Memoir

He's appeared in over 100 films and TV shows, but you still might not know his name. In his memoir, The Dangerous Animals Club, actor Stephen Tobolowsky talks about falling in love with comedy — and playing characters who are always on the story's fringes.

Waging Heavy Peace is about his music, raising two sons with special needs, and his own medical conditions, which have included polio, epilepsy and a brain aneurysm.

John Powers reviews the author's memoir of his time in hiding — the result of a fatwah calling for his murder after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Charles Rowan Beye has been married three times -- to two women and a man. Now, over age 80, he looks back on his life and asks, "What was that all about?" Critic Maureen Corrigan says Beye's memoir, subtitled "A Gay Man's Odyssey," is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon.

Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in the 1980s, where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was breathing its last gasps. In his memoir, Roth describes how he learned -- years after his father died from AIDS -- that his father was probably gay.

The author's new memoir, Winter Journal, is a history of his body — scars, panic attacks and near-death experiences. He tells Fresh Air how he got a reputation as a dirty fighter, why he doesn't drive and how hard it was to see his mother's dead body.

In his new memoir, David McGlynn describes how his teenage years were disrupted by violence. McAllen was a swimmer who turned to evangelical Christianity in college. A Door in the Ocean is a compelling coming-of-age story marked by random tragedy and biblical tracts, church coffee and chlorine.

Brian Castner commanded two Explosive Ordnance Disposal units in Iraq, where his team disabled roadside IEDs and investigated the aftermath of roadside car bombings. He returned home a completely different man, which he details in his memoir, The Long Walk.

The James Beard award-winning chef was the youngest ever to receive a three-star review from The New York Times. His memoir, Yes, Chef, explains what it takes to be a master chef — and describes his journey from Ethiopia to Sweden to some of America's finest restaurants.

Kristen Iversen spent her childhood in the 1960s in Colorado near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory, playing in fields that now appear to have been contaminated with plutonium. In Full Body Burden, she investigates the environmental scandal involving nuclear contamination around her childhood home.