Category: Biography and Memoir

  • People often ask if it was hard for me, as a journalist, to write a memoir. It wasn’t. In many ways, the people I interviewed over the years for news stories—many of them immigrants, many of them poor—taught me to trust the power of personal stories. One of them was Alaaedien. He drove cabs in…

  • Today is the day to thank Ada Lovelace for the device you’re using right now to read this. Born Augusta Ada Gordon in 1815, she is recognized as the “first computer programmer.” In the early 1840s, Lovelace translated and expanded on an Italian article describing Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Her elaborate notes included a method…

  • As a teenager, I didn’t pay much attention to posted signs. I was a strange kid—both very confident and very lost. My façade, my own sign posted for the world, was a lie and I knew it. But I believed if I could just be patient enough, a kind of secret door would eventually open…

  • For years I dragged around poems in the pockets of my white coat, pressing them into the hands of unsuspecting medical students and residents. As an attending physician at a teaching hospital in New York City, my job was to supervise the medical students and residents. I had to ensure that our patients received good…

  • By Christine Byl Photo credits: Christine Byl I've lived in Interior Alaska for the past eleven years, about 100 miles, as the raven flies, from the highest mountain in North America. I have always called this formidable and beautiful summit "Denali," as do a majority of Alaska residents, including our three Republicans in Congress. Since…

  • By Amy Caldwell Beach in Gaza City July 8 marks the anniversary of the Israeli-Gazan conflict, one of the subjects that concerns Amy Caldwell, executive editor at Beacon Press. She has acquired The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary by Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.…

  • Today Beacon Press takes part in the international conversation highlighting stories of people with disabilities. In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ADA, we present two disability stories: one from Terry Galloway, the other from Suzanne Kamata. *** Hearing's a Hoot by Terry Galloway   Image by Andreas Matern When I was deaf as…

  • At the start of Love & Fury, Richard Hoffman's father tells him that his will is pretty simple. The same could not be said about their relationship. In his memoir, Hoffman writes elegiacally of his upbringing in a working-class Pennsylvania family where he would inherit the abuse, racism, sexism, and other toxic values he would come…

  • By Barron H. Lerner In his interview with Terri Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, Barron H. Lerner, author of The Good Doctor, discusses the paternalistic approach his father, a physician, would take with some of his patients. His father would withhold information from them if he felt it was in their best interest. As a…

  •   View image | gettyimages.com Rajeev Goyal was in the Kavre district of Nepal when the April 25 earthquake struck and has been involved in relief work since then. He and his team quickly mobilized and have distributed 2,000 waterproof tarps. When the second earthquake struck on May 12, he and his team were in…