Issue Date: May 24, 2009

4 unforgettable memoirs

Summer reading? These books set the bar for today's tell-all tales.

By Jenny Rough

Memoirs have exploded onto the book scene in recent years, spilling personal details on topics ranging from dating to drug recovery to spiritual journeys. But long before memoirs were popular, authors were writing, well, memoirs. If you missed these four books the first time around, then check them out this summer:

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $24) Sip a glass of chardonnay while reading Feast, and you'll feel as if you're in a 1920s Paris café talking shop with Hemingway and his fellow expatriate writers, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose own life is chronicled in "The Crack-Up"). Originally published posthumously in 1964, Hemingway's memoir was edited heavily by his widow. A special edition, due out in July, includes never-before-released experiences with his first wife, Hadley, and their son, Jack.

The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway (The Feminist Press at CUNY, $14.95) Strapped to a board for 10 years because of spinal tuberculosis, Hathaway learns to walk again at age 15. Although she was pronounced cured, a solitary moment facing herself in the mirror reveals she has a deformity (a humpback) that she refuses to say aloud. Despite her disfigurement, she finds independence and freedom in her 30s, when she buys a house and becomes a writer. Originally released in 1943, the memoir was later reprinted by the Feminist Press at CUNY in 2000.

The Strawberry Statement by James Simon Kunen (Wiley-Blackwell, $28.95) At Columbia University in 1968, students who were upset over the Vietnam War and their belief that the college was constructing a racially segregated gym staged an uprising against the school's administration. Nineteen-year-old sophomore Kunen chronicled his participation in the events, including being chased by club-wielding police.

Walking Through the Fire: A Hospital Journal by Laurel Lee (Dutton, price varies) Six months pregnant and with a nagging cough, Lee heard her doctor say the word "tumor." When she returned from the hospital after battling Hodgkin's disease, she discovered that her husband had run off with the babysitter. Instead of despairing, she wrote about her faith and shared her journal with a doctor (he sent the book to an editor; it became a best seller). Lee eventually succumbed to pancreatic cancer, but not until she was 58.

Jenny Rough last wrote about books on infertility.