Amanda Marks

English 112B

Wednesday, 4:00PM

Dr. Warner

December 6th, 2006

Annotated Bibliography:

Non-Fiction: Memoirs, Biographies, and Autobiographies

 

            Nearly everyone in the country is exposed to non-fiction on a daily basis. Magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals, and information provided on the internet are all forms of non-fiction. However, it seems like significantly fewer people, including students, are regularly exposed to non-fiction in the form of a memoir, a biography, or an autobiography.

            Memoirs, Biographies, and Autobiographies are unique in the way that they are capable of teaching students about a specific person or event from a first-hand perspective. Learning things from a first-hand perspective can give students greater knowledge, appreciation, and understanding of the topic that the non-fiction work focuses on. Memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies often focus on people and events that are historically and culturally significant to the world. Exposing students to these works can potentially shape their own world perspective.

Introducing young adults to non-fiction is important because it will familiarize them with a style of writing that they will be exposed to frequently during college. Reading memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies will encourage young adults to seek out information from sources other than the newspaper and magazines. Newspapers and magazines habitually tell their readers what to think. Whereas, Memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies present the situation as it happened to the subject leaving the reader free to form their own opinion.

            I think that young adults will enjoy this particular bibliography of memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies because each work focuses on a real-life event that took place within the last century. The bibliography includes events as recent as 1999, the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and 2001, the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th. Each non-fiction work on this list is about an event, a person, or a concept that has drastically affected the modern world.

Beals, Melba Patillo. Warriors Don�t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock�s Central High. New York: Washington Square Press, 1995.

Summary: In 1957 Melba Patillo turned sixteen. That was also the year she became a warrior on the front lines of a civil rights firestorm. Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board Education, she was one of nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock's Central High School. This is her remarkable story. You will listen to the cruel taunts of her schoolmates and their parents. You will run with her from the threat of a lynch mob's rope. You will share her terror as she dodges lighted sticks of dynamite, and her pain as she washes away the acid sprayed into her eyes. But most of all you will share Melba's dignity and courage as she refuses to back down. (http://www.simonsays.com/content/book)

Bradley, John. Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 2006.

Summary: In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima�and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag. Now the son of one of the flag raisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. (http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/catalog)

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank. New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 1993.

Summary: Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic -- a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short. (http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/catalog)

Gallo, Donald R. First Crossing: Stories about Teen Immigrants. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2004.

Summary: It's hard enough to be a teenager, trying to fit in, trying to get along with your parents, trying to figure out how the world works. Being from a different culture makes everything that much harder. Fleeing from political violence in Venezuela, Amina and her family have settled in the United States. Sarah, adopted, is desperate to know her Korean birth parents. Maya is adapting just fine to life in the U.S. and wishes her strict Kazakh parents would follow suit. Adrian's new friends have some spooky -- and hilarious -- misconceptions about his Romanian origins. Whether they've transitioned from Mexico to the United States or from Palestine to New Mexico, the characters in this anthology have all ventured far and have faced innumerable challenges. Like the hundreds of immigrants who arrive on U.S. soil every year, each courageous teenager in FIRST CROSSING is unique. (http://www.candlewick.com/cat)

Hasday, Judy L. Columbine High School Shooting: Student Violence. New Jersey: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2002.

Summary: This slim, abundantly illustrated account of the shooting at the Littleton, Colorado, high school is plentiful in facts about perpetrators and victims, circumstances leading up to the massacre, and the rampage itself. The moment-by-moment recounting of the methodical, 46-minute killing spree makes for chilling reading. The often graphic color photographs appearing throughout will undoubtedly attract some browsers, but they offer little to extend the text. Although Hasday fails to look at the incident within the context of school violence as a whole and doesn't effectively relate Columbine to greater societal problems, her presentation of the basic facts of the tragedy is quite thorough. A time line of other school shootings, chapter notes, a glossary, and listings of further readings and Web sites are appended. (http://www.amazon.com)

Kherdian, David. The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1979.

Summary: David Kherdian re-creates his mother's voice in telling the true story of a childhood interrupted by one of the most devastating holocausts of our century. Vernon Dumehjian Kherdian was born into a loving and prosperous family. Then, in the year 1915, the Turkish government began the systematic destruction of its Armenian population. (http://www.harpercollins.com/books)

Loffreda, Beth. Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Summary: The infamous murder in October 1998 of a twenty-one-year-old gay University of Wyoming student ignited a media frenzy. The crime resonated deeply with America's bitter history of violence against minorities, and something about Matt Shepard himself struck a chord with people across the nation. Although the details of the tragedy are familiar to most people, the complex and ever-shifting context of the killing is not. Losing Matt Shepard explores why the murder still haunts us�and why it should. (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog)

O�Neill, Susan Kramer. Don�t Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.

Summary: In this powerful story collection�the first such work of fiction by a woman who served in Vietnam�Susan O�Neill offers a remarkable view of the war from a female perspective. All the nurses who served there had a common bond: to attend to the wounded. While men were sent to protect America�s interests at any cost, nurses were trained to save the lives of anyone�soldier or citizen, ally or enemy�who was brought through the hospital doors. It was an important distinction in a place where killing was sometimes the only objective. And since they were so vastly outnumbered, women inevitably became objects of both reverence and sexual desire. For American nurses in Vietnam, and the men among whom they worked and lived, a common defense against the steady onslaught of dead and dying, wounded and maimed, was a feigned indifference�the irony of the powerless. With the assistance of alcohol, drugs, and casual sex, "Don�t mean nothing" became their mantra, a means of coping with the other war�the war against total mental breakdown. Each or these tales offers new and profound insight into the ways the war in Vietnam forever changed the lives of everyone who served there. (http://www.umass.edu/umpress)

Pelzer, Dave. A Child Called �It�: One Child�s Courage to Survive. Florida: HCI Publishers, 1995.

Summary: David J. Pelzer's mother, Catherine Roerva, was, he writes in this ghastly, fascinating memoir, a devoted den mother to the Cub Scouts in her care, and somewhat nurturant to her children--but not to David, whom she referred to as "an It." This book is a brief, horrifying account of the bizarre tortures she inflicted on him, told from the point of view of the author as a young boy being starved, stabbed, smashed face-first into mirrors, forced to eat the contents of his sibling's diapers and a spoonful of ammonia, and burned over a gas stove by a maniacal, alcoholic mom. Sometimes she claimed he had violated some rule--no walking on the grass at school!--but mostly it was pure sadism. Inexplicably, his father didn't protect him; only an alert schoolteacher saved David. One wants to learn more about his ordeal and its aftermath, and now he's written a sequel, The Lost Boy, detailing his life in the foster-care system. (http://www.amazon.com)

Thoms, Annie. With Their Eyes: September 11th-- The View from a High School at Ground Zero. New York: HarperTeen Publishers, 2002.

Summary: Tuesday, September 11, seemed like any other day at Stuyvesant High School, only a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. The semester was just beginning, and the students, faculty, and staff were ready to start a new year. Within a few hours that Tuesday morning, they would experience an event that transformed all their lives completely. Here, in their own words, are the firsthand stories of a day none of us will ever forget.