Remembered Childhoods: A Guide to Autobiography and Memoirs of Childhood and Youth [Hardcover]

Focusing on first-person accounts that tell, at least in part, the remembered stories of childhood and youth, this guide organizes more than 2,800 titles in categories that reflect shared themes and characteristics. Long groups works into such chapters as The Traveled and the Captive: Adventurers, Explorers, and Warriors; Homes and Haunts: The Places and Cultures of Native Lands; and The Darker Side of Childhood; Outcasts, Violence, Abuse, Poverty, and Other Traumas. Keywords and occasional notes, along with birth and death dates of the author, accompany the entries, offering further insights.Jeffrey E. Long, former associate editor of and longtime reviewer forAmerican Reference Books Annual, currently works at Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Mass., and is editor ofSoutteReview.

Essentially an annotated bibliography, this book includes autobiographies and memoirs written in English and covering at least some aspect of the author's youth. Long groups entries into 17 themes. They range from experiential (Survivors and Victims) to avocational (Men and Women of Words) to environmental (Rural and City Life). Not surprisingly, these works frequently take the form of coming-of-age memoirs. A subject index with cross-referencing provides access points beyond the broad categories, although some index terms are so oddly phrased as to be of limited usefulness (e.g., Growing Up between WWI and WWII). The volume includes an author/title index and index of settings. More than 2,800 titles are included, so annotations are very brief when included at all. Remembered Childhoods will be most valuable to high school and college students and to general readers seeking autobiographies by subject. Even though readers may want more than just autobiographies of youth, this work will serve as a good starting point. Recommended. All levels. Choice

For author Long, this project has been in the works for manlóm