Bruce Dobler's Compenidum of Creative Nonfiction: printer version

And...be sure to check out Dobler's Dozen!
Twelve indispensable handbooks and reference guides for writers: http://www.pitt.edu/~bdobler/handbooks.html

Alternatively known as "literary journalism" or the "literature of fact," creative nonfiction is that branch of writing which employs literary techniques and artistic vision usually associated with fiction or poetry to report on actual persons and events. Though only recently identified and taught as a distinct and separate literary genre, the roots of creative nonfiction run deeply into literary tradition and history. The genre, as currently defined, is broad enough to include nature and travel writing, the personal memoir and essay, as well as "new journalism," "gonzo journalism," and the "nonfiction novel." -- Bruce Hoffman, University of Pittsburgh English Department website "Creative Nonfiction Writing Links."

Because there is now a fairly long tradition of graduate MFA work in fiction and poetry, students in those areas come to the University knowing what to expect. "Nonfiction," on the other hand, is a relatively new offering in the MFA and may seem broader and more inclusive than the other genres. Therefore we offer these guidelines:

The terms "creative nonfiction" and "literary journalism" should serve as indicators as to the intent of our program. We would expect our students to work in any of a wide variety of styles and sub-genres such as autobiography, biography, history, speculative or personal essay, new journalism, investigative reporting/analysis and quality feature writing of the quality that appears in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and literary quarterlies.

II. A good "first read"
(For students or anyone interested in learning the basics of "literary journalism")

Lee Gutkind, the author of several books of creative nonfiction and the founder/editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, has some interesting things to tell us about this genre of writing, which strives to communicate real-life stories dramatically. The most important quality that a creative nonfiction writer can have, writes Gutkind, is passion: "A passion for the written word; a passion for the search and discovery of knowledge; and a passion for ... understand[ing] intimately how things in this world work." Gutkind offers instruction on finding story ideas, focusing one's work, keeping story files, fact checking, and interviewing; he tells us what to expect from editors and agents; and he teaches us how to know when we're ready to start writing (when you can "think of nothing more to ask or to learn")....Appendices include a sample book proposal and readings. -- Editorial Review (amazon.com)

A pioneer in the writing and teaching of nonfiction presents a practical guide to composing creative nonfiction that covers the entire process -- from initial psychological preparation to marketing a finished piece. Written in an engaging style, the book provides pertinent information on conducting research, using interviews, "immersion journalism," cinematic writing, the ethical and moral concerns of writing subjective truth and more. Features examples culled from the author's journal, Creative Nonfiction, to illustrate writing techniques....LEE GUTKIND is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, the first school to grant an M.F.A. degree in creative nonfiction. -- From The publisher, John Wiley & Sons

Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality, Gay Talese, with introduction by Barbara Lounsberry*
[Great sampler!]
This informal book traces the evolution of literary nonfiction and reveals how Gay Talese writes in the genre. In addition, articles by such masters as John McPhee, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Dillard illustrate various writing techniques. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)
Table of Contents
Gay Talese, Origins of a Nonfiction Writer
Barbara Lounsberry, Anthology Introduction
I. REALITY RESEARCHED.
Joseph Mitchell, The Rats on the Waterfront
John McPhee, From Oranges
Tracy Kidder, From House
Gay Talese, From The Bridge
II. REALITY PRESENTED -- WITH STYLE.
Thomas Keneally, From Schindler'sList
John Hersey, From Hiroshima
Truman Capote, From In Cold Blood
Norman Mailer, From The Executioner's Song
Gay Talese, The Loser
Joan Didion, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
Thomas Thompson, From Blood and Money
Tom Wolfe, Las Vegas (What?). Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy). Las Vegas!!!!
James Thurber, University Days
S. J. Perelman, No Starch in the Dhoti, Sil Vous Plait
John McNulty, Two Bums Here Would Spend Freely Except for Poverty
III. REALITY ENLARGED.
Jack Finney, From The Crime of the Century
Art Spiegelman, From Maus II, A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
St. Clair McKelway, Some Fun with the F.B.I.
Terry Southern, Twirling at Ole Miss
Melissa Fay Greene, From Praying for Sheetrock
C.D.B. Bryan, From Friendly Fire .
Michael Herr, From Dispatches
Hunter S. Thompson, From The Curse of Lono
Frank Conroy, From Stop-Time .
Tobias Wolff, From This Boy's Life
Gay Talese, From Unto the Sons
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of the Cell,
William Least Heat-Moon, From PrairyErth
Annie Dillard, An Expedition to the Pole

Contemporary creative nonfiction: the art of truth, Bill Roorbach
[You'll be glad you found it!]
Just read the back cover description: "The most inclusive collection of creative nonfiction available, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth is the only anthology that brings together examples of all three of the main forms in the genre: the literary memoir, the personal essay, and literary journalism. Featuring a generous and diverse sampling of over sixty works, this collection includes beautiful, disturbing, and instructive works of literary memoir by such writers as Mary McCarthy, Annie Dillard, and Judy Ruiz; smart, funny, and moving personal essays by authors ranging from E.B. White to Phillip Lopate to Ntozake Shange; and incisive, vivid, and quirky examples of literary journalism by Truman Capote, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sebastian Junger, and many others. This unique volume also contains examples of captivating nature writing, exciting literary travel writing, brilliant essays in science, surprising creative cultural criticism, and moving literary diaries and journals, incorporating several classic selections to set a context for the contemporary work. The editor's general introduction and introductions to each of the five sections provide useful definitions, crucial history, critical context, and abundant issues to debate. Ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in creative nonfiction, literary journalism, essay writing, and all levels of composition, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth is also an essential resource for all nonfiction writers, from novices to professionals."

