This study guide collection celebrates the life stories of fascinating and inspirational figures. Read on to discover insightful analyses and discussion starters for an array of uplifting biographies, including the award-winning A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming, Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt, and Strength in What Remains by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Tracy Kidder.
John Nash is born and raised in Bluefield, West Virginia. As a child, he is introverted and quiet, preferring reading and performing experiments to playing with other children. He is obsessed with codes and patterns and enjoys playing pranks on his sister and schoolmates. Intending to become an engineer like his father, Nash secures a scholarship to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. After a year, he abandons engineering to major in mathematics. He... Read A Beautiful Mind Summary
This study guide references the 1990 Oxford University Press edition of James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. The book is a collection of seven essays originally delivered as lectures, all on the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and his role in the Civil War (1861-1865). The book calls the Civil War era the “Second American Revolution” because, with Lincoln’s help, it brought about a fundamental transformation in the... Read Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution Summary
A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea is a 2017 book by Melissa Fleming, telling the true story of a young girl named Doaa who fled the Syrian civil war. Made a refugee by the conflict, she travels to Egypt and then attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. The book has won numerous awards.Plot SummaryThe story opens with Doaa Al Zamel floating in the sea amid the wreckage of a ship. Her husband is... Read A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea Summary
Alexander Hamilton is a 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, written by Ron Chernow. Beginning with Hamilton’s birth in the Caribbean, the book traces Hamilton’s story from his childhood, to his early years in America, to his rise as one of the most admired—and reviled—politicians and statesmen that the country would ever see. The popular music Hamilton is based on the story told in Chernow’s book, and shows the development of both America, and one of its... Read Alexander Hamilton Summary
A Long Way Home is a 2013 memoir by Saroo Brierley, an Indian-born author who was accidentally separated from his biological family at the age of five and adopted by an Australian couple. The memoir traces Saroo’s remarkable journey from India to Australia and back again 25 years later. The book inspired the 2016 film Lion and became a New York Times Best Seller after the film’s release. This guide refers to the 2015 edition published... Read A Long Way Home Summary
Harold Livesay’s 1975 biography, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business, follows the life of entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie as he builds one of the biggest manufacturing companies in 19th-century America. As Livesay narrates Carnegie’s life, he also describes the many societal shifts occurring throughout the 19th century, during which life in America and around the globe transitioned to a modern, industrial society.In the opening chapters, Livesay focuses on Carnegie’s humble beginnings. Carnegie is born... Read Andrew Carnegie And The Rise Of Big Business Summary
John Colapinto’s 1999 book As Nature Made Him is an expansion of his award-winning 1997 Rolling Stone article on the medical scandal surrounding David Reimer. David, raised as Brenda under the auspices of famous sexologist and child psychiatrist Dr. John Money, transitions back to a male gender identity during his teenage years. After Dr. Milton Diamond reveals the failure of Money’s theory of gender neutrality at birth, David’s story raises serious questions in the medical... Read As Nature Made Him Summary
Becoming Nicole, a nonfiction book by Washington Post journalist Amy Ellis Nutt, tells the story of Nicole Maines, a transgender girl who fights for acceptance in her family, at her school, and beyond. Published in 2015, the book chronicles Nicole’s early years as a boy named Wyatt, her adoption of a female name, a lawsuit involving her right to use the girls’ restroom at school, and her relationships with family and friends. Nutt also shows how... Read Becoming Nicole Summary
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is a non-fiction book by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor specializing in race and religion in the US. The title gestures to a passage in James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), which stresses the importance of new beginnings in the quest to rebuild the US as a truly multiracial democracy. A New York Times bestseller, Begin Again... Read Begin Again Summary
In Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, writer Erik Larson traces the Lusitania’s final journey across the Atlantic Ocean. The Lusitania is a British passenger liner owned by the Cunard Steamship Company. First sailing in 1907, the Lusitania quickly sets records for the fastest journey across the Atlantic Ocean, stealing the coveted Blue Riband away from Germany.Dead Wake follows the Lusitania’s final journey, which took place during the first week of May 1915... Read Dead Wake Summary
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne, published in 2010, is a work of historical nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. The book narrates a history of the Comanche Nation, and also follows the fates of the Parker family, from whom the book’s central figure, Quanah Parker, descends.The Comanches... Read Empire of the Summer Moon Summary
