Rent Biography & Autobiography - Ethnic Cultures

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham Paperback Book

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book PrizeA New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Whiting Writers' AwardA Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the YearCatfish and Mandala is the story of an American...

Publication Date: Sep 2000

Add

My Father's Paradise

by Ariel Sabar

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and...

Publication Date: Oct 2009

Add

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

by Sandy Tolan

In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he...

Publication Date: Apr 2007

Add

Tis: A Memoir

by Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt's glorious childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, has been loved and celebrated by readers everywhere for its spirit, its wit and its profound humanity. A tale of redemption, in which storytelling itself is the source of salvation, it won...

Publication Date: Aug 2000

Add

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

by Adeline Yen Mah

Born in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen Mah was the youngest child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. But wealth and position could not...

Publication Date: Apr 1999

Add

Enrique's Journey

by Sonia Nazario

In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. When Enrique is five years old, his...

Publication Date: Feb 2007

Add

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

by Lucette Lagnado

Lucette Lagnado's father, Leon, is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at Shepherd's Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King...

Publication Date: Jul 2008

Add

Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

Praised by V. S. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran-the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited...

Publication Date: Jan 2008

Add

Rain of Gold

by Victor Villasenor

This phenomenal national bestseller has received extraordinary reviews and avid national media attention. Novelist Villasenor tells the true-life saga of one family's journey from the days of Pancho Villa in war-ravaged Mexico to the Prohibition era...

Publication Date: Sep 1992

Add

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

by Maxine Hong Kingston

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

Publication Date: Apr 1989

Add

A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age

by John Doyle

Celebrated TV critic John Doyle has penned an Irish memoir that gives a portrait of a boy and his country transformed by television. Funny, insightful, and engaging, A Great Feast of Light begins in the small town of Nenagh, where young John's...

Publication Date: Jan 2007

Add

Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

by Elva Treviino Hart

A vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. It brings to life the day-to-day existence of people facing the obstacles of working in the fields and raising a family in an environment...

Publication Date: May 1999

Add

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight: Memories of a Japanese Girl

by Yaeko Sugama-Weldon

Yaeko Sugama Weldon's memories of a poor but happy childhood shattered by the destruction of war offer a window to a different culture and an eye-opening look at how civilians survive the fears and horrors of a war they never wanted. Cherry Blossoms...

Publication Date: Aug 2007

Add

Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon

by Elmaz Abinader

In this memoir of her Lebanese-American family, the author offers an account of uprooted and resettled lives. Spanning four generations and two continents, the book is the story of a family from the mountains of Lebanon and their emigration to...

Publication Date: Oct 1997

Add

Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family

by Yoshiko Uchida

Autobiographical account of the internment of the Japanese American author's family in 1942.

Publication Date: Apr 1982

Add

Eyewitness: A Filmmaker's Memoir of the Chicano Movement (Hispanic Civil Rights)

by Jesus Salvador Trevino

Noted filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño participated in and documented the most important events in the Mexican American civil rights movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's: the farm workers' strikes and boycotts, the Los Angeles school...

Publication Date: Sep 2001

Add

Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos

by Emily Wu

Emily Wu’s account of her childhood under Mao opens on her third birthday, as she meets her father for the first time in a concentration camp. A well-known academic, her father had been designated an “ultra-rightist” and class...

Publication Date: Jan 2008

Add

Fifth Chinese Daughter

by Jade S. Wong

Originally published in 1945 and now reissued with a new introduction by the author, Jade Snow Wong's story is one of struggle and achievements. These memoirs of the author's first 24 years are thoughtful, informative, and highly entertaining. They...

Publication Date: Apr 1989

Add

Geisha: A Life

by Mineko Iwasaki

No woman in the three-hundred-year history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story -- until now.'Many say I was the best geisha of my generation,' writes Mineko Iwasaki. 'And yet, it was a life that I found too...

Publication Date: Sep 2003

Add

Great Irish Heroes: Michael Collins, Billy The Kid, Teddy Roosevelt, Ned Kelly: Fifty True Stories of Irish Men and Women Who Changed the World

by Danny Conlon

From Billy the Kid to President Roosevelt, this is a spectacular collection of true stories of Irish men and women who have changed the course of history: John Barry, the poor Irishman who made waves as the father of the US navy; William...

Publication Date: Apr 2010

Add

How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life

by Tom Miller

All over the world there are people struggling to master the quirks and challenges of English. In today's America, many millions of them are Latino—and in this eloquent collection, nearly 60 of the best known contribute fascinating, revealing,...

Publication Date: Aug 2007

Add

Hunger of Memory : The Education of Richard Rodriguez

by Richard Rodroquez

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British...

Publication Date: Jan 1983

Add

I Dreamed of Africa (tie-in edition)

by Kuki Gallmann

At the age of 25, Kuki Gallmann moved to Kenya with her future husband, where they established a vast ranch. But Africa's beauty does't come without a price, and when tragedy struck, Kuki found herself pregnant and alone with her young son and 90,000...

Publication Date: Apr 2000

Add

Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World

by Yang Erche Namu

This remarkable memoir transports us to the remote reaches of the Himalayas, to a place the Chinese call 'the country of daughters,' to the home of the Moso, a society in which women rule men. According to local tradition, marriage is considered a...

Publication Date: Feb 2004

Add

Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps

by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald

In 1941, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was a teenage girl who, like other Americans, reacted with horror to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet soon she and her family were among 110,000 innocent people imprisoned by the U.S. government because of their...

Publication Date: Apr 2005

Add

Lost in America: A Journey with My Father

by Sherwin B. Nuland

A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the body now gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about the mysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland's Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish...

Publication Date: Mar 2004

Add

Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story

by Dan Vittorio Segre

"I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head." From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre's memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled Fascist...

Publication Date: Apr 2008

Add

Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend

by Christopher Ross

On November 25, 1970, the world renowned Japanese writer Yukio Mishima committed seppuku with his own antique sword. Mishima's spectacular suicide has been called many things: a hankering for heroism; a beautiful, perverse drama; a political protest...

Publication Date: Nov 2007

Add

My Father's Roses: A Family's Journey from World War I to Treblinka

by Nancy Kohner

From their heroic feats on the battlefields of World War I to the rise of Hitler and a tragic culmination at Treblinka, this is one family's extraordinary history.Nancy's father was not like other fathers in their northern...

Publication Date: Dec 2009

Add

Paper Daughter: A Memoir

by Elaine M. Mar

When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and her mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver to join her father in a community more Chinese than American, more hungry than hopeful. While working with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese...