Memoir | featured news

The Amanda Knox story has spawned books that declare her guilt and proclaim her innocence.

“She’s a complete blank,” the playwright John Guare once said, trying to explain the public fascination with Amanda Knox, the American student accused (along with two men) of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher during a sex escapade gone awry in Italy. “You can project anything on to her. Is she Henry James’s Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys everything? Or is she Nancy Drew caught up in Kafka?”

While imprisoned in Italy for four years over the murder of her roommate, Amanda Knox fended off sexual harassment from guards and an overture from a cellmate. On the night of the killing, she was smoking marijuana and watching a movie with her Italian boyfriend. And those infamous cartwheels that Ms. Knox reportedly performed in the police station never happened.

Is Grammy and Oscar winning singer Adele writing a memoir? No! The New York Daily News reports that the British crooner turned down a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins, saying she is too young to detail her life experiences in a book.

David Axelrod, the political strategist behind the rise of President Obama, has signed with Penguin Press to write a memoir, the publisher said Tuesday morning. Release is slated for fall 2014.

The memoir of 15-year-old Pakistani student Malala Yousafzai will be published this fall, publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson announced Wednesday. The deal is reportedly worth about $3 million. Titled "I Am Malala," the book will tell the story of the young advocate for women's education who was shot in the face at point-blank range by Taliban gunmen on Oct. 9 in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

Overwhelming demand for a book offering clues to a hidden treasure chest worth millions has taken over a New Mexico store. The book, “Thrill of the Chase,” is the autobiography by Forrest Fenn, who first described his treasure last month on TODAY.

In 'The Soundtrack of My Life,' Clive Davis writes about musicians (and his part in making them legends) and his talents but little about the business side. He may be one of the most influential music executives in the world, but Clive Davis was never a music geek. He didn't like rock 'n' roll as a teen, doesn't describe that lightning-strike moment when sound first truly explodes. He didn't collect albums, and seldom paints himself as an aesthete.

The Secretary of State announced in a global town hall on Tuesday that she plans to pen a memoir after she steps down from the office, although she added that she does not yet know what she’ll say in it.

Very soon after being diagnosed with diabetes, 7-year-old Sonia Sotomayor decided she would not depend on the adults in her life — a distant, overworked mother, a doomed, alcoholic father — for the daily shots of insulin that would keep her alive. Read full article >>