Selected Memoirs and Novels on Race, Ethnicity, or Class in America
American Chica (2001) By Marie Arana
A journalist describes her efforts to come to terms with her dual heritage as a Hispanic American and offers a portrait of her family members, including her talented American mother and her brilliant Peruvian father. -Book Index
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Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) By Timothy B. Tyson
In this outstanding personal history, Tyson unflinchingly examines the civil rights struggle in the South. The book focuses on the murder of a young black man, Henry Marrow, in 1970. Tyson portrays the killing and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, including that of his contemporary, 10-year-old self; his progressive Methodist pastor father, who strove to lead his parishioners to overcome their prejudices; members of the disempowered black community; one of the killers; and his older self, who comes to Oxford with a historian's eye. -Publisher’s Weekly
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Black Like Me (Updated 2004) by John Howard Griffin
John Howard Griffin's groundbreaking and controversial novel about his experiences as a white man who transforms himself with the aid of medication and dye in order to experience firsthand the life of a black man living in the Deep South in the late 1950s is a mesmerizing tale of the ultimate sociological experiment. -School Library Journal
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The Bluest Eye (1970) By Toni Morrison
An impoverished black girl relates the struggles which attended her growth to maturity in rural Ohio. – Book Index
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Ceremony (1977) By Leslie Silko
One Navajo family, on a New Mexico reservation, struggles to survive in a world no longer theirs in the years just before and after World War II. – Book Index
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The Chosen (1967) By Chaim Potok
A baseball injury precipitates a friendship between two boys from Hasidic and Zionist families. – Book Index
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The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (1996) By James McBride
This memoir describes growing up interracial from the perspective of a son of an African American father and a white mother. McBride, an accomplished journalist and musician, has viewed the yawning chasm of racial division from both sides and, despite carving out a successful life, has been scarred. – Library Journal
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Come By Here: My Mother's Life (2002) By Clarence Major
Told through his mother's voice, a man recalls his light-skinned mother's struggle for existence, passing for white to earn a respectable living after leaving an abusive marriage. – Book Index
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Digging to America: A Novel (2004) By Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler’s richest, most deeply searching novel–a story about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan, who, after 35 years in this country, must finally come to terms with her “outsiderness.”
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Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (1999) Edited by Maria M. Gillan and Jennifer Gillan
The stories and memoirs in this collection are great: Sherman Alexie, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, Sandra Cisneros, and many more of our best writers deal directly, but never simplistically, with the conflicts of becoming American. They personalize what you lose by crossing borders, what you leave behind, what you gain, what America gains. - Booklist
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Holler if You Hear Me (1999) By Gregory Michie
There's a genre of education narratives that features a lone crusader who after minor setbacks achieves what everyone said was impossible: transforming a classroom of knuckleheads into high achievers. Michie's book breaks this mold. In the tales he tells, he fails almost as often as he succeeds. But there are lessons to be learned in either instance. – Chicago Reader
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Interpreter of Maladies (1999) By Jhumpa Lahiri
A collection of short stories blends elements of Indian tradition with the complexities of American culture. – Book Index
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Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps (2005) By Mary Matsuda Gruenewald
"Because of their racial ancestry, the Matsuda family, along with nearly 120,000 other mainland Japanese Americans, faced years of hardship, anxiety, prejudice, and discrimination during World War II. Looking Like the Enemy is a poignant story of that family's darkest days. Yet, shimmering rays of hope coupled with a solid foundation of courage and fortitude gave this family an immovable ballast to weather all that they faced. This is a wonderful, powerful, and mesmerizing read." - Tetsuden Kashima
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The Namesake (2004) By Jhumpa Lahiri
An Indian American saga, covering several generations of the Ganguli family across three decades. This poignant treatment of the immigrant experience is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details. -Library Journal
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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) By Barbara Ehrenreich
Between 1998 and 2000, Ehrenreich spent about three months in three cities throughout the nation, attempting to "get by" on the salary available to low-paid and unskilled workers. Beginning with advantages not enjoyed by many such individuals-she is white, English-speaking, educated, healthy, and unburdened with transportation or child-care worries-she tried to support herself by working as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart employee. – School Library Journal
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Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are (2003) By Brooke Kroeger
Explores the history, literature, and sociology of passing, and provides case studies of six individuals who are "passers," including a black man who passed as a white Jew and a lesbian naval officer who passed as straight. – Book Index
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Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (2004) By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Journalist LeBlanc spent more than 10 years following two Latina women from the Bronx, and in this ambitious work, she tells their stories, beginning in the late 1980s with their young teen years. What emerges is an important, unvarnished portrait of people living in deep urban poverty, beyond the statistics, hip-hop glamour, and stereotypes. -Booklist
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The Secret Life of Bees (2002) By Sue Monk Kidd
After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters. – Book Index
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She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2003) By Jennifer Boylan
"Probably no book I’ve read in recent years has made me so question my basic assumptions about both the centrality and the permeability of gender, and made me recognize myself in a situation I’ve never known and have never faced . . . The universality of the astonishingly uncommon: that’s the trick of She’s Not There. And with laughs, too. What a good book.”
—Anna Quindlen, from the Introduction to the Book-of-the-Month-Club edition.
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (1997) By Anne Fadiman
Discusses a sick child of Laotian immigrants whose beliefs conflict with Western medicine. – Book Index
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Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir (1998) By Rosemary Bray McNatt
A former editor of "The New York Times Book Review" describes growing up poor in Chicago in the 1960s and becoming one of the first Black women at Yale, and explains why recent changes in the welfare system will keep her story from being repeated. – Book Index
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When I Was Puerto Rican (1994) By Esmeralda Santiago
A story of a young girl trapped between two cultures, the author gives an extraordinary view of what it is like to be Puerto Rican and an immigrant in New York City. – Laura Sherrill
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Who's Irish: Stories (1999) By Gish Jen
An anthology of short stories captures the lives and fortunes of Chinese Americans as they make their way through American society. – Book Index
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The Woman Warrior (1976) By Maxine Hong Kingston
A first-generation Chinese-American woman recounts growing up in America within a tradition-bound Chinese family, and confronted with Chinese ghosts from the past and non-Chinese ghosts of the present. – Book Index
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