Sociology Memoirs

On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and wear makeup and jewelry to school. Profoundly shaken by the news and unsettled by media coverage that sidestepped the issues of gender identity and of race integral to the case, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial.

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

Jess enlisted in the Marines immediately after graduating from high school in 2001, and in 2004 she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps' first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq. Her platoon was tasked with recovering and processing the remains of fallen soldiers. With sensitivity and insight, Jess describes her job retrieving and examining the remains of fellow soldiers lost in combat in Iraq, and the psychological intricacy of coping with their fates, as well as her own.

After her traditional engagement to her high school sweetheart falls apart, Liza Monroy faced the prospect of another devastating loss: the deportation of her best friend Emir. Desperate to stay in America, Emir tried every legal recourse to obtain a green card knowing that his return to the Middle East where gay men are often beaten and sometimes killed was too dangerous. So Liza proposes to Emir in efforts to keep him safe and by her side. After a fast wedding in Las Vegas, the couple faces new adventures and obstacles in both L.A. and New York City as they dodge the INS.

Sarah Forbes was in graduate school when she stumbled upon a museum dedicated to...sex. The anthropology student hesitated when her boyfriend suggested that she apply for a job, but apply she did, and it wasn't long before a part-time position at New York's Museum of Sex led to a gig as the museum's curator. That was over 12 years ago. Now Sarah - a married mother of two - proudly sports her title as Curator of Sex.

Surviving non-Hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer, former White House chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan shares his personal and political reflections--from his experiences with the Civil Rights movement to his civilian volunteer tour in Vietnam, from his years of scrutiny under the Carter administration to his agonizing, yet triumphant times battling cancer.

Since serving as President Jimmy Carter's chief of staff in the late 1970s, Hamilton Jordan has survived three forms of cancer: non-Hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer. In this remarkable memoir, Jordan recounts his tumultuous adventures in the political arena and his successful journeys through the world of modern cancer treatment.

One in 3,000 people is born with neurofibromatosis. It affects all of them in different ways. For some, neurofibromatosis is as clear as the tumors on their face. For others, it hides beneath the surface, creating tumors that destroy hearing, vision, and more. Many of them are misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and often simply missed by a world of medicine that doesn't have a full grasp on all the effects of NF.

What happens when a 35-year-old average American woman spends one year following every piece of Oprah Winfrey's advice on how to "live your best life"? Robyn Okrant devoted 2008 to adhering to all of Oprah's suggestions and guidance delivered via her television show, her Web site, and her magazine. Living Oprah is a month-by-month account of that year.

When Lucy Pinney arrived in the lush Dorset countryside nearly 30 years ago she was newly married, very enthusiastic, charmingly naive and launched herself into pig-keeping, cake-baking and lamb- rearing with gusto. But nothing had prepared her for the essential oddness and precariousness of rural life.

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of Black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own midlife journey to lock his hair.

Pulling Down the Barn eloquently recalls author Anne-Marie Oomen's personal journey as she discovers herself an outsider on her family farm located in western Michigan's Oceana County, in the township of Elbridge - a couple hundred acres in the middle of rural America. Written as a series of heartfelt interlocking narratives, this collection of essays portrays the realities of farm life: haying, picking asparagus and cherries, the machinery of tractors and pickers.

A transcendent memoir from an author of rare talent, Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground recounts Bell’s time living mostly alone in the hills of Wyoming, where she herded sheep and cattle and battled isolation. A journey to the heart of self, Bell’s work sparkles with shimmering prose and remarkable insight.

This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single parent. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates, and travels across the country with her daughter. All roads, though, lead them back to her hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny village where Amy's family has lived for over 200 years.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

Wolfgang Bosbach hat etwas zu sagen - notfalls auch gegen die Linie der eigenen Partei. Seine Geradlinigkeit kommt bei den Bürgern an, die im unübersichtlichen und manchmal auch als unehrlich wahrgenommenen Politikbetrieb nach Orientierung suchen. Ein Interview von Hugo Müller-Vogg mit Wolfgang Bosbach über die Herausforderungen in Zeiten der Anti-Terror-Politik und der großen Flüchtlingsströme, über Werte in der heutigen Gesellschaft und über Deutschlands Rolle in Europa und der Welt.

In this first biography of Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. in more than 30 years, Chuck McFadden explores the unique persona of one of the most idiosyncratic politicians in California history. The son of California political royalty who forged his own political style against the tumultuous backdrop of a huge, balkanized state - and shoved to and fro by complex currents - Jerry Brown pursued visionary impulses as well as his grandiose ambitions.

On the 50th anniversary of her murder, Kevin Cook presents the real Kitty Genovese. She was a vibrant young woman - unbeknownst to most, a lesbian - a bartender working (and dancing) her way through the colorful, fast-changing New York of the ’60s, a cultural kaleidoscope marred by the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War, and race riots. Downtown, Greenwich Village teemed with beatniks, folkies, and so-called misfits like Kitty and her lover. Kitty Genovese evokes the Village’s gay and lesbian underground with deep feeling and colorful detail.

Dirty White Boy is a vivid mosaic of modern London, caught between the ghosts of the past and the uncertainties of the future. With an unforgettable cast of characters ranging from Chico the camp queen to Pam the Fag Lady (with guest spots by stars like Kathy Griffin and Graham Norton), these compulsively listenable true tales offer a wry panorama of Soho's rich and often raucous subcultures.

This is the extraordinary story of the South African boy whose bravery and fierce determination to make a difference despite being born with AIDS has made him the human symbol of the world's fight against the disease, told by the veteran American journalist whose life he changed.