The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, Robert S. Boynton
[Great tips from some of our greatest writers!]
Boynton uses the clunky moniker "new new journalism" to describe a group of reporters today who write article- and book-length examinations of their subjects, often pioneering new reporting techniques (such as Adrian Nicole Leblanc's trick of leaving her tape recorder with her subjects when she went home as a way of getting them to open up without her around-a method that worked to wonderful effect in her Random Family). Yet, Boynton points out, these writers also stay true to strict journalistic standards, unlike Tom Wolfe and the New Journalists, whose creative narrative methods broke all the rules. Many of the reporters Boynton highlights are also motivated by an activist impulse that informs but never overpowers their work. Boynton, the director of New York University's magazine journalism program, offers a nuts-and-bolts approach to understanding the way these reporters write, interviewing them on the smallest of details, such as how they organize their notes, what color pens they use and how they set ground rules with sources who aren't media savvy. Featuring lengthy discussions with star scribes such as William Langewiesche (American Ground) and Michael Lewis (Moneyball), this batch of discussions is a gold mine of technique, approach and philosophy for journalists, writers and close readers alike. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. -- Review from Publisher's Weekly

Joan Didion, The White Album* and Slouching Toward Bethlehem*
Upon its publication in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilitiesf nonfiction.
"In her portraits of people," The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful. . . . A rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country." -- From the Publisher (randomhouse.com)

Didion's second collection of short nonfiction works,White Album, is more personal and confessional than the first.

[ For those of you who would like to read a review from someone who can hardly bear to read Didion, I offer you this link to From Off Center: Essays by Barbara Grizzutti Harrison (1980), found on a course materials website at Penn State:
http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html . Among other things, essay deals with a certain class-snobbishness that does put off some readers. As to style, Harrison says bluntly: "Didion's 'style' is a bag of tricks. Some of the effects she produces are quite pretty, even momentarily beautiful. But make no mistake: these are tricks -- techniques -- that can be learned (I don't know why they have evoked so much wonder)." ]

Gay Talese, Fame and Obscurity*
In this extraordinary work of insight and interviews, bestselling author Gay Talese shares with us the lives of those we don't know and those we might wish we did: Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Manhattan mobsters, Bowery bums, and many others -- fascinating men and women who define our country's spirit and lead us to an understanding of ourselves as a nation. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of A Cell*
Lewis Thomas combines a deep knowledge of biology with an equally profound sense of wonder. In this book, which made his reputation as a science writer, he spreads out a series of brilliant metaphors showing the interconnection of humans with all other living things, and the possibility of using the cell as a structure with which to understand the entire world. He keeps turning up ideas which are at first surprising but then come to make complete sense -- for example, the idea that the cells of our body come from the co-operation of different kinds of bacteria, which decided that their several specialized functions could be combined to produce a structure with a higher chance of survival. You will come away from this book marveling. -- Editorial review (booksontape.com)

"A blend of hard science, elegant language, and thoughtfulness...guaranteed to intrigue." (Rolling Stone)[!!]

Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby**
In his first book -- a collection that launched its author as America's foremost entertainer with something to say -- Wolfe introduced us to the Sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past. The Twist, the Beatles, the Bouffant Hairdos, the Kar Kustomizers (title piece), and much more are brilliantly given their place in history, and the older cultural guard, struggling to preserve the forms of its status against the rising tide of barbarism, receives ruthless and hilarious scrutiny. Illustrated by the author's own "Metropolitan Sketchbook," The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was a dazzling debut. -- Synopsis (barnesandnoble.com)

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Published nearly sixty years ago, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men stands as an undisputed American masterpiece, taking its place alongside works by Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In a stunning blend of prose and images, this classic offers at once an unforgettable portrait of three tenant families in the Deep South and a larger meditation on human dignity and the American soul.
In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. There they lived with three different families for a month; the result of their stay was an extraordinary collaboration, an unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives. Upon its first book publication in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was called intensely moving, unrelentingly honest. It described a mode of life -- and rural poverty -- that was unthinkably remote and tragic to most Americans, and yet for Agee and Evans, only extreme realism could serve to make the world fully aware of such circumstances. Today it stands as a poetic tract for its time, a haunting search for the human and religious meaning in the lives of true Southern heroes: in their waking, sleeping, eating; their work; their houses and children; and their endurance.
With an elegant design and a sixty-four-page photographic prologue of Evans's stunning images, reproduced from archival negatives, the new edition introduces the legendary author and photographer to a new generation. Both an invaluable part of the American heritage and a graceful tribute to the vibrant souls whose stories live in these pages, this book has profoundly changed our culture and our consciousness -- and will continue to inspire for generations to come. (barnesandnoble.com)

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's autobiography was the first book I ever read that made me feel my life as a colored girl growing up in Mississippi deserved validation. I loved it from the opening lines. -- Oprah Magazine -- Oprah Winfrey (barnesandnoble.com)

This testimony from a black sister marks the beginning of a new error in the minds and hearts of all black men and women...I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity. I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood when the people in books were more real than the people one saw everyday, had I found myself so moved...Her portrait is a biblical study of life in the midst of death. -- James Baldwin

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
His first nonfiction book, essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad. "A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth, with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better all who ponder on the things books say" -- Langston Hughes (barnesandnoble.com)

H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger, Friday Night Lights*
In 1988, the author, a "Philadelphia Inquirer editor, left his job to spend a year with a high school sports team. The sport he picked was football, the location, the . . . West Texas oil town of Odessa. . . . Here 20,000 fans turn out regularly to watch their Permian Panthers win." (Libr J) This is an account of his experiences. (barnesandnoble.com)

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood*
"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans -- in fact, few Kansans -- had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre -- journalism written with the language and structure of literature -- this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise -- the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. (amazon.com)

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
The New York Times Book Review described In Patagonia as "The ur-text of contemporary travel writing...[an] intoxicating mix of adventure and erudition..." If you want to write a travel book that will truly matter to your readers, this book is a "must!"

