Biography & Memoir

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.

New York Times reporter Alex Kuczynski's new book is Beauty Junkies: Inside our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery. No stranger to "beauty maintenance," Kuczynski has had botox, an eye-lift, and liposuction, but gave it up after a bad experience with lip augmentation.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Styron died Wednesday of pneumonia at the age of 81. Styron's books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Confessions of Nat Turner (which won the Pulitzer) and Sophie's Choice, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep. His memoir Darkness Visible detailed his struggles with depression and suicidal impulses. This interview originally aired on Sept. 19, 1990.

Richard Gilman, who died Saturday at age 83, was a writer and professor at the Yale School of Drama. Ben Brantley of The New York Times writes, "Mr. Gilman was one of a breed of philosopher-critics... who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. They located in modern drama the elements of abstraction, alienation and absurdity that had long been at the core of discussions of other forms of art and literature." In this archive interview from 1987, Gilman recounts his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and then to atheism.

Kenya political activist Wangari Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Her new memoir is called Unbowed. She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which has planted over thirty million trees across Kenya. In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's parliament, and in 2003 was appointed assistant minister for the environment.

In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, author Daniel Mendelsohn unearths and reconstructs the lives of six people in his family who died in the Holocaust. Maureen Corrigan has a book review.

William Cope Moyers is the son of journalist Bill Moyers. He's written a new memoir about his addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine and his recovery. He's been sober for twelve years and is the vice president for external affairs at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. His new memoir is Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption

The New Yorker's former Middle East correspondent has written a memoir: Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Goldberg won the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2003 for his coverage of terrorism.