Blog Posts by Subject: Memoirs and Diaries

You may have seen the trailers or heard about a new movie that is out called The American, starring Academy Award winner George Clooney.

However, did you know the film is actually based on a novel, A Very Private Gentleman, written in 2004 by Martin Booth?

How long has it been since you’ve checked out the nonfiction side of the teen section in your library? Here are some standout titles—you can find them with young adult biographies.

The Bite of the Mango

Mariatu Kamara grew up in Sierra Leone, where rebel soldiers and the government were at war. At age 12, Mariatu was caught in a rebel attack. She escaped—but first, the rebels cut off her hands. Wounded and separated from her family, Mariatu had to learn a new set of survival skills. Though there are bleak moments in the book, there is also a happy ending: Mariatu now works for UNICEF, an international organization that helps young people.

The film Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts alongside great actors such as Viola Davis (Doubt) and Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), is causing quite a bit of excitement as it is scheduled to be released in August. But did you know this movie is actually based on a book? It is a memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert called Eat, Pray, Love: A Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.

Memoirs are notoriously unreliable when it comes to facts. So a reader needs to read between the lines to get at the truth about a subject. That's part of the fun.

How does that work with a graphic memoir? Do the drawings help you better see inside the author?

Happy New Year! And welcome (or welcome back) to The Reader’s Den, now in its second year.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron, a former #1 New York Times bestseller, kicks off the list this year. As the years roll by, many over a certain age move into an increasingly-complex maintenance schedule, and several of the 15 essays in the book examine these efforts. If we can’t ultimately win the war against aging—as each of us knows somewhere inside—we might as well laugh at it. As you read this book, you will laugh.

The Tottenville book discussion group has been meeting since this past September. Here is the schedule:

In celebration of the National Day of Listening, the Art and Picture Collections have been collaborating with StoryCorps to produce an all-day drop-in event to consider your art and your life.

In his recent movie review of the documentary film No Impact Man, available in book form from NYPL here and in blog form here, A.O. Scott writes, "The year of doing something crazy to learn a lesson or prove a point is by now less a gimmick than a full-fledged publishing genre. Activities that would, in the course of ordinary life, count as modest or private undertakings acquire a special significance when they become the basis of book proposals. A. J.