In Patagonia is Bruce Chatwin's exquisite account of his journey through "the uttermost part of the earth," that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America, where bandits were once made welcome and Charles Darwin formed part of his "survival of the fittest" theory. Chatwin's evocative descriptions, notes on the odd history of the region, and enchanting anecdotes make In Patagonia an exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land. An instant classic upon publication in 1977, In Patagonia remains a masterwork of literature. -- Book Description from Amazon.com

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy's passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father's early death and a son's exhilarating escape into manhood. Stop-Time is as generous on the subject of growing up lost in America, as moving in its absolute intelligence and compassion, as anywork that has appeared before or since. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Joan Didion, Salvador*
In 1982, Didion traveled to El Salvador at the height of the ghastly civil war. From battlefields to body dumps, she trained a merciless eye not only on the terror but also on the depredations and evasions of our own country's foreign policy. (amazon.com)

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek and An American Childhood
[Pilgrim] A personal narrative of one year spent exploring the natural wonders, curiosities, frights and revelations experienced by naturalist Annie Dillard in her own backyard. (barnesandnoble.com)

[American Childhood] A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

"An American Childhood -- more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood." -- From Chicago Tribune

"The reader who can't find something to whoop about is not alive. An American Childhood is perhaps the best American autobiography since Russell Baker's Growing Up." -- From Philadelphia Inquirer

David Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius***(You gotta read this!)
It's an all-too-rare book that can be said to break new ground, but Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius does just that. Rather than take its place in what is now a seemingly unending queue of memoirs by people whose lives have been altered by tragic events, tough times, and difficult lessons, Eggers's book starts a new line altogether, one that very few authors will be allowed to join.

Yes, Eggers lost both his parents to cancer within a matter of months when he was only 22, and yes, 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. Yes, he and Toph pick up and move from their Chicago-area hometown to the San Francisco Bay region (as though their lives had not already been seen enough disruption), where Eggers fashions for Toph a safe -- which is not to say traditional -- environment. But the reader who buys this book expecting a sort of "Party of Two" soap opera is bound to be disappointed. And those looking for a good cry would be well advised to look elsewhere, too.

Which is not to say that this work is not...well, heartbreaking. But Eggers avoids the bathos so often associated with the "I got it bad and that ain't good" school of memoir-writing. You'll laugh as often as you cry, perhaps more often, and even when Eggers does focus on the grieving and sense of loss he and his siblings naturally endured, his thoughtful, introspective approach avoids navel-gazing. He's as hard on himself as on anyone else (well, almost), and that frank self-assessment serves the book well.

Eggers's deft blend of outrageously amusing tales and implied social commentary is also winning. We follow his progress as he strives to be a part of the San Francisco cast of MTV's "Real World" (a goal he is more than a little conflicted about), as he and a small but intrepid group of friends with little combined experience and even less capital launch a magazine intended to change forever the world of periodical publishing, and even, on occasion, as he tries to get over on a young woman.

But it all works, and in a fashion quite unlike anything you've ever read before. You'll likely begin the book thinking the title an amusing and ironic overstatement, but by the time you've finished reading it, you might just decide, as I did, that it is instead an admirable example of truth in packaging. -- Brett Leveridge, Barnes and Noble, Editor's Review

Ian Frazier, The Great Plains*
With a unique blend of intrepid adventure, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey through the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains -- from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West. (From the Publisher)

Darcy Frey, The Last Shot
It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that - for many young men it represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. It is their last shot. This is the story of a small group of high school boys who have given their young lives to basketball, as neighborhood stars and as team members of the Abraham Lincoln High School Railsplitters, consistently one of the best teams in New York. They dream of a college scholarship and escape from the neighborhood. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication. But working against them are an educational system that has woefully failed them and family circumstances that are often desperate. (From the Publisher)

This is an achingly good book, a worthy literary companion to 'Hoop Dreams,' the new documentary film about a pair of inner-city basketball hopefuls. Frey, who is white, somehow managed to get close to these young black men, whocome across all at once as wary, proud, funny and doomed. Frey is withering about the college recruiters who hover around like so many pimps. One coach ends his recruiting letter with the salutation, 'Health, Happine$$, and Hundred$.' The Greek chorus in this tragedy is the crowd of drug dealers who stand on the sidelines at the Garden, shouting at the most gifted players, 'You ain't going nowhere, sucka!' -- From Evan Thomas - Newsweek