In 1914, after several years of fundraising efforts, Ernest Shackleton leaves England bound for exploration in Antarctica on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The purpose of the expedition is to traverse Antarctica from west to east by use of dog sleds. He purchases a sturdy wooden boat designed for hunting polar bears and changes the boat’s name to the Endurance. Against the advice of experienced whalers whom he meets in South Georgia en route to his... Read Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage Summary
Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother is a best-selling nonfiction book by Sonia Nazario, an American journalist best known for her work on social justice. Originally published in 2006, the book is based on Nazario’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Enrique’s Journey” series, which was written in six parts and published in The Los Angeles Times.The book, which has been published in eight languages and adapted for young adults in... Read Enrique's Journey Summary
Escape from Camp 14 is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, who is the only known person to have been born in and escape from a North Korean labor camp. The book’s author, Blaine Harden, interviewed Shin many times and has also spoken with former camp guards and North Korean traders. His book details Shin’s life both inside and outside the camp, as well as the political landscape in North Korea.As Shin was born in the... Read Escape from Camp 14 Summary
Historian Joseph J. Ellis was fascinated by George Washington ever since Ellis’ boyhood in Alexandria, Virginia, where Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, is located and his historical presence was strongly felt. By the time Ellis wrote His Excellency: George Washington in 2004, he had already produced several popular books about early American history. His Excellency is a more intimate biography of Washington than many previously written, focusing as much on the subject’s character as on his... Read His Excellency: George Washington Summary
The memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is an account of the life of Harriet Ann Jacobs, who calls herself “Linda Brent” in the narrative. Written in the tradition 18th-century writer Olaudah Equiano, Jacobs’s work joins that of her American contemporaries and fellow anti-slavery activists Solomon Northrup and Frederick Douglass. It is a key text for understanding the conditions of the lives of the enslaved in the Southern United States in... Read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Summary
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson is a non-fiction book published in 2011. It recounts the early years of Germany's Nazi regime from the perspective of the American ambassador, William Dodd, and his family. In Berlin, the family watches with growing horror as Hitler increases his dictatorial control over Germany, rearms the country in preparation for war, and conducts a national campaign of violent... Read In the Garden of Beasts Summary
Into the Wild is a nonfiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It was first published in 1996 and turned into a feature film directed by Sean Penn in 2007. It has been classified as outdoor writing, travel writing, and biography.In 1993 Krakauer published “Death of an Innocent” in Outside magazine, an article that detailed the death of Christopher McCandless. The article generated an enormous response from readers, and Krakauer spent a subsequent year tracing McCandless’s... Read Into The Wild Summary
Kisses From Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption, published in 2009, is a Christian memoir that follows the life of Katie Davis as she moves from the suburbs of Nashville to Uganda after high school to care for abandoned and orphaned children. This study guide refers to the 2011 First Howard Books hardcover edition. Kisses From Katie is broken into 21 chapters that linearly tell the story of how Katie moved from Tennessee... Read Kisses from Katie Summary
Dava Sobel’s best-selling book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time tells the story of the 18th-century contest to find a precise way to locate a ship at sea, the clockmaker who built the first timepiece that could do so, and his battle with the astronomers whose alternate method competed for the winning prize. Replete with sea disasters, brilliant scientists, and scheming politicians, Longitude won... Read Longitude Summary
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (2003), by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, presents ten accounts of ordinary contributors to the Rwandan genocide, which killed 800,000 Tutsis in just two months in 1994. Each survivor is from the same relatively small city and goes into depth about the neighbors they murdered (or helped murder). The work was first translated into English by Linda Coverdale.Its themes include personal responsibility, the horrors of groupthink, and mass dehumanization... Read Machete Season Summary
In Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Erica Armstrong Dunbar traces the life of enslaved woman Ona Judge from shortly before her birth to just after her death. This tracing is bookended by details about the circumstances into which Judge was born and the effect her life had on her family after her passing. To highlight additional historical aspects of the narrative, Dunbar includes an Author’s Note explaining how she became... Read Never Caught Summary
