Summer Reading 2008 (AP English 11)

Synopsis of each memoir:

Southern

All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg

Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist, Rick Bragg, grew up in the poor and rural south of the 1960's.  His story pays homage to the selfless efforts of his mother to raise her three young sons without the assistance of their heavy drinking and abusive Korean War vet father.

Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg

Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, and a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River.  He made boats out of car hoods and knew how to pack a wound with brown sugar to stop the blood. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so that he would not be ignorant.  His is a story of a self-made, true American hero.

An Hour Before Daylight: Memoirs of a Rural Boyhood by Jimmy Carter

President Carter offers an unforgettable portrait of his family.  His father was a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of "separate" respect and fairness, and his strong-willed and well-read mother was a nurse who cared for all in need regardless of their position in the community.

One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. She writes of growing up in the South, of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught, and of the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance.

My Losing Season by Pat Conroy

Conroy’s memoir of his losing season on the basketball team at the Citadel in 1966-1967. For some, it was a season best forgotten; but for Conroy, it was a season best remembered for its hardwood heroics, Olympian fortitude, and larger-than-life adversaries.

Legal/Crime

Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean

When Helen Prejean was invited to write to a prisoner on Death Row who brutally killed two teenagers, she had little idea how much it would change her life. Although she abhorred his crime, she befriended a man as he faced the electric chair. As powerful an indictment of the death penalty as has ever been written, her book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Truman Capote reconstructs the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers.  This is a fascinating and disturbing read.

Adventure & Travel

Into Thin Air by John Krakauer

A childhood dream of someday ascending Mount Everest, a lifelong love of climbing, and an expense account propelled writer Jon Krakauer to the top of the Himalayas. His tale is powerful and cautionary—an adventure gone horribly wrong.

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, and encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. He reflects on the American character, racial hostility, and on a particular form of American loneliness that he finds almost everywhere.  He also examines the unexpected kindness of strangers that is a very real part of our national identity.

Blue Highways:A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon

William Least Heat-Moon's journey into America began with little more than the need to put home behind him. At a turning point in his life, he packed up a van he called “Ghost Dancing” and decided to leave his old life behind him.  Escaping into the country, Heat-Moon discovers that people and places on his roundabout 13,000-mile trip down the back roads and through small, forgotten towns, are unexpected, sometimes mysterious, and full of the spark and wonder of ordinary life.

Contemporary

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Eggers lost both his parents to cancer within a matter of months when he was only 22, and it is left to him (with the aid of his older sister and, to a lesser degree, his older brother) to raise his eight-year-old brother, Toph.  He and Toph pick up and move from their Chicago-area hometown to the San Francisco Bay region, where Eggers fashions a safe environment for Toph.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

A funny collection of autobiographical essays about language itself. Meet the lisping young fifth-grader David "Thedarith," who arms himself with a thesaurus, learns every non-sibilant word in the lexicon, eludes his wily speech therapy teacher, and amazes his countrified North Carolina teachers with his out-of-nowhere, man-sized vocabulary—and that’s only in the first chapter!

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

During the Christmas holidays in 2003, novelist Joan Didion began a month of hell. Just a few days before Christmas, Didion and her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, watched helplessly as their newly married daughter, Quintana, came down with a horrifying succession of illnesses that finally led to complete septic shock and system breakdown. A week later, as Quintana hovered close to death, Dunne collapsed and died. Didion plunged into a mad state of "magical thinking."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver and her family take a journey away from the industrial-food pipeline and into a rural life in which they vow to buy only food they have raised in their own neighborhood or have grown themselves—or they learn to live without it.

Childhood in America

American Childhood by Annie Dillard

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

Growing Up by Russell Baker

Pulitzer Prize winner for Distinguished Commentary and columnist for The New York Times, Russell Baker traces his youth in the mountains of rural Virginia.  When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed and matriarchal, never looked back. As is often the case, early hardships made the man.

African American

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston's candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography is an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston's very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life—public and private—of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the black experience in America.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou

Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than she learns that Malcolm X has been assassinated.  Devastated, she tries to put her life back together.  On a trip to New York, she meets Martin Luther King, Jr., who asks her to become his coordinator in the North.  Song Flung Up to Heaven ends as Maya Angelou begins to write the first sentences of Caged Bird.

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Black Boy is Richard Wright’s unforgettable story of growing up in the Jim Crow South. The book is a lyrical and skillfully wrought description of Wright’s hungry youth in rural Mississippi and Memphis, told from the perspective of the adult Wright, who was still trying to come to grips with the cruel deprivations and humiliations of his childhood.

Nature & Animals

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

In this book, Dinesen gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells of the country and the natives, of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom, and of her guests that included the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, an old charcoal burner. She tells of primitive festivals, of big game that she considered “neighbors”—lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes—and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley, filled with "mystery, death, beauty, violence."

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the heart that beat within, is a fascinating, sometimes raucous, always personal account of a place that has already disappeared, but is worth remembering and living through.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

This book includes an account of the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside and another section that gathers together the informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled around the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere.  In a final section, Leopold addresses more formally the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation.

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

Whether struggling mightily to position a calf for birthing, or comforting a lonely old man whose beloved dog and only companion has died, Herriot's heartwarming and often hilarious stories of his first years as a country vet perfectly depict the wonderful relationship between man and animal—and they intimately portray a man whose humor, compassion , and love of life are truly inspiring.

Chinese American

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girl Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

Irish American

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants, Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland.  McCourt’s chronically unemployed alcoholic father appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty and frequent death and illness and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life.

Japanese American

Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii by Garrett Hongo

Garrett Hongo grew up with a profound sense of estrangement from his past: Born in Hawaii, raised in Los Angeles after the age of six, a fourth-generation Japanese American, inheritor of a recent past more comfortably forgotten than kept alive—for Hongo, the "knowing" he so desired would come only when he returned to Volcano, the tiny town where he was born. Hongo combines childhood recollections with the insight that this journey provided to him about his own family, about the experience of the Japanese American community at large in this century, and about the relationship of both the inner and outer landscapes of the human imagination.

Native American

The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

Scott Momaday retells myths of his people and describes the Indian way of life he knew as a child. He tells of how his people entered the world through a hollow log, shares stories of great events and heroes, and recalls fantastic creatures like a buffalo with horns of steel.

Vietnam War

If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien

O’Brien relates an intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman’s rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong.

Puerto Rican

When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago

Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of tenderness as well as domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, to decipher the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, to cultivate a taste for the delectable sausage called morcilla, and to hone the ritual for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity.

Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood by Judith Ortiz Cofer

A collection of writings by the poet, novelist, and essayist recalling her childhood spent shuttling between the land of her birth and the family home in New Jersey.

South American

The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende

Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss—the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily letters the author and her mother, who lives in Chile, wrote to each other, Allende bares her soul and recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her that becomes a new kind of family.

South African

Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.
 

Political

Faith of My Fathers by John McCain

The Republican senator from Arizona tells of his naval forbears: his grandfather commanded an aircraft carrier in the Second World War while his father presided over all naval forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. They were the first father-son admirals in American history. Young John McCain knew he had enormous shoes to fill and rebelled against many of the expectations set for him. McCain also describes the awful details of his imprisonment and tells how he stayed mentally strong during seemingly endless months of solitary confinement.

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. Obama's not-unhappy youth is a sometimes lonely voyage to racial identity.

Religious

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs

Jacobs chronicles 12 months living a remarkably strict Biblical life full of charity, chastity, and facial hair. Through it all, he brilliantly manages to keep things light while avoiding the sinful eye of judgment.

[synopsis of each memoir compiled from barnesandnoble.com]