Lee Gutkind, Many Sleepless Nights
This dramatic, moving account of transplantation patients and the technology involved, written by a University of Pittsburgh professor, is based on Gutkind's four years observing the agonizing hope and despair of the terminally ill who await a matching organ from brain-dead donors. Two procedures are described in detail involving multiple-organ procurement from a 15-year-old boy, a liver for transplant to one patient and the heart and lungs to another, the mother of four. Gutkind conducted research at Pittsburgh's Presbyterian University Hospital, the world's largest transplant and training facility, which works with institutions around the country and those abroad where immunosuppressive drugs have been developed to control the critical problem of rejection. Despite the hazards (up to 20 hours of surgery) and high cost ($90,000-$200,000 plus) of transplantation, the demand far exceeds the supply of organs and medical staff. Most essential, the author points out, is the role of the procurement coordinator who seeks consent of families, links donor with surgeon and arranges retrieval, reservation and transportation of organs. (Publisher's Weekly)

Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X*
Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there's the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture -- try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston's Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can't help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.'s during the civil rights struggle of the '60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. --Wendy Smith (amazon.com)

Michael Herr, Dispatches*
"He seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter . . . the premier war correspondence of Vietnam." -- Washington Post. "The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." -- John le Carre." . . . Dispatches puts the rest of us in the shade." -- Hunter S. Thompson. From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

If you've seen the movies "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon," in whose scripts Michael Herr had a hand, you have a pretty good idea of Herr's take on Vietnam: a hallucinatory mess, the confluence of John Wayne and LSD. Dispatches reports remarkable frontline encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can't wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list ("I just can't hack it back in the World," he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds of civilians; with daredevil photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who disappeared somewhere inside Cambodia. Although Herr has admitted that parts of his book are fictional [my emphasis!!!-b.d.], this is meaty, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam. (amazon.com)

John Hersey, Hiroshima*** (Start with THIS one! Absolute "must read!" Simple, understated, power....a writer who trusts the details, description, dialogue, scene.)
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times).

Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's-a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir's impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" (USA Today) today as it ever was.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior*
Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in two worlds. There was "solid America," the place her parents emigrated to, and the China of her mother's "talk-stories." In talk-stories women were warriors and her mother was still a doctor in China who could cure the sick and scare away ghosts, not a harried and frustrated woman running a stifling laundromat in California. But what is story and what is truth? In China, a ghost is a supernatural being; in America it is anyone who is not Chinese. In addition, underlying even the most exciting talk-stories of Chinese women warriors is the real oppression of Chinese women: "There is a Chinese word for the female 'I' - which is 'slave.' " In an attempt to figure out her world, Maxine Hong Kingston finds herself creating stories of her own, filling in the blanks her mother has not told her because her daughter is, after all, not true Chinese and thus cannot be completely trusted. Can these new stories explain why she had trouble speaking in the American schools? Can they help her understand the aunt who committed adultery and whose existence is denied? The new stories refuse to fall into traditional forms, and the realizations that come from them often bring out a beautiful, passionate anger that practically burns through the pages. This is powerful, experimental writing, a combination of love, hate, frustration, and sheer beauty. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister

Tracy Kidder, House and Among Schoolchildren
[House] One learns about architecture, about how lumber is produced, how a house is designed, how a builder goes about his trade -- about building a house in general. The only thing I wanted to see, but didn't, in 'House' was the finishedproduct (which later won a design award from the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Architects). . . . Kidder was there with all the participants,came to know them well, and it is obvious that they trusted him. The result is a book better than even 'The Soul of a New Machine' {BRD 1981, 1982}, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the computer trade, and it puts Kidder right at the top of the class of contemporary writers of literary nonfiction. -- From James Kaufmann -- The Christian Science Monitor (Eastern edition)

[Schoolchildren] Tracy Kidder can turn the most unlikely subject into riveting drama (computers in The Soul of a New Machine {BRD 1981, 1982}, carpentry in House {BRD 1986}), so it's no surprise that Among Schoolchildren reads like a novel. . . .{It} demonstrates a number of points. Our schools are often holding pens forchildren whose parents are unable or unwilling to do their own part in encouraging learning: our teachers are brutally overworked and insultingly underpaid. . . . But the most important point of all is that question of status. . . . You can't help wondering if the downward progression of education in this country might be explained at least partly by the fact that we no longer see our teachers as the genuine heroines and heroes they are. -- From The New Republic

Public education,' writes Mr. Kidder, 'rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid. He makes this statement toward the beginning of the book. By the end we know it, having returned to a fifth-grade classroom and seen it, thanks to Mr. Kidder, for ourselves. . . . 'Among Schoolchildren' is more than a book about needy children and a valiant teacher; it is full of the author's genuine love, delight and celebration of the human condition. He has never used his talent so well. -- From Phyllis Theroux - The New York Times Book Review.

Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here
There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side, literally learning how to dodge bullets the way kids in the suburbs learn to chase baseballs. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette at one point. That's if, not when -- spoken with the complete innocence of a child. The book's title comes from a comment made by the brothers' mother as she and author Alex Kotlowitz contemplate the challenges of living in such a hostile environment: "There are no children here," she says. "They've seen too much to be children." This book humanizes the problem of inner-city pathology, makes readers care about Lafeyette and Pharoah more than they may expect to, and offers a sliver of hope buried deep within a world of chaos. -- Editorial Review (amazon.com)

Jane Kramer, The Last Cowboy*
[Interview] Cary Smith: "One thing that always really strikes me about your work, especially in moments such as when you've gotten a reluctant Henry Blanton to talk about his wedding night in The Last Cowboy, is how you're able to get such sensitive information from your subjects."

