books to read if you like biography and autobiography

I'm all about biography and autobiography because I think it's one of the most interesting ways to learn history. Although what you're reading is filtered through one person's viewpoint and that has to be kept in mind, really, all history is filtered through one viewpoint. I'd rather read it from an admittedly biased individual than read the ostenibly unbiased, dry accounts that the dominant culture presents as the objective truth. It's more interesting to get to read about events on a macro and micro level at once, and it makes historical events seem more real and relate-able.

Anything from the Nabat series
Published by an imprint of AK Press, this series of books reprints out of print autobiographies of various outlaw type folks. My favourites are You Can't Win by Jack Black (not the irritating actor), which is about a hobo burglar who does spends years hopping trains and doing crimes, and does intense time in Folsom and San Quentin, and Out of the Night by Jan Valtin, which is this epic story of an organiser with the Communist Party in Germany (and in various other locations ... he ends up as an insanely well travelled guy) in the years leading up to and during WWII. The former is smart and fun and will have you using copious amounts of old hobo slang, and the latter is smart and intense and incredibly difficult to read, but incredibly necessary at the same time. Amazing stuff, as is everything else in the series.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman by Diane diPrima
Diane di Prima is one of the people I most admire. Not only is she an absolutely beautiful writer, but she's a toughass lady. As one of the original writers in the Beat movement, she introduced lots of the legendary male Beat writers to New York City, was a skilled and prolific author, founded a poetry zine and printing press, put on plays, lived with incredible style, and managed to do it all while raising several kids. When you think of how many of the male Beat writers (who usually get more accolades than diPrima) relied on their wives, girlfriends, or mothers to support them and allow them to live in carefree, artistic ways, her accomplishments are all the more impressive. A rad lady and an equally rad autobiography.

Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
A really interesting autobiography detailing the first twenty five or so years of Brown's life. He grew up in Harlem in an incredibly transitional era ... coming from a fairly traditional rural Southern family who had moved to the city, running around the streets causing shit as a little kid, and seeing heroin devestate his community as a teenager. He tells fascinating, sad stories about being a bad kid, running around stealing and skipping school and ending up going through the juvenile detention system. Later he ends up working his way into university, and has to deal with choosing to go straight and leaving his old friends and community behind. It's crazy to read his descriptions of how widespread of an epidemic heroin became, in Brown's words, "Drugs were killing just about everybody off in one way or another. It had taken over the neighborhood, the entire community. I didn't know of one family in Harlem with three or more kids between the ages of fourteen and nineteen in which at least one of them wasn't on drugs. This was just how it was."

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Lorde describes this as a biomythography, and it's a rad read. She uses her amazing poetic voice to flesh out the structure of the autobiography and create a story that contains the facts and goings on of her life, as well as more mythological stories and feelings behind everything that happened to her. Stories of growing up poor, black, and female with aspirations towards being formally educated and becoming a poet, which is a hard path to choose in life (especially in the time in which she grew up), but which Lorde is strong enough to accomplish for herself.

Living My Life by Emma Goldman
The two volumes of Emma Goldman's autobiography are a lot to get through, but they're not as weighty as you might think, and they're a hell of a lot of fun to read. I think pretty much everyone I know really admires Goldman for her politics, her eloquence, and the amount she managed to accomplish in her life, especially considering her gender and the repression she faced, but even if you've read lots by her and are pretty aware of her life, you'll learn tons more from these books. Goldman was a toughass lady, so there's lots of tales of confrontations with cops and jailers, crazy tales of speeches she made with cops and right wingers waiting outside for her, and all that other stuff. That's the stuff that everyone knows about her, but I liked the chance to learn that she also owned an ice cream shop, tried prostitution to make money for activism but got nervous and had some dude give her money to just go home, and other stories that give a more complete picture of her life.

Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was one of the early founders of the women's liberation movement (second wave feminism), as well as an anti-war activist, involved in work in Cuba, and associated to a certain extent with SDS and the Weather Underground. I like that she writes really honestly about her progression into activism, covering the victories, but also the mistakes and the nervous moments. Although she sort of snipes at other women more than I like reading about, some of the gossipy anecdotes are pretty entertaining (Bernadette Dohn from the Weather Underground wore very short skirts! And she was a jerk to Dunbar Ortiz! Scandalous!). She writes a lot about being a rural, working class woman who becomes a part of the activist scene, and does a good job of examining the class prejudices she encounters along the way.