Biography & Memoir

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.

Former presidential Cabinet member James A. Baker III's new memoir offers some insights right of the bat in its title, Work Hard, Study...and Keep Out of Politics!: Adventures and Lessons from an Unexpected Public Life. Baker served as chief of staff and treasury secretary under President Reagan, and was also secretary of state and chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush.

Writer Jonathan Franzen's massive 2001 bestseller The Corrections was based, in part, on his own life. His new book is a memoir, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History. Franzen's other books include The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion and How to be Alone.

Episcopalian minister Barbara Brown Taylor's new book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, describes her decision to leave her job after 15 years as a full-time minister.

Elvis Presley confidant Jerry Schilling talks about his new book, Me and a Guy Named Elvis: My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley. When Schilling was 12 years old, he met the teenaged Elvis Presley at a north Memphis pickup football game. As Presley rose to fame, Schilling joined him on the rise, eventually becoming creative affairs director for Elvis Presley Enterprises.

Edmund White has been writing about gay culture in fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s. He has a new autobiography, My Lives. White is director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Writer Reynolds Price has penned a total of 37 volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and translations. His new book is Letter to a Godchild (Concerning Faith). Price has taught at Duke University since 1958, and has won numerous awards and honors for his work.

Author and museum director James Cameron died last Sunday at the age of 92. In 1930, an organized mob of more than 10,000 white men and women dragged Cameron and two other black teenage men from a jail cell in Marion, Ind. The mob mercilessly beat the three young men and lynched two — Cameron was spared. He recounted this experience in his 1984 memoir A Time of Terror and later founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, which he modeled after the Jewish Holocaust museum in Israel. This interview originally aired on March 8, 1994.