Jane Kramer: " I spent a long time with Henry, or what for me was a long time. I spent about six weeks with Henry, and it was mainly a question of Henry becoming familiar with me. We became, in a sense, friends. He had a way of sliding into humor that may have made it easier for him to talk about certain things. But mainly it was that nobody had ever asked him these things before. Nobody had ever said, "Your life is interesting; tell me about it." Nobody had ever said, "Tell me about you." Cowboys are notoriously taciturn. They can talk to men, in a very prescribed way, but they are very shy around women. They have a sense of appropriateness that is part of the code of their identity.

"I don't think that Henry would have been able to talk to a man about most of the things he discussed with me. His conversations with men were very coded; they had to do with work, with bosses, with fools, with enemies, with whatever their next fight was going to be about, with cattle, of course, and horses. They had stereotypically male conversations. They were very funny and often very interesting, but they were never personal. In a sense, the fact that I was a woman helped. Or, I should say, a woman who was also a stranger, because Henry could never have talked so personally to any of the women actually in his life. Conveniently, I was going to leave, so Henry could tell me things without thinking that he'd have to live with me afterwards. But, don't forget, I also talked to Henry much more about his work and his skill -- about the things that made him proud, about the business he was in. The private things stick out because they're unexpected. But the context was always ranching, cattle. You could not simply walk into Henry's life and start asking about his wedding night. But if you knew him well enough, there were the small stories he and his wife would begin to tell. Stories like the one about his wedding have to be seen in the context of everything else we talked about in the course of a long stay." -- From an interview by Pitt Writing Student, Carey Smith, published in Pitt's undergraduate literary Magazine, Collision

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams*
The masterpiece of one of the most widely acclaimed writers working today, Arctic Dreams is an unforgettable study of the Far North, the marvelous and mysterious land of stunted forests and frozen seas, of muskox and narwhal, where sunrise and dusk are seasonal rather than daily phenomena. Lopez offers a thorough examination of this obscure world -- its terrain, its wildlife, and the history of the Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on its icy shores. What turns this inimitable compendium of biology, anthropology, and history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is Lopez's unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. In prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Norman Mailer, Executioner's Song
The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the crimes and punishment of a 20th-century murderer and thief, is what the author calls a "true-life novel." It is a horrifying, sad, scrupulously detailed look at the events leading up to the moment Gary Gilmore as killed by a firing squad in Utah State Prison on January 17, 1977. Based on interviews, records of court proceedings, newspaper stories, and various other documents, it covers the nine months between Gilmore's parole from prison, his final crime, and his execution. The blurring of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction was one of the central developments of postwar American literature, and Mailer's imaginative use of the facts is an extension of his earlier forays into the "new journalism." He re-creates Gillmore's tormented psyche, recounts his crimes, takes in the story of Mormonism and the history of Utah, introduces Uncle Vern, Aunt Ida, victims, cops, cons, guards, lovers, and lawyers. The "Western Voices" of small-town America and the "Eastern Voices" of the journalists and show-biz types who descend on the Gilmore story are fused into a remarkable chorus, amplifying the presence of Gilmore himself, a smart, funny, doomed man -- one of the most complex characters in modern letters. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Hilary Masters, Last Stands**
"This is an American classic. It belongs on everyone's American bookshelf, and it should be on the desk of every college teacher of writing." -- Boston Globe, Dec. 1982 (amazon.com)

"This family history is the progenitor of the current popular memoir genre." -- From the Publisher (amazon.com)

"...a slice of America...a masterpiece of reminiscence." -- Doris Grumbach, NPR (amazon.com)

Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes**
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages.

Yet Malachy-exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling-does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors-yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic. -- From the Publishers (Barnes & Noble)

John McPhee, Coming Into the Country**
This is the story of Alaska and the Alaskans. Written with a vividness and clarity which shifts scenes frequently, and yet manages to tie the work into a rewarding whole, McPhee segues from the wilderness to life in urban Alaska to the remote bush country. "With this book McPhee proves to be the most versatile journalist in America." -- Editor's Choice, The New York Times. From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Joe McGinnis, Fatal Vision*
Synopsis: "According to Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, four drug-crazed hippies murdered his wife and two young daughters and injured him at his Fort Bragg, N.C. home in 1970. Despite suspicion, he was cleared by the Army due to lack of a motive and his seemingly 'All-American' character -- honor student, Green Beret, and devoted family man. Ten years later, however, MacDonald was convicted of the crimes, based on analyses of crime scene evidence. McGinnis . . . was contacted by MacDonald to write this book." (Libr J) Bibliography.

Mr. McGinniss himself, without being intrusive, becomes a genuinely sympathetic character in the book. . . . If his personal epilogue seems a trace overwritten, he's entitled. He has researched and told a complicated story very effectively. And while Dr. MacDonald was back in California on appeal, he made Mr. McGinniss the custodian of the murdered children's baby albums. . . . These things happen when reporters become involved in people's lives and deaths,when a writing project evolves into a kind of selective, if unforeseen and not entirely voluntary, human bondage. It is this involvement, finally, that makes 'Fatal Vision' -- even beyond the fascination of the story it tells and even at this length -- well worth reading. -- From Joan Barthel - The New York Times Book Review (barnesandnoble.com)

