BiblioVault - Books about Diaries

Eagle Days: A Marine Legal/Infantry Officer in Vietnam
Donald W. Griffis
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Library of Congress DS559.5.G745 2007 | Dewey Decimal 959.7043092

Much has been written about America’s war in Vietnam, and an enduring and troubling subtext is the composition of the body of soldiers that made up the U.S. troop deployment: from the initially well-trained and disciplined group of largely elite units that served in the mid-sixties to what has been termed an “armed mob” by the end of that decade and into the early 1970s. Drug use, insubordination, racial antagonism that often became violent, theft and black market dealing, and even “fragging” (murder of officers and senior noncoms by disgruntled troops) marred the record of the U.S. military presence. Don Griffis served in the twin roles of legal officer charged at various times with the task of both defending and prosecuting servicemen, while at the same time leading combat patrols in “search and destroy” missions against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemy. Eagle Days is a remarkable account of Griffis’ personal record of experiencing what the military should do best—meet, engage, and defeat the enemy—and what it becomes when esprit de corps, discipline, and a sense of purpose decay.

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Ellie's Log: Exploring the Forest Where the Great Tree Fell
Judith L. Li
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Library of Congress PZ7.L591174Ell 2013

Winner of 2013 John Burroughs Association Riverby Award Honorable Mention

After a huge tree crashes to the ground during a winter storm, ten-year-old Ellie and her new friend, Ricky, explore the forest where Ellie lives. Together, they learn how trees provide habitat for plants and animals high in the forest canopy, down among mossy old logs, and deep in the pools of a stream. The plants, insects, birds, and mammals they discover come to life in colored pen-and-ink drawings.

An engaging blend of science and storytelling, Ellie’s Log also features:

• Pages from Ellie’s own field notebook, which provide a model for recording observations in nature

• Ellie’s advice to readers for keeping a field notebook

• Ellie’s book recommendations Online resources for readers and teachers—including a Teacher’s Guide—are available at ellieslog.org.

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Ellie's Strand: Exploring the Edge of the Pacific
M. L. Herring
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Library of Congress PZ7.H4946Ell 2018

Sigrud Olson Nature Writing Award, Notable Children’s Book
Green Earth Book Award, Honor Book

There are days in late winter when the Pacific coast enjoys a brief spell of clear, warm weather. Most of the winter storms have passed and the summer fog has not yet settled in. This is when some coastal communities plan their annual beach clean-ups.

In this sequel to Ellie’s Log and Ricky’s Atlas, Ellie and Ricky travel to the Oregon coast from their home in the Cascade Mountains to help with a one-day beach clean-up. Hoping to find a prized Japanese glass float, they instead find more important natural treasures, and evidence of an ocean that needs its own global-scale clean-up.

Ellie and Ricky are amazed by their discoveries at the edge of the world’s largest ocean. Together, they realize the power of volunteering and grapple with the challenges of ocean conservation. In her journal Ellie records her observations of their adventures in her own words and pictures.

With charming pen-and-ink drawings and a compelling story, Ellie's Strand makes coastal science exciting for upper elementary school students. It will be a treasured companion for young beach explorers everywhere.

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Emerson in His Journals
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 1982
Library of Congress PS1631.A33 1982 | Dewey Decimal 814.3

This long-awaited volume offers the general reader the heart of Emerson’s journals, that extraordinary series of diaries and notebooks in which he poured out his thoughts for more than fifty years, beginning with the “luckless ragamuffin ideas” of his college days.

Emerson as revealed in his journals is more spontaneous, more complex, more human and appealing than he appears in the published works. This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical (“I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly”), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.

Drawing from Harvard’s sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journals—but omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to read—Joel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.

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The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945
Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Library of Congress DS134.64.B74 2014 | Dewey Decimal 891.85

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies

The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

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The Exploration of the Colorado River and the High Plateaus of Utah by the Second Powell Expedition of 1871-1872
Herbert E Gregory
University of Utah Press, 2009
Library of Congress F788.E98 2009 | Dewey Decimal 917.913044

The second Powell Colorado River exploration, consisting of eleven men and three boats at the time of launch, departed from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 22, 1871. Most members kept journals, and this volume contains the writings of three men, Stephen Vandiver Jones, John F. Steward, and Walter Clement Powell, as well as excerpts from the journals of John Wesley Powell. Taken together, they provide diverse points of views about the second expedition, both in terms of its human components and in its scientific labors.

Originally published from 1948 to 1949 as volumes sixteen and seventeen of the Utah Historical Quarterly, this volume looks to the larger significance and fruits of the second of Powell’s explorations, a more carefully constituted and better equipped scientific operation, yet one strangely neglected in historical records. Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society.

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The Exploration of the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871-1872: Biographical Sketches and Original Documents of the First Powell Expedition of 1869 and the Second Powell Expedition of 1871-1872
William Culp Darrah
University of Utah Press, 2009
Library of Congress F788.E985 2009 | Dewey Decimal 917.9130440922

Volume fifteen of the Utah Historical Quarterly, originally published in 1947, was primarily devoted to Powell’s initial reconnaissance of the canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers, an expedition that would prove to be the last great exploration through unknown country in the continental United States. Powell and nine companions launched from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, embarking on a journey that would become a race against starvation and death and grow tragic with the deaths of three of the party at the hands of the Shivwits (Paiute) Indians. The maps, field notes, and journals of this first exploration would guide Powell when he returned to the canyons in 1871 for a second expedition.

This volume contains the journals of Major John Wesley Powell, George Young Bradley, Walter Henry Powell, and J. C. Sumner. Also included are various letters and notes by the members of the first expedition, and the journal of Francis Marion Bishop from the second expedition. All of the writings offer vivid descriptions of both adventure and of able and energetic scientific field work, and are of enduring interest and importance.

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society.

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The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary
Jennifer Sinor
University of Iowa Press, 2002
Library of Congress CT25.S554 2002 | Dewey Decimal 808.06692

Exciting and beautifully crafted, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing provides an entirely new way of viewing “ordinary writing,” the everyday writing we typically ignore or dismiss. It takes as its center the diary of Jennifer Sinor's great-great-great-aunt Annie Ray, a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. Diaries such as this have long been ignored by scholars, who prefer instead to focus on diaries with literary features. Reading diaries through this lens gives privileged status to those that are coherently crafted and ignores the very diaries that define the form through their relentless inscription of dailiness.

Annie Ray’s diary is not literary. By considering her ordinary writing as a site of complex and strategic negotiations among the writer, the form of writing, and dominant cultural scripts, Sinor makes visible the extraordinary work of the ordinary writer and the sophistication of these texts. In providing a way to read diaries outside the limits and conventions of literature, she challenges our approaches to other texts as well. Furthermore, because ordinary writing is not crafted for aesthetic reception (in contrast to autobiography proper, memoirs, and literary diaries), it is a productive site for investigating how both writing and culture get made every day.

The book is truly original in its form: nontraditional, storied, creative. Sinor, an accomplished creative writer, includes her own memories as extended metaphors in partnership with critical texts along with excerpts from her aunt's diary. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing will be a fascinating text for students of creative writing as well as of women's studies and diaries.

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