Memoir

Joel Hafvenstein spent a year in Afghanistan trying to convince opium-poppy farmers to give up what he calls "the perfect crop." Working for a private company funded by the United States Agency for International Development, Hafvenstein helped provide Afghan farmers with alternative jobs — like building canals and roads — in hopes that they'd give up their alliance with the Taliban.

Journalist Philip C. Winslow has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, ABC radio and CBC radio.

But he hasn't always been a journalist: His new memoir, Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer, chronicles the time he spent working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the West Bank. It was during the second Palestinian intifada, during which Winslow transported aid across checkpoints to villages and refugee camps.

Pro golfer John Daly has won tournaments on five continents, including two of the PGA tour's four majors. He's also gambled away a couple of fortunes, trashed various hotel rooms, houses and cars, married four times, and downed enough booze to land himself in a string of emergency rooms and rehab clinics. These days, he says, he lives on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. "I guess you could say," Daly writes in his recent memoir, that "I'm not exactly a poster boy for moderation."

The rapper MF Grimm, whose real name is Percy Carey, has written a graphic memoir entitled Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm. He spoke to Terry Gross about his story.

Always politically minded, chess master Garry Kasparov is now running for president of Russia. He's the leader of an opposition coalition known as The Other Russia. He's also published a new book, called How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom.

In July 2003, newspaper columnist Robert Novak published the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame — shortly after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece contradicting President Bush's contention that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure yellowcake uranium from the West African nation of Niger.

In his memoir Foreskin's Lament, author Shalom Auslander writes about his attempt to break free from the strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish environment of his childhood.

Auslander is the author of the short-story collection Beware of God. He's contributed to The New Yorker, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

He spent a year reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and writing The Know-It-All, an account of what he learned.

Now author A.J. Jacobs has accomplished another annually retentive feat: Living life the way the Good Book says we should.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible chronicles Jacobs' attempts to follow every rule in the Bible — and considers the lessons he learned along the way.

A new family memoir from the daughter of famed literary critic Anatole Broyard bears the subtitle My Father's Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets. Bliss Broyard, raised as white in Connecticut, was 24 when she learned that her father had concealed his black heritage.

Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying details the complicated emotions surrounding the deaths of her father and uncle — and the birth of her daughter — all in the same year.

Danticat's uncle raised her in Haiti until age 12, when she moved to New York to live with her immigrant parents.

Danticat is the author of a number of novels, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, as well as the short-story collection Krik? Krak!.