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004) is a history of Pocahontas’s role in the early stages of English colonialism in the Americas. Its author, Camilla Townsend, is a Professor of History at Rutgers University who has earned multiple awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for her work. This guide refers to the 2005 Hill and Wang paperback edition.In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend reconstructs a biography of Pocahontas, a figure so wrapped up in legends... Read Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma Summary
Rain of Gold recounts author Victor Villaseñor’s family history through the early 20th century, when his parents immigrated to America to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution. The book was inspired by stories from his grandmother and father, which Villaseñor came to view with skepticism as an adult. He devoted 12 years to researching his family’s history, which included conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with his parents, Lupe and Juan Salvador, and embarking... Read Rain of Gold Summary
Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (2018) is a biography of disavowed white nationalist Derek Black, authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow.Derek is a former white nationalist wunderkind. Derek is the son of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and Stormfront online hate group creator, Don Black, and the godson of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, white supremacist politician, and notorious public figure, David Duke. Derek’s parents remove... Read Rising Out of Hatred Summary
Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Endurance by American author Jennifer Armstrong is a work of narrative non-fiction that tells the story of the survival of explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton and the crew of the ship Endurance after they were shipwrecked in the Antarctic Circle. Published in 1998, the book was the winner of the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction and was also named an... Read Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World Summary
First published in 1990, the creative memoir Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood explores the childhood and adolescence of author Judith Ortiz Cofer. This study guide uses the second edition published in 1991 by Arte Público Press.Born in Puerto Rico, Cofer grew up moving between a Puerto Rican village and Paterson, New Jersey, where her father was stationed with the US Navy. Through a series of essays and poems, Cofer examines... Read Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood Summary
Steve Jobs (2011) is an authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson about the life of the late Apple founder and tech revolutionary. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs, the book is an in-depth exploration of who Jobs was, from the story of his birth and subsequent adoption to his massive success at the helm of Apple. Jobs himself personally requested that Isaacson write his biography on a phone call in 2004. By the... Read Steve Jobs Summary
Strength in What Remains is a nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder. It chronicles the story of a Burundian man named Deogratias (Deo). Deo, a Tutsi, survived a genocide that embroiled Burundi and Rwanda—especially in 1993-94. Deo fled the hospital where he had a medical school internship. Without any resources, he made his way to Rwanda only to be forced to escape violence there, return to Burundi, and finally travel to America... Read Strength in What Remains Summary
Surprised by Joy is C.S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, tracing the steps that led up to his conversion to Christianity. This guide refers to the 1955 Harcourt Brace & Company/Harvest Books edition. Lewis was born in 1898 in Ireland and begins his story with his childhood in Belfast, where he and his family lived in a maze-like house full of empty attics and heaps of books. He was close with his older brother, and together they... Read Surprised by Joy Summary
Sybil, by Flora Rheta Schreiber, tells the story of the recovery of the pseudonymous Sybil Dorsett (in real life, Shirley Mason), a woman who suffers from multiple personality disorder because of severe childhood trauma. Published in 1973, the book and the subsequent mini-series caused an immediate sensation, selling millions of copies and bringing the little-known disorder into Americans’ cultural awareness. The story claims to be nonfiction, but critics of the book, such as Debbie Nathan... Read Sybil Summary
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, published in 2005, is an historical study of the events surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s nomination as the Republican candidate for US president in 1860 and his tenure in office from 1861 to his assassination in 1865. The sixth book by Pulitzer Prize winner Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals won the 2006 Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History from the New... Read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln Summary
Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership by R. David Edmunds is both a biography of the titular Shawnee war chief Tecumseh and an overview of the political movement he started in the early 19th century.From roughly 1805 until his death in October 1813, Tecumseh played a pivotal role in establishing relations between the United States and Native Americans in the Old Northwest Territory (now part of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). Along... Read Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership Summary
