Biography – Autobiography- Memoir

My Name Is Number 4: A True Story from the Cultural Revolution

Here is the real-life story about the fourth child in a family torn apart by China’s Cultural Revolution. After the death of both of her parents, Ting-xing and her siblings endure brutal Red Guard attacks on their schools and even in their home.  At the age of sixteen, Ting-xing is sent to a prison farm far from the world she knows, where she survives for six years. Eventually, people leave the countryside, and Ting-xing passes the entrance exam for Beijing University, the only person in the prison camp to do so.

Golda Meir

Leading Women celebrates the impact that women in leadership roles have made across cultures and decades. This biography focuses on Golda Meir, who served as prime minister of Israel.

Grandma’s Gift

The author describes Christmas at his grandmother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem the year she introduced him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja, which has had a profound and lasting effect on him.

Water Buffalo Days: Growing Up In Vietnam

As a young boy growing up in the hills of central Vietnam, Nhuong’s companion was Tank, the family water buffalo. When bullies harassed Nhuong, Tank sent them packing. When a wild tiger threatened the entire village, Tank defeated it. He led the herd and adopted a lonely puppy. Tank was Nhuong’s best friend.Nhuong gives readers a glimpse of himself when he was their age, and tells a thrilling story of how he and Tank together faced the dangers of life in the Vietnamese jungle which was their home.

Tangled Threads: A Hmong Girl’s Story

For the Hmong people living in overcrowded refugee camps in Thailand, America is a dream: the land of peace and plenty. In 1995, ten years after their arrival at the camp, thirteen-year-old Mai Yang and her grandmother are about to experience that dream. In America, they will be reunited with their only remaining relatives, Mai’s uncle and his family. They will discover the privileges of their new life: medical care, abundant food, and an apartment all their own. But Mai will also feel the pressures of life as a teenager. Her cousins, now known as Heather and Lisa, try to help Mai look less like a refugee, but following them means disobeying Grandma and Uncle. From showers and smoke alarms to shopping, dating, and her family’s new religion, Mai finds life in America complicated and confusing. Ultimately, she will have to reconcile the old ways with the new, and decide for herself the kind of woman she wants to be. This archetypal immigrant story introduces readers to the fascinating Hmong culture and offers a unique outsider’s perspective on our own.

This book has been included in WOW’s Language and Learning: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction Booklist. For our current list, visit our Booklist page under Resources in the green navigation bar.

Alive In The Killing Fields: Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide

Alive in the Killing Fields is the real-life memoir of Nawuth Keat, a man who survived the horrors of war-torn Cambodia. He has now broken a longtime silence in the hope that telling the truth about what happened to his people and his country will spare future generations from similar tragedy. In this memoir, a young Nawuth defies the odds and survives the invasion of his homeland by the Khmer Rouge. Under the brutal reign of the dictator Pol Pot, he loses his parents, young sister and other members of his family. After his hometown of Salatrave was overrun, Nawuth and his remaining relatives are eventually captured and enslaved by Khmer Rouge fighters. They endure physical abuse, hunger and inhumane living conditions. But through it all, their sense of family holds them together, giving them the strength to persevere through a time when any assertion of identity is punishable by death. Nawuth’s story of survival and escape from the Killing Fields of Cambodia is also a message of hope; an inspiration to children whose worlds have been darkened by hardship and separation from loved ones. This story provides a timeless lesson in the value of human dignity and freedom for readers of all ages.

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen’s struggle to become a “real” American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.

The Shaman’s Nephew: A Life In The Far North

When Jewish author/storyteller Sheldon Oberman met Inuit artist/hunter Simon Tookoome, he knew the encounter was special. Still, he had no idea their meeting would result in an amazing collaboration that would span a decade. Through the use of many tape recordings and translations, Sheldon has painstakingly woven the threads of a remarkable man’s life into a book for all to treasure. With Tookoome’s drawings to enhance the text, Oberman has managed to express the cadence and voice of one of the last of the Inuit to live the traditional nomadic life in the Arctic. The Shaman’s Nephew magically transports readers to a cold climate that warms and grows more familiar with every turn of the page.