Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.
posted by Trurl
on Dec 29, 2011 -
8 comments
Even people who would normally never care about something Judy Garland-related marvel at the incredible pathos and dark insanity of these tapes, which come off like Garland performing in a one-woman show written by Samuel Beckett.
posted by Trurl
on Dec 28, 2011 -
27 comments
Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest prisoner held at Guantánamo, has written a
memoir of his time there, the lead up to his imprisonment, and subsequent release years later.
posted by gman
on Dec 14, 2011 -
65 comments
Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 30, 2011 -
10 comments
Fifteen years after we broke up, my ex-boyfriend published a book of poetry. ... For months, the slim book sat on my shelf like an awkward houseguest. Then, one quiet night, something nudged me out of my inertia, or dread, and I settled into bed with his book. And there I was.
posted by Joe Beese
on Feb 10, 2011 -
41 comments
Robert F. Gallagher served in the United States Army's 815th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion (Third Army) in the European Theater during WWII. He has posted his memoir online:
"Scratch One Messerschmitt," told from numerous photos he took during the war and the detailed notes he made shortly afterwards.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 23, 2010 -
7 comments
Kristin Hersh is well-known to many as a founder of legendary 80s indy/alt band
Throwing Muses, as well as for her own successful solo albums and alt-punk 3-piece band
50 Foot Wave, is having a good 2010. A new solo album,
Crooked, is due out later this year -- a follow-up to the collection
Speedbath, which was released on the web under a Creative Commons license, and
demos for a forthcoming new Throwing Muses collection have been appearing on the band's
CASH page (
previously);
Crooked has also appeared in the UK in
book format through HarperCollins' Friday Project imprint. A nice additional tidbit for fans is the just-released live collection,
Cats and Mice. As if all that wasn't enough, stories that Kristin came up with
for her sons while they accompanied her on tour over the years inspired a children's book,
Toby Snax,
published in 2007, and Hersh will be publishing a memoir,
Rat Girl (
Paradoxical Undressing, in the UK edition) detailing her early days with Throwing Muses -- a time in which she struggled
with mental illness and figured out what it meant to front a touring rock band while pregnant (excerpts of
Rat Girl arrived in periodic email installments to
Hersh's subscription supporters, whose support
has enabled much of Hersh's current productivity). Hersh has been taking advantage of various social media as well: you can follow her doing in the
Throwingmusic fan forums,
Facebook, or via her often-curious
Twitter feed.
posted by aught
on Jul 14, 2010 -
30 comments
'There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If
it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has
aught of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes?'
Chris Chester, author of
Providence of a Sparrow:
Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds, a meditation on his life
with B, an English Sparrow which he raised from a hatchling fallen from
the nest, died suddenly early this past Spring. His nephew Marc Mowery
has created
Chris Chester - born May 14, 1952
died April 17, 2007 to his memory and has posted 6 of 8 short videos
of Chris and Rebecca Chester and the sparrow named B on YouTube.
And
here is
The Sorrow and the Sparrow: The
Life and Death of Chris ChesterExcerpt and video
links within [more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Oct 25, 2007 -
9 comments
It's the first Monday in October and time for Supreme Court Justices to compare liberals, unfavorably, to the Ku Klux Klan. In his new
memoir, released on the first day of the Supreme Court's 2007 term, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that he grew up fearing the KKK, but now knows he had
"been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. " No small man, he also comments on Anita Hill's bad breath. Slate's spectacular legal columnist, Dahlia Lithwick, notes that
"in the few hundred pages of his new book, Thomas has managed to undo years of effort by his colleagues to depoliticize the judicial branch." As usual, only
Jon Stewart can make us laugh through the tears.
posted by The Bellman
on Oct 4, 2007 -
110 comments
Life and Death: an extraordinary post from Chris Clarke about his connection to serial killer Stephen Peter Morin. His family chimes in meaningfully in the comments.
Morin's execution is often pointed to as proof of the cruelty of lethal injection.
posted by Cassford
on Apr 4, 2005 -
20 comments
Be careful what you wish for, the cliché goes. Having aspired from early youth to become stars, people who achieve that status suddenly find themselves imprisoned, unable to walk down the street without being importuned by strangers. The higher their name floats, the greater the levy imposed, the less of ordinary life they can enjoy. In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades... 'I Is Someone Else'
posted by y2karl
on Feb 19, 2005 -
34 comments
