Champagne and Meatballs: An Autobiography of Sorts
Brought to light and introduced by editor and historian Larry Hannant, Champagne and Meatballs is Bert Whyte's fascinating memoir written months before his death in Moscow in 1984. Brash, funny, irreverent, and entertaining, it highlights an important perspective on world history while delving into the story of the man who was brave enough to live it.
Science writer Matt Ridley has found a way to tell someone else's story without being accused of plagiarism. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters delves deep within your body (and, to be fair, Ridley's too) looking for dirt dug up by the Human Genome Project. Each chapter pries one gene out of its chromosome and focuses on its role in our development and adult life, but also goes further, exploring the implications of genetic research and our quickly changing social attitudes toward this information. Genome shies away from the "tedious biochemical middle managers" that only a nerd could love and instead goes for the A-material.
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authorized Edition
Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait, the first of three volumes collected by the Mark Twain Project on the centenary of the author's death. It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time. (Twain wanted his more scalding opinions suppressed until long after his death.) Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (February, 1890 — May, 1960) was a Nobel Prize-winning Soviet Russian poet and writer. In the West he is best known for the epic novel Doctor Zhivago, a tragedy, whose events span through the last period of Tsarist Russia and early days of Soviet Union. Pasternak was brought up in a highly cosmopolitan atmosphere, and visitors to his home included pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and writer Leo Tolstoy.
Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and WildeAlthough much has been written on autobiography, the same cannot be said of autothanatography, the writing of one's death. This study starts from the deconstructive premise that autobiography is aporetic, not or not only a matter of a subject strategizing with language to produce an exemplary identity but a matter also of its responding to an exorbitant call to write its death. The I-dominated representations of particular others and of the privileged other to whom a work is addressed, must therefore be set against an alterity plaguing the I from within or shadowing it from without.
