1106 books match the query 'Memoirs' and 8 start with k

cover of Kaiaulu: Gathering Tides

Kaiaulu

Gathering Tides

Mehana Blaich Vaughan

Oregon State University Press, 2018

The tide is rising ahead of the early morning sun on the northeast coast of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. Waves rush singing onto the outer reef where two throw net fishermen stalk the surge. An elderly woman with her silver hair in a kerchief makes her way toward shore, two octopuses tucked in her mesh bag. Within hours, two hundred tourists will snorkel, sunbathe, and teeter on the coral, few ever knowing that people fish here or that their catch sustains an entire kaiāulu (community) connected to this stretch of reef.

This coast is known as a playground for tourists and backdrop for Hollywood movies, but catch from small local reefs, and the sharing of this abundance, has sustained area families for centuries, helping them to thrive through tidal waves, hurricanes, an influx of new residents, and economic recessions. Yet fishing families are increasingly invisible and many have moved away, threatened by global commodification and loss of access to coastal lands that are now private retreats for star entertainers, investors, and dot-com millionaires.

Building on two decades of interviews with more than sixty Hawaiian elders, leaders, and fishermen and women, Kaiāulu shares their stories of enduring community efforts to perpetuate kuleana, often translated to mean “rights and responsibilities.” Community actions extend kuleana to include nurturing respectful relationships with resources, guarding and cultivating fishing spots, perpetuating collective harvests and sharing, maintaining connection to family lands, reasserting local governance rooted in ancestral values, and preparing future generations to carry on.

An important contribution to scholarship in the fields of natural resource management, geography, Indigenous Studies, and Hawaiian Studies, Kaiāulu is also a skillfully written and deeply personal tribute to a community based not on ownership, but reciprocity, responsibility, and caring for the places that shape and sustain us all.
[more]
cover of Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters

Kay Boyle

A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters

Edited and with an Introduction by Sandra Spanier

University of Illinois Press, 2015

One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Kay Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children's books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievement can be even better appreciated through her letters to the literary and cultural titans of her time.

<p>Kay Boyle shared the first issue of <i>This Quarter</i> with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, expressed her struggles with poetry to William Carlos Williams and voiced warm admiration to Katherine Anne Porter, fled WWII France with Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, socialized with the likes of James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett, and went to jail with Joan Baez. The letters in this first-of-its-kind collection, authorized by Boyle herself, bear witness to a transformative era illuminated by genius and darkened by Nazism and the Red Scare. Yet they also serve as milestones on the journey of a woman who possessed a gift for intense and enduring friendship, a passion for social justice, and an artistic brilliance that earned her inclusion among the celebrated figures in her ever-expanding orbit.
[more]
cover of Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President

Keeping Faith

Memoirs of a President

Jimmy Carter

University of Arkansas Press, 1995

In Keeping Faith, originally published in 1982, President Carter provides a candid account of his time in the Oval Office, detailing the hostage crisis in Iran, his triumph at the Camp David Middle East peace summit, his relationships with world leaders, and even glimpses into his private world. “Responsible, truthful, intelligent, earnest, rational, purposeful. Thus the man: thus the book” (The Washington Post).
[more]
cover of Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine

Keeping Heart

A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine

Otis Trotter

Ohio University Press, 2015

“After saying our good-byes to friends and neighbors, we all got in the cars and headed up the hill and down the road toward a future in Ohio that we hoped would be brighter,” Otis Trotter writes in his affecting memoir, Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine.

Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Trotter and his thirteen siblings, the story begins in 1914 with his parents, Joe William Trotter Sr. and Thelma Odell Foster Trotter, in rural Alabama. By telling his story alongside the experiences of his parents as well as his siblings, Otis reveals cohesion and tensions in twentieth-century African American family and community life in Alabama, West Virginia, and Ohio.

This engaging chronicle illuminates the journeys not only of a black man born with heart disease in the southern Appalachian coalfields, but of his family and community. It fills an important gap in the literature on an underexamined aspect of American experience: the lives of blacks in rural Appalachia and in the nonurban endpoints of the Great Migration. Its emotional power is a testament to the importance of ordinary lives.

