autobiographical to the extent that she blended family events with Salishan folklore and identified with her half-blood heroine. Many readers were curious about the author's real story. Responding to them and angered by charges that the novel was not hers, mourning Dove began to write about her life among her people, the Colviles near Kettle Falls on the upper Columbia River."

Title: To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman  Memoir @
Author: Lucy Thompson    Publisher: Heyday Books, 1991   Pages: 284
Call Number: 979.4 T473
    "Lucy Tompson is, even today, one of the few Native American women to have written a book about her people." Originally written in 1916, this edition has a new introduction but the text remains the same. "Concerned about the survival of her people and their customs, and concerned also that the true story of the Yurok was not being told - not by the popular press, not by the anthropologists - she took it upon herself to write this remarkable book."

Title: Viola Martinez, California Paiute  Biography @
Author: Diana Meyers Bahr      Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003   Pages: 170
Call Number: 979.4004 B151
  "The Life story of Viola Martinez, an Owens Valley Paiute Indian of eastern California, extends over nine decades on the twentieth century. Viola experienced forced assimilation in an Indian boarding school, overcame racial stereotypes to pursue a college degree, and spent several years working at a Japanese American Internment camp during World War II. Finding herself poised uncertainly between Indian and white worlds, Viola was determined to turn her marginalized existence into an opportunity for personal empowerment."

Organizations

Title: My Name is Bill: Bill Wilson: His life and the Creation of Alcoholic Anonymous       Biography
Author: Susan Cheever        Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004      Pages: 257
Call Number: 362.292 C515
"Alcoholics Anonymous is a worldwide organization that since 1935 has helped people break free from the destructive influence of intoxicating and addictive substances. This great wave of comfort and help that has covered the world had its beginnings in one man, born shortly before the twentieth century. Utilizing exhaustive research, Cheever traces Bill Wilson's life beginning with his birth in a small town in Vermont, where, following the breakup of his parents' marriage, he was raised primarily by his grandparents. Handsome and intelligent, with a wit and charm that both women and men responded to, he seemed at the outset to be capable of achieving anything he wants. Wilson, however also suffered from deep-seated insecurity, and once he was away from the provincial Vermont town, he found that alcohol helped relieve his self-doubts and brought out the charm and wit that had made him a favorite in school."

Philosophy

  Title: The Alcotts: Biography of a Family        Biography
Author: Madelon Bedell         Publisher:  Clarkson N. Potter, 1980    Pages: 334
Call Number: 141.3 B411
     “This is the story of the lives of the nineteenth century philosopher and educator Amos Bronson Alcott; his wife, Abby May, and their four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May. The Alcotts were the real-life prototypes for the Marches in Little Women.”

  Title: The Rest of the Dream        Biography  #
Author: Wade Hall       Publisher: University Press of Kentucky, 1988     Pages: 224
Call Number: 185.97 H181
    The life of Lyman Johnson, a grassroots civil rights leader. Born in 1906, his grandparents were slaves yet his father was a college graduate. This book is an account of his fight for racial justice.

Title: Wittgenstein: A Life         Biography
Author: Brian McGuinness    Publisher: University of California Press, 1988   Pages: 316
Call Number: 192 M148
     “Wottgenstein’s thought, more than that of any other modern philosopher, was rooted in a highly personal and deeply felt moral vision of the world.” This book attempts to make connections between his unusual life and his work.

  Title: Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography      Biography
Author: Lesley Chamberlain     Publisher: Picador, 1998      Pages: 218
Call Number: 193 C443
     “In this accessible, moving biography, Chamberlain examines with passion and insight the mind of a genius at its creative pinnacle.”

Political Science

Title: A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait       Biography #
Author: Jervis Anderson    Publisher: Harcourt, 1972       Pages: 352
Call Number: 323.4 A547
     “This is a book about the transforming difference the dignity and persistence of one man has made to the cause of social justice and black liberation in America.”

Title: California Rising     Biography
Author: Ethan Rarick        Publisher: University of California Press, 2005     Pages: 384
Call Number: 979.4053  R221
  "Set against the riveting historical landscape of the late fifties and sixties, the book offers shrewd insights into history as well as a fascinating glimpse of those who charted its course - including the Brown family dynasty and such national figures as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon."

Title: Florence Harding: The First Lady, The Jazz Age, and the Death of America's most Scandalous President      Biography
Author: Carl Sferrazza Anthony    Publisher: William Morrow & Co., 1998     Pages: 543
Call Number: 973.914 A628
   This author "recounts the drama of Florence Harding's personality and uses the White House to bring to life Jazz Age America. He shows how Florences's friendship with Evalyn McLean, the morphine-addicted owner of the Hope Diamond and The Washington Post was one of the defining bonds in her public life. Drawing on newly declassified FBI documents, Florence's recently discovered diary, and many other sources, Anthony offer a penetrating reanalysis of the Teapot Dome scandal and the 'intimidation squad' used to silence Harding's political opponents."

  Title: Frances Willard        Biography
Author: Ruth Bordin        Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986   Pages: 240
Call Number: 322.44 B729
     “Frances Willard (1839-98) devoted most of her life to building the women’s organization that ultimately secured the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. She also was an effective advocate of other causes, especially women’s suffrage and education.’

Title: John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court  Biography
Author: R. Kent Newmyer    Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, 2001   Pages: 485
Call Number: 347.7236 N556
  "As constitutional innovator, Chief Justice John Marshall was among the most important institution builders in American history. Better than anyone before, Kent Newmyer illuminates the origins and scope of Marshall's contribution t