The Blood of Emmett Till is a 2017 nonfiction book by Timothy B. Tyson. The text provides an account of the 1955 murder of a young African American boy named Emmet Till. Till was visiting Mississippi from Chicago, where his parents had emigrated during the Great Migration of the 1920s. They sought employment in the North, but they also sought to escape from the terror exercised by whites on blacks in the South.The Civil War... Read The Blood of Emmett Till Summary
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is a work of narrative nonfiction written by Daniel James Brown and published in 2013. The book became a New York Times bestseller and won several awards, including the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The book also inspired a PBS documentary titled The Boys of ’36.Content Warning: The source material references the... Read The Boys in the Boat Summary
The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club by Phillip Hoose is a young adult (YA) nonfiction book published in 2015. Hoose, who previously received a Newbery Honor for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, was inspired to write the book after learning about the Churchill Club on a visit to the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen. The book is composed of Hoose’s research-based narration of the actions and events surrounding the... Read The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Summary
Published in 2004, The Corporation, by legal scholar Joel Bakan, demonstrates that corporations often misbehave because it is in their nature to do so. The corporate legal mandate, to pursue profit on behalf of shareholders, impels corporations to take any action, including callous, antisocial, and even unlawful behaviors, so long as they generate a profit. Because corporations are created by governments, they are beholden to the state for their survival, yet they often manage to... Read The Corporation Summary
Published in 2013, Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City tells the stories of Oak Ridge, a secret town that grew around plutonium processing plants in Tennessee, and of the women who worked there during the Second World War. A New York Times bestseller within its first week of publication, the book went on to receive the 2014 APSA Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. Via the experiences of several new arrivals, the reader learns about Oak Ridge... Read The Girls of Atomic City Summary
“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II was published in 1984 and received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year. Written by Studs Terkel, the book is still considered a classic of oral history. Unlike traditional history, which tends to rely on written records and other material artifacts like works of art and literature or archaeological remains, oral histories collect information about past events through interviews with individuals who were... Read The Good War Summary
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Lacks and her HeLa cells, or the immortal cell line that doctors retrieved from her cervical cancer cells. Crown Publishing Group published the book in 2010, and it won a National Academies Communication Award the following year. This guide refers to the Crown 2010 first edition. Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cancer... Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Summary
The King’s Speech is a 2010 non-fiction book about King George VI and how he was treated for a speech impediment by the Australian Lionel Logue. Their unlikely friendship is credited for saving the British monarchy during a difficult time in world history. The King’s Speech was co-authored by Mark Logue (grandson of Lionel Logue) and Peter Conradi (an accomplished author of historical nonfiction) as an accompaniment to the Oscar-winning 2010 film of the same... Read The King's Speech Summary
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East is a biography and memoir written by Sandy Tolan and published in 2006. Against the backdrop of the first Arab-Israeli War’s 50th anniversary, American journalist Sandy Tolan travels to the Middle East to research his assignment. Through the biography, Tolan aims to highlight how two families on opposite sides of the conflict—the al-Khairis and the Eshkenazis—are connected on a level that... Read The Lemon Tree Summary
James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is often considered to be one of the finest pieces of biographical writing in the English language. Samuel Johnson was an English poet, essayist, and lexicographer who produced a pioneering and influential Dictionary of the English Language. However, he is less well-known today for his writings than as the biographical subject for Boswell, a lawyer from Scotland who first met Johnson in 1763. During their 21-year friendship... Read The Life of Samuel Johnson Summary
Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984) is a biography of 16th-century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. Spence is a former professor of history at Yale University and a specialist in Chinese history. The biography is a study of cross-cultural exchange between Ming China and Counter-Reformation Europe. It charts Ricci’s attempts to teach a mnemonic device called the memory palace to scholarly elites in Ming China and his experiences as a missionary in... Read The Memory Palace Of Matteo Ricci Summary
