Know the difference between biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs!

Be in the know!

Biography – story of someone’s life written by someone else
Autobiography – story of someone’s life written by that individual
Memoir – reflections of the individual; story about particular events that happened in the author’s life

Check out some of these favorites!

Escape from Camp 14 by  Blaine Harden

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North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. Very few born and raised in these camps have escaped. But Shin Donghyuk did. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence-he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his own family.

 

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

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Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

 

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

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Ishmael Beah describes his experiences after he was driven from his home by war in Sierra Leone and picked up by the government army at the age of thirteen, serving as a soldier for three years before being removed from fighting by UNICEF and eventually moving to the United States.
Book summaries courtesy of Titlewave.

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