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Get Real at Your Library

Non-Fiction Booklist

Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. After finishing this, try Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett.

Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett
B Grealy
The author describes her twenty-year friendship with Lucy Grealy, tracing their introduction at a writer's workshop, the integral part their friendship played in their writing careers, and her witness to Grealy's medical deterioration.

Hole in My Life, by Jack Gantos
B Gantos
Gantos reveals how his involvement with drugs and his stint in prison led him to writing. A 2003 Printz Honor Book and a 2003 Sibert Honor Book.

Into Thin Air, a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster
796.5 Krakauer
Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of the bestseller Into the Wild

Katie.com : My Story
362.7 Tarbox
Katherine Tarbox (the first victim to successfully prosecute a pedophile via the new Internet laws) explains her courageous story of how the Internet and chatrooms can vastly change teen life.

Me Talk Pretty One Day
814 Sedaris
David Sedaris's memoir tells a most unconventional life story, beginning with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech therapy classes and unwanted guitar lessons taught by a midget.

The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, by Phillip M. Hoose
The story of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker's demise is the centerpiece for a book about extinction and the pressures of mankind upon the Earth.

This Boy's Life
B Wolff
In this unforgettable memoir of boyhood in the 1950s, we meet the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning.

Also check out the American Libraries Association list of suggested non-fiction books: http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/teenreading/trw/trw2005/nonfiction.htm.