Autobiographies & Memoirs is the biggest category in our Book of the Year Awards program. I understand why: everyone has a story to tell—even reference librarians. (Does Ruth Harrison from A Prairie Home Companion ring familiar?) The ability to tell a good story and grab the reader from page one is a gift that not everyone has. That’s what makes an award-winning memoir: it’s not only an incredible tale, but an incredibly well-written one. Cheers to those who tackle retelling their life stories in print. This week we feature a more humorous account of a con man, Bob Moore, in Don’t Call Me a Crook! published by Dissident Books.

Boy, did reading that make my day!  It’s a fact is Don’t Call Me a Crook! is both “an incredible tale” and “an incredibly well-written one.”  One blogger confessed that she read it three times.  Three times!  You know a story is gripping and a pleasure to read when someone goes through it more than once.  Check out what ForeWord has to say about Moore’s memoirs here.

Booklust also comments wisely on Moore’s racism.  In the book’s third part, “Mitchell and China,” “Moore’s racism and bigotry shine through a little too much for my liking,” she remarks. “However, it made the book very real. I think now, a lot of historical fiction tends to glaze over the racial relations of the past, sidestepping the complications and possible negative reactions that those situations can create. But when you read books that were written in those eras, by people who lived them. . .  well, it’s just there. Innate. In the pores, as it were. Yes, it is hard to read, but it’s worse to ignore it, and worst to pretend it never happened, I think. Moore had opinions and he stuck by them, regardless of how narrow-minded or slippery his ideas were. I can’t help but respect a man who sticks to his guns. And when he does it in such a hilariously self-righteous and interesting manner. . . well, that just makes the going that much easier.”

We completely agree.  How often in movies and books about the past do you find whitewashing of discrimination and strife?  The good old days weren’t so good.  Like today, there was hatred and racism.  Like Booklust, we prefer reality to lies.

Booklust ends her review with an equally perceptive summary: “Don’t Call Me a Crook is a fun and interesting look at what life was like for the working class of the 1920s–unapologetic, realistic and true, it sheds light on what must have been a fascinating time to be alive.”  She’s absolutely right to stress that Don’t Call Me a Crook! is a proletarian memoir.  As The Scotsman (Edinburgh) pointed out, “Moore’s book is one of relatively few accounts looking at the Roaring Twenties from the point of view of a Scot who was, if hardly at the bottom of the social order, at least not born with a silver spoon in his gob.”  It might break the hearts of politically correct folks to read that a laboring man didn’t feel class solidarity (just the opposite: he wanted your job!), and saw the world through a sexist, racist, and greedy lens, but that’s their problem.  Again, we’ll take truth over fairy tales.

How appropriate to bring the globetrotting Bob Moore on a voyage halfway across the earth…  But should you really trust him as a traveling companion?