Memoirs/Essays

Articles in this section

• The Great Baseball Scandal - how the Mob won the 1919 World Series, by Nelson Algren

  29 April by Nelson Algren

  Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the (...)

• "Typee" (1846) by Herman Melville - a fascinating account of life in a South Sea island before the spread of Western civilization

  1 May 2019 by Herman Melville

  This account of his four-months stay among the fiercest tribe in the remote Marquesas Island of Nukuheva was Herman Melville’s first book, and its enormous success - it was the best-selling of all his books during his lifetime – was essential in deciding the future author of the monumental “Moby (...)

• "Children of Yesterday" - Jan Valtin’s dramatic eyewitness account of the Pacific War in the Philippines 1944-45

  21 November 2017 by Jan Valtin

  After the quite phenomenal success of his monumental political memoir Out of the Night in 1941, Richard Krebs (nom-de-plume: Jan Valtin) was arrested and tried for an attempted (political) murder he was accused of having committed in the twenties – for which he was acquitted – in 1942, and then (...)

• "Out of the Night" (1941) by Jan Valtin - an extraordinary memoir of life in the international Communist movement between the two World Wars

  26 April 2017 by Jan Valtin

  This is the memoir of a militant and full-time party worker in the German Communist Party (KPD) and in the Comintern – the international organization of all the Communist parties in the world - in the twenties and thirties, this is a first-hand account of many of the dramatic events that shaped (...)

• Jack London’s in-depth exploration of the (shocking) living conditions in London’s East End: "The People of the Abyss" (1903)

  2 December 2016 by Jack London

  In 1902 the 25-year-old Jack London, who was already a veteran of a year of vagrant "hobo" wanderings around the American continent when he was 17, of a year of sailing on a fishing boat in the Far Pacific when he was 18, and of a year in the Klondike gold-rush in Canada’s Far North when he was (...)