The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism and Treachery, written by Steven Sheinkin and published in 2010, is a biography for young readers about one of America's notable war heroes who was also her most famous traitor—Benedict Arnold. How this startling reversal came about is traced in the book, which is rigorously researched yet presented in the manner of an adventure novel. Sheinkin confronts the moral ambiguities that lie at the heart... Read The Notorious Benedict Arnold Summary
In The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights, historian Steve Sheinkin traces the story of the Port Chicago 50, a group of African-American sailors charged with mutiny for disobeying orders during World War II. Sheinkin’s history opens, however, with the story of Dorie Miller, a black mess attendant stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attack in 1942. Though not trained for battle, Miller courageously begins fighting with an anti-aircraft... Read The Port Chicago 50 Summary
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1998 work of nonfiction by British-American journalist Simon Winchester. Originally titled The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness, and the Love of Words upon its release in the United Kingdom, the book follows the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the connection that developed between James Murray, the... Read The Professor And The Madman Summary
Steve Lopez’s 2008 book, The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, is a work of nonfiction that charts the experience of the musician Nathaniel Ayers. Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and encounters Ayers playing a two-string violin on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Lopez questions why so talented a musician is clearly homeless and reduced to his present circumstances. Lopez strikes up a... Read The Soloist Summary
The Stranger in the Woods by journalist Michael Finkel is a 2017 nonfiction book about the “North Pond hermit,” who has lived in the Maine wilderness alone for 27 years. Through letters and interviews, the author learns about his origins, survival tactics, and burglary raids that made him a local legend. Finkel first published the story as the 2014 GQ article “The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit,” and the book provides... Read The Stranger in the Woods Summary
A powerful dichotomy lies at the heart of The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016), Michael Lewis’s account of how the friendship between two Israeli psychologists—Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—essentially created the field of behavioral economics and shifted paradigms about human decision making. This dichotomy is the tension between intuition and algorithms, between gut feelings and empirical data. In the Introduction, Lewis explains that The Undoing Project exists largely as a complement... Read The Undoing Project Summary
The Worldly Philosophers, first published in 1953, is a nonfiction work on the history of economics, written by American economist and historian Robert L. Heilbroner, the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics, Emeritus at the New School for Social Research, New York. Currently in its seventh edition, published in an updated and revised form in 1999, the book is regularly assigned to economics undergraduates, providing them with an overview of western economic thought. The Worldly Philosophers... Read The Worldly Philosophers Summary
Through My Eyes is the autobiography of Ruby Bridges. In 1960, Bridges became the first African American child to integrate an elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana following a court mandate for the state to desegregate its public school system. Louisiana trailed segregation effort in neighboring states, such as the nine Black high school students known as the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.Bridges’s autobiography, published in... Read Through My Eyes Summary
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a biography by Laura Hillenbrand that tells the life story of Louie Zamperini, an Italian-American from Torrance, California who lived from 1917 to 2014. Published in 2010, Unbroken was a The New York Times bestseller for over four years.Plot SummaryIn his youth, Louie Zamperini was the town troublemaker, a boy who used his cunning to commit acts of petty theft and public nuisance... Read Unbroken Summary
John Lewis’s 1998 memoir, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, written with Mike D’Orso, is an intimate firsthand account of the US Civil Rights Movement (CRM). Lewis, the child of sharecroppers, grew up in Pike County, Alabama, during the heyday of segregation in the American South. From a young age, Lewis questioned the injustices of segregation, yet never imagined that he would become one of the key leaders of the civil rights... Read Walking with the Wind Summary
When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 is a nonfiction book published in 1994 by Louise Levathes. In a narrative that predates the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Levathes examines a three-decade period in the early 15th century when China launched seven major sea voyages. Levathes holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and worked for ten years as a staff writer for National Geographic. In 1990, she... Read When China Ruled the Seas Summary
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman is a nonfiction book published in 2009 by the American journalist Jon Krakauer. It details the true story of Pat Tillman, a professional American football player who left his sports career to enlist in the army after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2004, Tillman died in Afghanistan as a result of friendly fire. Krakauer is known for his Outside magazine articles and several... Read Where Men Win Glory Summary