History: Memoir Writing and the Speculation that Dissent is Vital for Progress

Challenge your conceptions concerning heresy and learn how to write a compelling and accurate memoir.

A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America (BOOK): by Anouar Majid 1960-

Discover unexpected common ground in one of the most inflammatory issues of the twenty-first century: the deepening conflict between the Islamic world and the United States. Moving beyond simplistic answers, Majid argues that the Islamic world and the United States are both in precipitous states of decline because, in each, religious, political, and economic orthodoxies have silenced the voices of their most creative thinkers – the visionary nonconformists, who are often punished as heretics.

The United States and contemporary Islam share far more than partisans on either side admit. Majid provocatively argues that this “clash of civilizations” is in reality a clash of competing fundamentalisms. Illustrating this point, he draws surprising parallels between the histories and cultures of Islam and the United States and their shortsighted suppression of heresy. Drawing from Muslim poets and philosophers like Ibn Rushd to the free thinker Thomas Paine, as well as from Abu Bakr Razi and Al-Farabi to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln; Majid finds bitter irony in the fact that Islamic culture is now at war with a nation whose ideals are losing ground to the reactionary forces that have long condemned Islam to stagnation.

Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life (BOOK): edited by Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May

Memoirs have fallen under great scrutiny with questions of their accuracy. Memoirists must draw on their memories and imaginations, yet audiences demand narratives that, while worthy of fiction, are completely factual. Hampl, an essayist and memoirist, and May, the author of several books on 20^th century America, have navigated gray areas between fact and memory, history and imagination, in their writings. Together, they have collected 14 original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians who show how they tell compelling and accurate stories.