Kathleen Norris, Dakota and The Cloister Walk
[Dakota] "The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob's angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing." In a voice as authentic as the land she describes, poet Kathleen Norris transports us to the heart of the country, America's empty quarter, a "spiritual" geography often devoid of human presence but rich in other life. A sublime physical landscape, for Norris it is also a metaphor for the indomitable human spirit. Nearly twenty years ago, Kathleen Norris returned to the house built by her grandparents in an isolated town on the border between North and South Dakota. The elemental landscape forced her to confront and reexamine her heritage, religion, language, and the land itself. Living in a community "so small that the poets and ministers have to hang out together," Norris reveals to us the contradictions of small town life on the Great Plains, where gracious hospitality blends with provincial wariness, local history is valued but writers are suspect, and truth and myth collide. With rare poetic voice and unsentimental vision, Kathleen Norris weaves together the lives of farmers, townsfolk, Native Americans, and a community of Benedictine monks whose home is on the Plains. This expansive portrait of the Dakotas introduces to the American literary scene the forceful, mature voice of an important American writer. An award-winning poet and the author of two books of poetry, Falling Off (1971) and The Middle of the World (1981), Kathleen Norris lives in Lemmon, South Dakota, where she has lived with her husband, the poet David Dwyer, for almost twenty years -- From the publisher

[Cloister Walk] This exquisite chronicle of spiritual discovery, which begins with the dawn, ends with the night, and spans a liturgical year, picks up where Norris' highly acclaimed "Dakota" (1992) left off. Here she delves even more deeply into the source of her initially "incomprehensible" attraction to the Benedictine order. Why would a poet and a married woman, raised as a Protestant and long disaffected with the church, find solace and inspiration in the monastic life? In the process of answering this question, Norris reassesses the profound significance of community, ritual, and symbol. As she describes Benedictine liturgy and how hearing Scripture read aloud fine-tunes the soul, she discerns the alignment of imagination and faith, of "monastic practice and the discipline of writing." Poets, Norris explains, like men and women of the church, are devoted to recognizing and celebrating the sacredness of life. Norris expands upon this insight as she considers celibacy, virgin martyrs, metaphor, marriage, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the benefits of living intentionally rather than casually. A deeply moving encounter with the heart and mind of a writer devoted to the highest level of inquiry. -- From Donna Seaman - BookList (barnesandnoble.com)

Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family** (My students loved this one!)
[Various Reviews]
" Brightly coloured, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend.” –Margaret Atwood
“Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling.…Ondaatje’s knowledge of the fragility and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose.” –The New Yorker
“Ondaatje has produced a remarkable book.…Shimmering through the haze of heat and memory is an impressionistic, sometimes surreal portrait of an exotic time and place now gone, a colonial paradise that had its own rhythms and imperatives.” –Globe and Mail
“A beautiful, luscious book. Michael Ondaatje has depicted his extraordinary family, who delighted in masks and costumes and love affairs that ‘rainbowed over marriages’ in the kind of language that makes glory of their lives. He has gone on a poet’s journey to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and the reader who travels with him enters a truly magical world.” –Maxine Hong Kingston
“It sparkles with the intensity and vividness of its multifaceted tales of romance and intrigue.” –Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“A brilliant, charming, poetic, hyperbolic holiday of a book.…Ondaatje walks the line between fact and fiction with a delicately rendered delight.” –Vancouver Province
“…the brilliant and moving book he has written is original in every way that matters.” –W. S. Merwin
“A beautiful, luscious book of discovery and remembrance.” –Hamilton Spectator
“With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [Ondaatje’s] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure.”
–Washington Post “It dazzles with its range of imagination, richness of language and the consistently involving changes of mood and tempo.” –Toronto Star
“This is an intriguing, funny, dream-like book, impossible to put down.” –Winnipeg Free Press

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief*** (Here's a book I'll be recommending to all my writing students!)
A friend of mine recently summed up the lavish lifestyle of his new boss by revealing that "she employs an orchid consultant!" At the time, this seemed like the strange and decadent quirk of a Silicon Valley millionaire. However, after reading Susan Orlean's engaging and informative The Orchid Thief, I realize that my friend's boss is only one of many swept up by an intense devotion to the fragile blossom. As one besotted collector says, "You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can't do anything to kick the habit."

What is it about this particular flower? Why can a single plant sell for more than $25,000? Why does Kew Gardens "display its orchids behind shatterproof glass, surrounded by surveillance cameras the way Tiffany's displays its jewels"?

Perhaps it's sex. Orlean describes orchids as the Brad Pitt of blossoms -- "the sexiest flowers on earth!" As early as 1653, the British Herbal Guide warned that orchids are "hot and moist...under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly." Victorian women were forbidden to own the suggestive-looking treasures.

Or perhaps it's strength. Charles Darwin studied his "beloved orchids" as the pinnacle of evolutionary transformation.

Whatever the reason for their particular appeal, orchids, since their arrival in America in 1838, have come to symbolize elegance. Yet Orlean uncovers the rough drama behind the display of a flower associated with genteel wealth. She recounts tales of paid professional hunters who met their deaths through drowning, fever, and murder in locales like Bhamo, Myanmar, Panama, and Ecuador. In Florida, Orlean meets an amusing husband-and-wife poaching team who boast of their illegal pursuits: "We had more situations than Indiana Jones! Butch Cassidy is bullshit compared to the adventures we had!"

Florida, it turns out, is a hotbed for the shady side of orchid mania, and it is there that Orlean meets the "thief" of her title. John Laroche is a reckless iconoclast, a self-described "shrewd bastard," an orchid breeder who joyfully cooks seeds in his microwave. "Every time I'd make a new hybrid, it felt so cool...I felt a little like God!" After the wealthy Seminole tribe hires him to run a nursery, he concocts a grandiose get-rich scheme: get a rare "ghost" orchid from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve and clone it. The slight hitch is that, under Florida's Endangered Species law, it's illegal to collect wild orchids. The Seminoles, however, consider themselves at war with America; they call themselves the Unconquerable. Laroche enlists a few members to commit the actual theft, assuming Native Americans are exempt from government law. After stuffing 200 orchids into pillowcases, Laroche and his cohorts are arrested, and Laroche is convicted.

