Books – Detail

Click on a genre link to see the matching books; click again to return to the full Athenaeum Bookshelf. Please click Guidebooks, Youth, Poetry or Graphic Works Collection to see the Find Library catalog listings for these categories.

Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief
Richard Holmes

In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time

431 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China
Jung Chang

In this follow-up to Chang's Wild Swans, "Deng Xiaoping opened the door of Communist China, and Jung--twenty-six years old and unstoppably curious, despite years of brainwashing--seized the propitious moment and became one of the first Chinese to leave the tightly sealed country and come to the West. [This memoir] chronicles her journey and that of her family, along with that of China, as it rose from a decrepit and isolated state to a world power challenging American dominance

309 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

How to Cook a Coyote: The Joy of Old Age
Betty Fussell

As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with morality, all the while the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can't control, this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the day progresses. Ultimately, this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.

164 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Intimate Audrey: An Authorized Biography
Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden

To those who appreciate her work and legacy, Audrey Hepburn was many things. She was a child survivor of the Second World War. She was a fashion icon who made the little black dress the symbol of elegance that it is today. She played a runaway princess, an eccentric socialite, and a nun struggling with her faith. But perhaps her greatest contribution to the world was as a selfless humanitarian in the final years of her life, proving that fear and trauma can be transmuted into kindness and art.

288 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour
Mark Haddon

Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. ... This is a book about being different and seeing the world differently.

213 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family
Dorothy Roberts 307 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs
Antony Beevor

A new biography of one of history's most disturbing, dubious masterminds, showing how a Siberian peasant, through his seduction of the imperial household, contributed to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world.

361 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries
Nicholas Lemann

The author examines three generations of his family, who emigrated from Germany to the South, and embraces the Jewish traditions that they eschewed as they sought acceptance by New Orleans society.

395 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Shut Up and Read: A Memoir from Harriett's Bookshop
Jeannine A. Cook

Jeannine Cook always thought she'd open a bookshop in her old age. Raised by a blind librarian, books were integral to her life, and she expected she would eventually write one as well. On February 1, 2020, Jeannine fulfilled her dream and opened a bookstore in Philadelphia which she named after her hero and inspiration, Harriet Tubman. Harriet's Bookshop would be a place to celebrate women authors, artists, and activists. But in only six weeks, Jeanne would be forced to shut the shop's doors when Covid turned the world upside down--not knowing whether her dream would survive. Five years later, this small independent bookshop is thriving, with satellite stores in unconventional places, from movie theaters to horse trailers.

262 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Two Women Living Together
Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo ; translated by Gene Png

When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence--savoring solitude, quiet mornings, and the unmitigated freedom of living alone. But in their forties, something shifted, and they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Refusing to settle for the outdated choice between marriage or isolation, Hana and Sunwoo made a radical decision: to buy a home and live together--not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family. Now a bustling household of two women and four cats, Hana and Sunwoo still value solitude, but can do so while sharing a life and its meaning with someone else.

241 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

We the Women: The Hidden heroes Who Shaped America
Norah O'Donnell with Kate Andersen Brower

We the Women presents a new and extraordinary retelling of American history through the eyes of women, introducing us to inspiring patriots who demanded that the country live up to the promises made 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

406 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Where We Keep the Light
Josh Shapiro with Emily Jane Fox

A grounded and intimate portrait of life by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Where We Keep the Light is the story of public service and personal faith.

260 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

Windower
Michael Loughran

Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love.

189 pp. Paperback - Biography/Memoir

Young Man in a Hurry :A Memoir of Discovery
Gavin Newsom

From California Governor Gavin Newsom, an intimate and reflective memoir laying bare the defining moments of his liminal childhood splintered by his parents' divorce that shaped Newsom's visionary and relentless commitment to the state and nation.

291 pp. Hardcover - Biography/Memoir

UPCOMING EVENTS


TAKE PART >

DONATE


GIVE NOW >

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST