Biography & Memoir

Journalist Jeff Gammage and his wife Christine have adopted two daughters from China; now Gammage, a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, has written a book about the experience. It's called China Ghosts: My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood.

Muslim feminist Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and co-founder of Muslims for Peace, recently spent a reporting fellowship covering a Muslim woman who was building a women's mosque in India.

Nomani was born in Mumbai, India's largest city, moved to the U.S. as a child, and grew up in Morgantown, W. Va.

Her new book is called Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam.

Maureen Corrigan recommends non-fiction books to read this summer.

Josh Rushing was a Marine Corps media liaison at Central Command, or Centcom, in the early days of the Iraq war. His job was to represent the Marines to the worldwide media covering the war in Iraq, including the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera, and he was featured in the documentary Control Room. After retiring from the Marines he took a job as a correspondent with Al-Jazeera, reporting from Washington D.C. His new memoir is Mission Al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World.

Arnold Rampersad's new biography re-examines the life of Ralph Ellison, the influential cultural critic and author of Invisible Man, and offers insights about why Ellison never produced a second masterpiece.

Comic Don Rickles is known for insulting his audiences on stage, but he doesn't consider himself an insult comic. His heyday was in the '50s and '60s, on TV and in Vegas. Frank Sinatra, an early fan, helped get him noticed. Now Rickles has written a memoir, Rickles' Book.

In 1961, an integrated group of self-proclaimed "Freedom Riders" challenged segregation by riding together on segregated buses through the Deep South. They demanded unrestricted access to the buses — as well as to terminal restaurants and waiting rooms — but pledged nonviolence.

With his famous "slam dunk" comment about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, George Tenet helped shape the arguments that led the United States into the Iraq war. A holdover from the Clinton administration, he was director of the CIA when the White House made the decision to invade, and in 2004 President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service.

Sari Nusseibeh is the president of and a professor of philosophy at al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem. He's written a memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life; he's also co-author of the People's Voice Initiative, aimed at building grassroots support for a two-state solution in the Middle East. Until December 2002, he was the representative of the Palestinian National Authority in Jerusalem.

Distinguished biographer Hermione Lee is known for her writings on the lives of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, among other subjects. Now her much-anticipated biography of Edith Wharton has been published, and book critic Maureen Corrigan has just resurfaced after a long, long read.

Novelist A.M. Homes writes about her real life — including her reunion with her biological parents, 31 years after they gave her up for adoption — in a memoir called The Mistress's Daughter.

Record producer Joe Boyd has worked with Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Richard and Linda Thompson, R.E.M. and many other musical acts. He has a new memoir, called White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.

Retired CIA field officer Larry Devlin was appointed CIA station chief in Zaire in the Congo in 1960, following the Congo's independence from Belgium. It was also a time when the Congo was a significant pawn in the Cold War.

Devlin has written a memoir about his experiences, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone.

Navy Cmdr. Richard Jadick earned a Bronze Star with a "V" for valor for his service as a doctor during the Battle of Fallujah, which featured some of the worst street fighting seen by Americans since Vietnam. His new memoir, written with Thomas Hayden, is On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story.

ABC news correspondent and former anchor Bob Woodruff was nearly killed by a roadside bomb on Jan. 29, 2006 in Iraq. He suffered a severe brain injury and was in a coma for over a month. He and his wife Lee have written a new memoir about his recovery: In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing.

Woodruff has just returned to work at ABC with the special report "To Iraq and Back." It tells the story of his recovery, and the plight of brain-injured Iraq veterans. He and his wife have also set up a new foundation to help soldiers recovering from brain

Ishmael Beah has written a memoir about his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Orphaned by the civil war there, he was carrying an AK-47 by the age of 12. Pumped up by drugs, he was forced to kill or be killed.

When he was 15, UNICEF took Beah to a rehabilitation center. He was eventually adopted by an American woman and brought to the United States, where he attended high school and graduated from Oberlin College.

His book is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

Composer and writer Allen Shawn is the author of the new memoir, Wish I Could Be There. The book documents his many phobias. Shawn is deathly afraid of a lot of things, including heights, water, fields, parking lots and unknown streets.

Writer Emily Rapp's left foot was amputated when she was four years old, and she has worn a prosthetic device ever since. Her book is Poster Child: A Memoir.

Novelist Robert Stone has written a new memoir that begins with a stint in the Navy in the late 1950s, continues through his work as a journalist in Vietnam and then includes his counterculture years in the 1970s, taking hallucinogenic drugs, cross-country road trips, and hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. His memoir is, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Stone's novels include Dog Soldiers (which was adapted into the film Who'll Stop the Rain), and Outerbridge Reach.