Orlean hopes Laroche will offer her insight into orchid mania, and he makes a lively, contrary companion as he guides her through Florida's often bizarre botanical subculture. In Palm Beach mansions and low-rent bungalows, at conferences, galas, and greenhouses, she is introduced to devotees who regale her with accounts of rivalries and discoveries, of lives both ruined and enlightened by a passion for "the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things."

Determined not to succumb to the flower lust, Orlean does succumb. In the end, she makes a heart-of-darkness trek into the frightening Fakahatchee swamp. As Orlean reveals her own desire to find the elusive white flower, orchid mania resonates as a metaphor for any obsession. Fanatic behavior, she suggests, is really admirable optimism. "They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing...were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for; believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed." -- Margot Towne is a freelance writer living in New York. (barnesandnoble.com)

George Plimpton, Paper Lion* (You'll probably have to find this one in a library!)
George Plimpton is the best-selling author and editor of nearly thirty books and the editor of The Paris Review. Perhaps he is best known for his practice of covering professional sports by participating in them as an amateur. In his first exploit, in 1959, he boxed three rounds with light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore. Plimpton wrote articles for Sports Illustrated about his experiences, many of which evolved into books, notably Out of My League (1961), about pitching against the great batters of the American and National baseball leagues; Paper Lion (1966), about playing quarterback at the summer training camp of the Detroit Lions; and The Bogey Man (1968), about participating in three golf tournaments on the pro circuit. Ernest Hemingway called Out of My League, "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived." -- New York State Writer's Institute [ http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ ]

"Paper Lion is the best book written about pro football -- maybe about any sport -- because Plimpton captures with absolute fidelity how the average fan might feel given the opportunity to try out for a professional football team." -- The Saturday Review

"A great book that makes football absolutely fascinating to fan and non-fan alike. . . . a tale to gladden the envious heart of every weekend athelete. . . Plimpton has endless curiosity, unshakable enthusiasm and nerve, and a deep respect for the world he enters. He touches on just about everything involved in the game -- the styles of different players and coaches, the relationship of veterans to rookies, in-game tensions and off-hours carousing. . . and Plimpton's own moment of truth when he is sent in to run a series of plays in the Big Game." -- The New York Times )

Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory
Hunger Of Memory is the story of a Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.

Here is the poignant journey is a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation -- from his past, his parents, his culture -- and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle class America.

Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger Of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On*
Why was AIDS allowed to spread unchecked during the early 1980s while our most trusted institutions ignored of denied the threat? In this brilliant, now classic expose of one of the most important issues of our time, Randy Shilts does nothing less than answer this frightening question. And the Band Played On reveals how the federal government put its budgetary concerns ahead of the nation's welfare, how health authorities placed political expediency before public health, and how some scientists valued international prestige more than saving lives. This masterpiece of investigative reporting has become the very foundation for all ongoing debate about the greatest medical crisis of the twentieth century. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale Volume 1: My Father Bleeds History and Maus: A Survivor's Tale Volume 2: And Here My Troubles Began
Synopsis: Using a comic book format, with human characters depicted as animals, the author presents his father Vladek's account of his life as a Jew in Poland from the mid-1930s to 1944 when he arrived in Auschwitz. The story is told in six chapters, each preceded by a scene about Art's visit to his father in Rego Park, N.Y., where he records Vladek's words. (barnesandnoble.com

When Art Spiegelman undertook an epic account of the Holocaust and its impact on the American son of an Auschwitz survivor in the form of a comic book featuring mice, cats, and other emblematic animals, few could have foreseen the masterpiece that resulted. -- Description from The Reader's Catalog (barnesandnoble.com)

Making a Holocaust comic book with Jews as mice and Germans as cats wouldprobably strike most people as flippant, if not appalling. [This book] is the opposite of flippant and appalling. To express yourself as an artist, you must find a form that leaves you in control but doesn't leave you by yourself.That's how 'Maus' looks to me -- a way Mr. Spiegelman found of making art. . . . [Comics] represent privacy and fantasy. They can become treasure. . . . [The author] has made of them a shrine to which he can bring his woe over his mother's suicide and the Holocaust and come away with humor, a sense of the ridiculous and some satisfying style. From William Hamilton - The New York Times Book Review -- Books of the Century, New York Times review December, 1986. (barnesandnoble.com)

"The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust." -- From Wall Street Journal

Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China and The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
[Iron Rooster] Theroux (The Old Patagonian Express, The Great Railway Bazaar) spent a year exploring China by train, and his impressions about what has and has not changed in the country, as gathered in hundreds of conversations with Chinese citizens, make up a large portion of the book. The Cultural Revolution and the vandalism of the Red Guards have left scars on both the land and the people. Mao's death brought a collective sigh of relief from the population; reforms brought about under Deng Xiaoping have generally been welcomed. Still, this is not a political book. Whether describing his dealings with a rock-hard bureaucracy, musing over the Chinese flirtation with capitalism -- they've ``turned the free market into a flea market'' -- or commenting on the process of traveling, Theroux conducts the reader through this enormous country with wisdom, humor and a crusty warmth. Along the way are anecdotes about classic Chinese pornography (forbidden to the citizenry, but all right for ``foreign friends''); 35-below-zero weather; the Chinese penchant for restructuring nature; and the omnipresent thermos of hot water for making tea. The last chapter, ``The Train to Tibet,'' deals with the extremes to which the Chinese have gone in their attempts to subjugate the Tibetan people. Theroux develops an understanding of China through his travels, but he falls in love with Tibet. As in his previous works, he gives the reader much to relish and think about. BOMC featured selection. -- From Publisher's Weekly (barnesandnoble.com)

