<<The>> world's best memoir writing the literature of life from St. Augustine to Gandhi, and from Pablo Picasso to Nelson Mandela

Eve Claxton has taken the most intriguing portions of the world's most famous memoirs and compiled them in this volume. The reader experiences world history as the authors lived it and gains rare insight into the lives and personalities of some of the world's most important writers, thinkers, athletes and artists. From Charlie Chaplin's childhood walks through Victorian London and Alan Bennett's wartime boyhood in Yorkshire to the day Muhammad Ali discovered boxing and Mahatma Gandhi experimented with cigarettes; from Primo Levi's capture of fascist militia at twenty-one and Katherine Hepburn's first acting job at the same age to Charles Darwin on his lifelong love-his work-and Nelson Mandela on being released from prison at seventy-one. The World's Best Memoir Writing is a uniquely enjoyable immersion into some of the world's best, and most personal, writing. Acknowledgements / xix Introduction / 1 Publisher's note / 19 Beginnings : Birth through Age Twelve / 21 The Middle: Ages Twenty-one through Fifty-nine / 233 Toward The End : Ages Sixty through One Hundred / 355 Credits and Sources / 415 Index of contributors / 433 Description based on print version record. Amazing memoirs told in their own words.