2024 is at a close, and Iowa City Public Library Staff reflected on some of the literary highlights of the year, voting for new favorites in a variety of genres. In this list, you'll find the staff picks for Biography/Memoir Books released in 2024. "Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring" by Brad Gooch was the standout title among staff, earning the greatest number of votes for this genre.
Radiant : the life and line of Keith Haring
Gooch, Brad, 1952- author.
709.2 /Haring
A stunning life of the iconic American artist, Keith Haring, by the acclaimed biographer Brad Gooch. Keith Haring was one of the most emblematic artists of the 1980s, a figure described by his contemporaries as "a prophet in his life, his person, and his work." Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power.
Be not afraid of my body : a lyrical memoir
Stewart, Darius, author.
BIOGRAPHY Stewart, Darius
Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee, Texas, and Iowa, he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. A mix of memoir, surreal reveries, and startling imagery, Be Not Afraid of My Body is a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of experience and transform them into a story that captures all the multitudes we contain.
The Friday afternoon club : a family memoir
Dunne, Griffin, author.
BIOGRAPHY Dunne, Griffin
A memoir and coming-of-age story chronicling the successes and disappointments, wit and wildness of Dunne and his multigenerational family of larger-than-life characters.
Home and alone
Stern, Daniel, 1957- author.
791.43028092 /Stern
Beginning with his film debut in Breaking Away, Daniel Stern has grown up on-screen before our very eyes. His connection with audiences is cemented in movies like Home Alone and City Slickers, and in his debut memoir, Home and Alone, he is the Everyman narrator on a ride into the human side of Hollywood. But the real surprises are in Stern's off-screen roles as a bronze sculptor, cattle rancher, avocado farmer and public servant. The hard work and commitment he has put into his on-screen successes are applied with the same intensity to every aspect of his life. From creating monumental public art projects and founding a Boys & Girls Club to visiting troops in Iraq and learning to birth a cow, he has lived it all. Home and Alone is for anyone who needs reminding that nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it.
Becky Lynch : The Man : not your average average girl
Lynch, Becky, 1987- author.
796.812092 /Lynch
This compelling and deeply personal memoir from WWE superstar Rebecca Quin--a.k.a. The Man, a.k.a. Becky Lynch--delves into her earliest wrestling days, her scrappy beginnings, and her meteoric rise to fame. Rebecca's deep love of wrestling as a child set her on an unlikely path. With few female wrestlers to look to for guidance, Rebecca pursued a wrestling career hoping to change the culture and move away from the antiquated disrespect so often directed at the elite female athletes that grace the ring. Even as a teenager, she knew that she would stop at nothing to earn a space among the greatest wrestlers of our time, and to pave a new path for female fighters.
In my time of dying : how I came face-to-face with the idea of an afterlife
Junger, Sebastian, author.
133.9013 /Junger
For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. "It's okay," his father said. "There's nothing to be scared of. I'll take care of you." That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger--a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical--to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die.
Sonny boy : a memoir
Pacino, Al, 1940- author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJbWxVWt7dFG44WJhwXTpP
791.43028092 /Pacino
To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies - The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon - that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. But Pacino was in his mid-30s by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theatre in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him.
Splinters : another kind of love story
Jamison, Leslie, 1983- author.
BIOGRAPHY Jamison, Leslie
From the New York times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage--an exploration of motherhood, art and new love.
There's always this year : on basketball and ascension
Abdurraqib, Hanif, 1983- author.
796.323 /Abdurraqib
While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role-models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir:
Traveling : on the path of Joni Mitchell
Powers, Ann, 1964- author.
781.66092 /Mitchell
For decades, Joni Mitchell's life and music have enraptured listeners. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Mitchell has inspired countless musicians--from peers like James Taylor, to inheritors like Prince and Brandi Carlile--and authors, who have dissected her music and her life in their writing. Kaleidoscopic in scope, and intimate in its detail, Traveling is a fresh and fascinating addition to the Joni Mitchell canon, written by a biographer in full command of her gifts who asks as much of herself as of her subject.
Why we read : on bookworms, libraries and just one more page before lights out
Reed, Shannon, author.
028.9 /Reed
In this uproarious exploration of the joys of reading, a long-time teacher, lifelong reader and The New Yorker contributor shares surprising stories from her life and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students and shows us how literature can transform us for the better.
"Radiant : the life and line of Keith Haring" was ranked the Best of Biography/Memoir by ICPL Staff for 2024.
- Becky