[Patagonian Express] Each time Paul Theroux takes a trip - The Great Railway Bazaar, Riding the Iron Rooster - the result is unmistakably Paul Theroux. And he has never been sharper than in The Old Patagonian Express. Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, he winds up on the polky, wandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine ("a kind of demented samovar on wheels"), which comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes. But with Theroux the view along the way is what matters: the monologuing Mr. Thornberry in Costa Rica, the bogus priest of Cali, and the blind Jorge Luis Borges, who delights in having Theroux read Robert Louis Stevenson to him. "Like good conversation, a good travel book consists of two kinds of material: narrative and comment...Theroux's comments come in the form of little essays. Interesting as these excursions are, his narrative is better - his rendering of a combined soccer game and riot in San Savador is superb - and his dialogue best of all." -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels*
[Las Vegas] Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. Now this cult classic of gonzo journalism is a major motion picture from Universal, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

[Hell's Angels] "California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again." Thus begins Hunter S. Thompson's vivid account of his experiences with California'smost notorious motorcycle gang, the Hell's Angels. In the mid-1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial Angels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. His book successfully captures a singular moment in American history, when the biker lifestyle was first defined, and when such countercultural movements were electrifying and horrifying America. Thompson, the creator of Gonzo journalism, writes with his usual bravado, energy, and brutal honesty, and with a nuanced and incisive eye; as The New Yorker pointed out, "For all its uninhibited and sardonic humor, Thompson's book is a thoughtful piece of work." As illuminating now as when originally published in 1967, Hell's Angels is a gripping portrait, and the best account we have of the truth behind an American legend. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers*
{The book is a} gripping account of the events, social pressures and individual psychological responses that led {the author's} brother Robert to prison for murder and him to a middle-class life as a professor of English at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. By combining his own literary skill with thecandor and vitality of his brother's street style, Mr. Wideman gives added power and dimension to this book about the contrary values and goals of two brothers. It is a rare triumph in its use of diverse linguistic styles. . . . Mr.Wideman has succeeded brilliantly in both understanding his brother's life and coming to terms with his own. -- From Ishmael Reed - The New York Times Book Review

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test* and The Right Stuff***
[Acid Test] Tom Wolfe's much-discussed kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel, chronicling the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In the 1960s, Kesey lead a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced "acid tests" all along the way. Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe's ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic indulgence of the era ensures that this book, written in 1967, will live long in the counter-culture canon of American literature. -- Synopsis (barnesandnoble.com)

[The Right Stuff] The Right Stuff is Tom Wolfe's deft account of a cast of heroes, introduced to America with the explosion of space exploration in the romantic heyday of the 20th century and encapsulated in Neal Armstong's "one giant step for mankind." Beginning with the first experiments with manned space flight in the 1940s, remembering the feats of Chuck Yeager and the breaking of the sound barrier, and focusing in on the brave pilots of the Mercury Project, Wolfe's ability to marry historical fact with dramatic intensity is nowhere more evident than in The Right Stuff. Synopsis -- (barnesandnoble.com) (If I could have written any book on this list...THIS is the one I'd choose! -- b.d.)

Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception
Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer.

Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately improvised scams, exploiting employers, wives, and, finally, his own son.

In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of this Gatsbyesque figure, a bad man who somehow was also a very good father, an inveterate liar who falsified everything but love. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

"A touching, funny, sad and altogether irresistable memoir." -- From Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times

Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

VI. ORAL HISTORY
(From the master of the genre!)

Studs Terkel, Working and Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith
[Working] Studs Terkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily News)-- "a magnificent book . . .. A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking." (Boston Globe). From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

[Circle] "At the age of 88, Studs Terkel has turned to the ultimate human experience, that of death and the possibility of life afterward. Death is the one experience we all share but cannot know. In Will the Circle Be Unbroken? a wide range of people address that final experience and its impact on the way we live. In talking about the ultimate and unknowable culmination of our lives, they give voice to their deepest beliefs and hopes, reflecting on the lives they have led and what still lies before them. For the first time Terkel addresses the whole realm of religious belief and of expectations of an afterlife, including reincarnation, and discovers an extraordinary range and complexity of experience and of belief." "As in Working and Coming of Age, Studs Terkel tackles an issue bound up with all of our lives, yet rarely discussed on its own terms. From a Hiroshima survivor to an AIDS caseworker, from a death-row parolee to a woman who emerged from a two-year coma, these interviewees find an eloquence and grace in dealing with a topic many of us have yet to discuss openly and freely." Terkel also interviews the vast array of people who confront death in their everyday lives, whether as police, firefighters, emergency health workers, doctors, or nurses. Many of the most moving interviews deal with AIDS, and how the disease has devastated whole communities and forced people to face death at the young ages we associate with centuries past. -- From the Publisher (barnesandnoble.com)

Bruce Dobler is an Associate Professor of English in the Creative
Nonfiction Program at the University of Pittsburgh