In a bonanza year for memoirs, Ruth Coker Burks got us off to a strong start with All the Young Men (Trapeze), a clear-eyed and poignant account of her years spent looking after Aids patients in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1980s. And so she took it upon herself to sit with the dying and bury them when their families wouldn’t. Later, as the scale of fear and prejudice became apparent, she helped patients with food, transport, social security and housing, often at enormous personal cost. Lea Ypi’s Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin) is a beautifully written account of life under a crumbling Stalinist system in Albania and the shock and chaos of what came next. But you won’t find self-pity in his meandering but amusingly irreverent memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (Quercus).

Source: The Guardian December 05, 2021 06:10 UTC