"I am willing to relate all I can remember, but I wish it clearly understood that it must be in my own way,  and at my own time.  I will not be hurried or dictated to.  It is my history and not yours I propose to tell.”—Mariano Guadelupe Vallejo, on “Recuerdos históricos y personales”  (1875)
    My History, Not Yours is a landmark study of the autobiographical writings of Mexican Americans in the century following the US-Mexican War of 1846-1848.  Some 75,000 inhabitants of what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California were suddenly foreigners on their own lands.  Faced with the deliberate obliteration of their history, culture, language, and personal experiences, these women and men set down the stories of their lives and their communities, as a means of both remembering and resisting.
    Genaro M. Padilla and other scholars have begun to uncover the huge store of literary materials forgotten in manuscript archives:  memoirs long out of print, others unpublished and unread, diaries, family histories, poetry, correspondence, and texts of corridos (ballads).  Padilla writes, “Lives are scattered on broken pages, faded, partially lost at the margins, suspended in language unread until there is a reader who opens the file and begins.  It is my intention to initiate a recovery of that autobiographical formation that emerged after a war of conquest.”
    In providing an overview of this rich literature, Padilla also points out the power relations embedded in the narratives, showing that the reconstruction of the Mexican past was not merely nostalgic idealization, but often an angry and deeply politicized recovery of a world ruptured by American domination.

My Life in Nevada Politics tells the entertaining, informative, and at times poignant story of the rise of Richard Bryan from humble beginnings in Las Vegas to the pinnacle of Nevada politics during a time of great change across the state and nation. Through his memoir, Bryan provides keen insight into the mechanics of politics, and the book serves as a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the Silver State.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1937, Bryan grew up in Las Vegas. His interest in politics started early, winning school-class elections and expressing a personal goal of one day becoming Governor of Nevada. He was elected student body president at the University of Nevada.

His career in public service began as a deputy district attorney in Clark County. In 1966, he became the first county public defender in state history. Bryan served in the Nevada Legislature in both the Assembly and Senate before winning the statewide office of Attorney General in 1978. He was elected Nevada Governor in 1982, winning re-election in 1986. Bryan was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1988, reelected in 1994, and served on the committees on Commerce, Banking, Taxation, and Intelligence, and chaired the Ethics Committee. He retired from the Senate in 2001 and returned to Nevada.

Bryan’s list of accomplishments is extensive. He was largely responsible for the early call-to-arms in the fight against the Department of Energy’s attempt to create a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. As governor, he reorganized state economic development programs, improved environmental protections for Lake Tahoe and other threatened areas, and made unprecedented appointments of women. In the Senate, Bryan authored the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act and the National Conservation Area for the High Rock Desert country. He had a front-row seat to the historic buildup to the Iraq War and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. In retirement, Bryan continues to serve the state through his participation on a wide range of committees. 

Throughout his political career, Bryan, with wife Bonnie at his side, traversed Nevada from its tiniest hamlets to the metro areas of Reno and Las Vegas with unrivaled zeal in his efforts to represent the state’s citizens. He is famous for knowing thousands of his constituents not only by their first names, but also recalling details of their lives. The simple fact is, while in service to Nevada, Bryan was in his element in the place he loves best.

Paper both shapes and defines us. Baby books, diaries, sewing patterns, diplomas, resumes, letters, death certificates—we find our stories in them. My Life in Paper is Beth Kephart’s memoiristic exploration of the paper legacies we forge and leave.

Kephart’s obsession with paper began in the wake of her father’s death, when she began to handcraft books and make and marble paper in his memory. But it was when she read My Life with Paper, an autobiography by the late renowned paper hunter and historian Dard Hunter, that she felt she had found a kindred spirit, someone to whom she might address a series of one-sided letters about life and how we live it. Remembering and crafting, wanting and loving, doubting and forgetting—the spine and weave of My Life in Paper came into view.

Paper, for Kephart, provides proof of our yearning, proof of our failure, proof of the people who loved us and the people we have lost. It offers, too, a counterweight to the fickle state of memory.

My Life in Paper, illustrated by the author herself, is an intimate and poignant meditation on life’s most pressing questions.

In her never-finished My Life’s Travels and Adventures, the eighteenth-century Polish doctor Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa plays a myriad of roles, including child bride, wife, mother, lover, adventuress, slave trader, writer, and home-taught physician. She successfully carved out a viable niche for herself, navigating the multicultural, multiethnic, and varied religious environment of Europe’s eastern periphery. Despite limited expectations for female professionals, she became a highly sought after and well-respected practitioner of the medical arts and rose to the position of court physician to Turkish pashas and Hungarian princes, and even to Sultan Mustafa III. My Life’s Travels and Adventures—part memoir, part autobiography, and part travelogue—provides a view into eighteenth-century social, professional, and gender interactions and weaves a rich narrative replete with vignettes of love, travel, and popular superstitions important to our historical, ethnographic, and religious understanding of the era.

This edition brings the entirety of this personal and idiosyncratic memoir to English for the first time.
 

My Lord, What a Morning is a gentle and engrossing memoir, abounding with the tender and inspiring stories of Marian Anderson's life in her own modest words. From her humble but proud beginnings in south Philadelphia to international vocal renown, the legendary contralto writes of triumph and adversity, of being grounded in faith and surrounded by family, and of the music that shaped her career. 