[more]
cover of Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives

Keeping the Faith

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives

Wayne Flynt

University of Alabama Press, 2011

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4
This historical memoir by the widely recognized scholar, Wayne Flynt, chronicles the inner workings of his academic career at Samford and Auburn Universities, as well as his many contributions to the general history of Alabama. Flynt has traveled the state and the South lecturing and teaching both lay and academic groups, calling on his detailed knowledge of both the history and power structures in Alabama to reveal uncomfortable truths wherever he finds them, whether in academic institutions that fall short of their stated missions, in government and industry leaders who seek and hold power by playing to the fears and prejudices of the public, or in religious groups who abandon their original missions and instead seek financial and emotional comfort in lip service only.
 
In doing so he has not only energized those who think the State of Alabama can and must do better, but  also has earned the enmity of those who prosper, profit, and prevaricate for their own selfish ends. Nevertheless, Flynt utilizes a lifetime of learning and reflection to voice the conscience of his community. Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives tells the story of his life and his courageous battles against an indifferent or hostile hierarchy with modesty and honesty. In doing so he tells us how Alabama institutions really are manipulated and, more importantly, why we should care.

 
[more]
cover of Kid Cops: What Communities Gain and Lose from Junior Police in Schools

Kid Cops

What Communities Gain and Lose from Junior Police in Schools

Mai Thai

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An on-the-ground study of junior police academies—contentious school-police partnerships that provide educational resources, career opportunities, and hope for social mobility.
 
Some might see police officers as benevolent sources of protection, but in many communities, they are often perceived as a threat due to a legacy of violent interactions and arrests for arbitrary offenses. How, then, do police sustain their presence in places where people might distrust them? In Kid Cops, sociologist Mai Thai offers one answer: junior police academies, high school programs in which police officers provide courses, mentorship, and job training to students in communities with high rates of juvenile delinquency and poverty. These school-police partnerships have expanded rapidly in the United States over the last few decades, largely in response to political unrest and police violence in the 1990s. Programs vary in their offerings, but they generally aim to ease tensions between communities and law enforcement, while also providing needed resources in neighborhoods where education and job opportunities are scarce.

Kid Cops draws on years of observations and interviews with educators, police officers, and, of course, kids. The junior police programs at each high school may have different emphases, but their common goal is for students to graduate from high school and enter college or the workforce. A second goal of the program is to cultivate a positive image of the police. Ultimately, however, Thai finds that these programs tighten the relationship between marginalized youth, schools, and the criminal justice system and strain the students’ relationships with their peers, families, and each other. These programs also distract residents from systemic issues of policing and suppress opportunities for meaningful change.

Written in an accessible tone that balances the seriousness of inequality with the playfulness of the study’s youth, Kid Cops moves beyond the narrative of detentions, suspensions, and arrests to tell a less conventional story about police in schools. It asks, does good, friendly policing exist—especially if it continues to tether low-income communities of color to the criminal justice system? 
 
[more]
cover of Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories

Killer Crónicas

Bilingual Memories

Susana Chavez-Silverman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

A woman living and communicating in multiple lands, Susana Chávez-Silverman conveys her cultural and linguistic displacement in humorous, bittersweet, and even tangible ways in this truly bilingual literary work. These meditative and lyrical pieces combine poignant personal confession, detailed daily observation, and a memorializing drive that shifts across time and among geocultural spaces. The author’s inventive and flamboyant use of Spanglish, a hybrid English-Spanish idiom, and her adaptation of the confessional "crónica" make this memoir compelling and powerful. Killer Crónicas confirms that there is no Latina voice quite like that of Susana Chávez-Silverman.

Includes a chapter that was awarded first prize in El Andar magazine’s Chicano Literary Excellence Contest in the category of personal memoir.
[more]
cover of Kitchen Table History: Contending with My Family’s Radical Past

Kitchen Table History

Contending with My Family’s Radical Past

Daniel Czitrom

University of Illinois Press, 2027

Daniel Czitrom learned early on that radical politics was a family affair that stretched across generations and was shared around the kitchen table. In this historical memoir, Czitrom explores how memories and political beliefs shaped his life and his identity as a historian.

Czitrom follows three generations of his family as they fled violence in Eastern Europe, built new lives in America, and committed themselves to radical political movements. Their works and trials included union organizing, volunteering to fight fascism in Spain and elsewhere, harassment by the FBI, and everyday acts of survival. Czitrom describes what he discovered in his years of historical detective work while pondering the still-unanswered questions wrapped in silence and pain. He also recounts his years-long journey to balance loyalty to his family’s values with a desire to succeed, question authority, and become his own person.

An engaging blend of memoir and history, Kitchen Table History is the chronicle of a family and a personal search for the meaning of the past.
[more]