Anderson published My Lord, What a Morning in 1956 on the heels of her groundbreaking role as the first African American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. In it are bittersweet reminiscences of a working-class childhood, from her first job scrubbing the neighbors' steps to the sorrow and upheaval of her father's untimely death. Here are the stories of a young girl with prodigious talent and her warm remembrances of the teachers, managers, friends, accompanists, and fans who worked to foster it. In addition, she provides a veritable travelogue of her concerts across the globe and rare glimpses at the personal life of a woman more concerned with family than celebrity. 

With eleven photographs and a touching new foreword by Anderson's nephew, famed conductor and poet James DePreist, this edition of My Lord, What a Morning revives the classic portrait of a musical legend who was resilient in the bullying face of bigotry and gracious in the unfaltering glow of fame.

In his autobiography, My Many Selves, Wayne C. Booth is less concerned with his professional achievements---though the book by no means ignores his distinguished career---than with the personal vision that emerges from a long life lived thoughtfully. For Booth, even the autobiographical process becomes part of a quest to harmonize the diverse, often conflicting aspects of who he was. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke the self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his experience and background, and engaged those selves and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concern with ethics and rhetoric was his Mormon youth in rural Utah. In adulthood he struggled with that background, abandoning most Mormon doctrines, but he retained the identity, ethical questions, and concern with communication that this upbringing gave him.

The uncommon wisdom and careful attention that empower Wayne Booth's many other books cause My Many Selves to transcend its genre, as the best memoirs always do. The book becomes a window through which we who read it will see our own conflicts, our own ongoing struggle to live honestly and ethically in the world.

Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on this autobiography.

My Name is LaMoosh is the life story of Warm Springs Tribal elder Linda Meanus. She grew up with her grandma Flora Thompson and grandpa Chief Tommy Thompson near Celilo Falls, a mighty fishery on the Columbia that was flooded in 1957 by the construction of The Dalles Dam. Linda persevered through this historic trauma and life’s challenges to teach young people about the Indigenous ways of the Columbia River.  

Intended for early readers to learn more about Native American history through a first-hand account, the book is also a reminder that Indigenous people continue to maintain a cultural connection to the land and river that gave them their identity.  

My Name is LaMoosh includes fact boxes that provide historical, cultural, and environmental context for Linda’s personal story. Hundreds of books exist about Lewis and Clark and their journey of “discovery.” This book balances our understanding of American history with the long-neglected voices of Indigenous people. Linda’s story is not just about historic trauma but also about resilience, perseverance, and reciprocity.

My Parents: Memoirs of New World Icelanders is a collection of essays written by second-generation Icelandic immigrants in North America, describing the lives of their parents. Originally collected in 1956 by Dr. Finnbogi Gumundsson, the first Chair of Icelandic at the University of Manitoba, seven of the fourteen memoirs are translated here from Icelandic to English. They offer a rare first-hand look into the lives of New World immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers are invited straight into the heart of these people’s lives, from social evenings spent reading poetry and the sagas, to the daily struggles to prepare the land and build homes. A prevailing sense of community emerges from the writers’ stories, showing how Icelandic culture and tradition sustained the immigrants through hardship, illness, and isolation. My Parents also details some of the genealogy of the New World Icelanders who settled in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Minnesota.

Selected as an "Editors Choice" by the Chicago Tribune

Lennard J. Davis grew up as the hearing child of deaf parents. In this candid, affecting, and often funny memoir, he recalls the joys and confusions of this special world, especially his complex and sometimes difficult relationships with his working-class Jewish immigrant parents. Gracefully slipping through memory, regret, longing, and redemption, My Sense of Silence is an eloquent remembrance of human ties and human failings.

There are 27 million slaves living in the world today—more than at any time in history. Three hundred thousand of them are impoverished children in Haiti, who "stay with" families as unpaid and uneducated domestic workers, subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. This practice, known locally as restavek ("staying with"), is so widespread that one in ten Haitian children is caught up in this form of slavery.

Jean-Robert Cadet was a restavek in Haiti from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. He told the harrowing story of his youth in Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American—a landmark book that exposed ongoing child slavery in Haiti. Now in My Stone of Hope, Cadet continues his story from his early attempts to adjust to freedom in American society to his current life mission of eliminating child slavery through advocacy and education. As he recounts his own struggles to surmount the psychological wounds of slavery, Cadet puts a human face on the suffering that hundreds of thousands of Haitians still endure daily. He also builds a convincing case that child slavery is not just one among many problems that Haiti faces as the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. Rather, he argues that the systematic abuse of so many of its children is Haiti's fundamental problem, because it creates damaged adults who seem incapable of governing the country justly or managing its economy productively.

For everyone concerned about the fate of Haiti, the welfare of children, and the freedom of people around the globe, My Stone of Hope sounds an irresistible call to action.

In Myself and Strangers, John Graves, the highly regarded author of Goodbye to a River and other classic works, recalls the decade-long apprenticeship in which he found his voice as a writer. He recounts his wanderings from Texas to Mexico, New York, and Spain, where, like Hemingway, he hoped to find the material with which to write books that mattered. With characteristic honesty, Graves admits the false starts and dead ends that dogged much of his writing, along with the exhilaration he felt when the words finally flowed. He frankly describes both the pleasures and the restlessness of expatriate life in Europe after World War II—as well as his surprising discovery, when family obligations eventually called him home to Texas, that the years away had prepared him to embrace his native land as the fit subject matter for his writing. For anyone seeking the springs that fed John Graves' best-loved books, this memoir of apprenticeship will be genuinely rewarding.