Childhood Memoir

That afternoon was the last time the high-school Patriots would see one another for weeks; some teammates they'd never see again. Hurricane Katrina was about to tear their lives apart. Hurricane Season is the story of a great football coach, his team, his family, and their school - and a remarkable fight back from shocking tragedy.

We all know what is wrong with today’s schools - or do we? Tracy Kidder spent a year in a fifth grade class in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The teacher is excellent, but something else is very wrong. Kidder skillfully presents the problems and leaves the listener to ponder the solutions.

Ruth Clare's father came back from the Vietnam War a changed man: a violent, controlling parent and a dominating, aggressive husband. After escaping her difficult upbringing, Ruth went on to have a family of her own. Facing the challenges of parenting brought her past back to life, and she lived in fear that she was doomed to repeat her father's behaviour. Wanting to understand the experiences that had damaged her father, she met with other veterans and began listening to their stories of war, conscription and returning to civilian life.

Young Mendel, from age four to 14, tells in vivid detail the wretched journey in cramped cattle cars through frigid Russia, the indignities of being forced labor, the shame of begging for bread just to survive, and death of those closest to him. The family's plight includes abandonment, hunger, and separation (and later remarkable twists of fate and reunion) quite unlike other Holocaust stories.

Aké. Los años de la niñez es el relato en primera persona de la infancia de Soyinka en una aldea de Nigeria llamada Aké, en los años en torno a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Allí el pequeño Wole, un muchacho de una curiosidad infinita, amante de los libros y propenso a meterse en líos y aventuras, crece con la doble influencia de los aires occidentales y de las antiguas tradiciones espirituales youruba.

For Clarence, a two-year-old Minnesota boy, the terrible twos were terrible. His mother was killed in an auto accident, boiling water scalded his arm, and a rooster nearly pecked out one of his eyes. Things weren’t much better at six. Tumbling into a stream, a broken bottle pierced his elbow and doctors contemplated amputating the arm. At eight, his luck changed.

Giuliana Rancic is best known for interviewing A-listers on the red carpet and E! News, skewering their shocking style choices on Fashion Police, and giving viewers a front-row seat to her marriage and family life on her reality show, Giuliana & Bill. What fans may not know is that she learned English from Eddie Murphy, got her American citizenship so she could be a beauty queen, and used to have a bad habit of stealing cars for fun.

These stories are specific to one legendary riverfront plateau and one boy's journey, but are emblematic of immigrant life and blue-collar aspirations during the heyday of American industry and its crash, foreshadowing one of the largest internal migrations in US history. Approximately six million baby boomers, like the narrator, fled the Rust Belt. Another six million remained and stories of their youth, struggles, and aspirations echo throughout this book.

The year is 1939. As war breaks out across Europe, nine-year-old Susie and her older sister Gyll are dispatched to Africa by their mother. Alone on the dusty continent, the sisters find little sympathy in their new guardians, and little to like about their new way of life: patched-up clothes, a 6 o'clock bedtime (a particular indignity), and regular obsessive cleanliness rituals. Their continued presence a nuisance, and overwhelmed by fear of doing the wrong thing, Susie and Gyll seek an ally in Mavis.

The actress Isla Blair’s extraordinary, moving and uplifting story of her childhood in India and her separation from her parents. Born in Bangalore India, during the fading days of the Raj, Isla grew up on a tea plantation managed by her father. She spent her early years in the lush, verdant hills of Kerala with her much loved older sister Fiona, secure in the love and affection of her parents and her adored “Ayah”.

When the Bible talks about the third- and fourth-generational curse, that's so true. If the curse is not broken by you, then who will stop it dead in its tracks? Fierce Wholeness: Finding Myself After Childhood Emotional Trauma is Robin's story—in all of its raw and messy but authentic and beautiful transparency—as she seeks to repair the dam that had been busted, the riverbed that had been washed away, the landscape that had been obliterated by her family of origin. Listeners who grew up in the clutches of the branches of emotional abuse will be empowered by Robin's story.

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.

Sunil Dutta is a 20-year veteran of the LAPD. Before that, he was a biologist at the University of California and a translator of classic Indian poetry. Before that, he was a destitute refugee, one of so many uprooted by the genocidal violence surrounding the Partition of India. Back then, he had a brother. Back then, they were children together, chasing whatever fun and solace they could find in impossible conditions. Sunil looked up to Raju. He admired his strength, his character.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar’s. After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva.

Journey Back into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints invites you to travel with me back to the land of my birth for the first time in 56 years in order to reclaim my forgotten Cuban childhood memories, original identity, and once-promised destiny. Come with me as I search for the now faded footprints I once left behind in the homes, school, and playgrounds of the first nine years of my life; help me honor the grandparents, uncles, and aunts I never saw again at their final resting place; and meet family members I never knew I had.

A revelation about the future of America and the group called "The third America" that has the last key to the solution for us today, to poverty, racism, and peace. These solutions were prophesied by the greatest fighter that ever lived when he was in Jr High School, Muhammad Ali. These revelations were revealed to us by Ali's childhood friend who walked to school with him every day and became a writer from The James Brown Show, Sonny Fishback. Ali believes these solutions can help avoid a nuclear explosion.

With little more than a run-down Jeep and their newborn baby in tow, author Micah Perks' parents set out in 1963 to build a school and a utopian community in the mountains. The school would become known as a place to send teens with drug addictions and emotional problems, children with whom Micah and her sister would grow up. This complex memoir mixes a moving celebration of the utopian spirit and its desire for community and freedom with a lacerating critique of the consequences of those desires - especially for the children involved.

Vinnie Curto was born in East Boston, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1955. His father Jimmy Curto was a raving, sick, alcoholic homosexual. Vinnie’s father and his drunken friends sexually abused young Vinnie, frequently raping him and performing other deviant sexual acts on him, while his mother Loretta stood by and let it happen.

Tiny’s Wall is the story of my undiscovered faith and a testament to perseverance, the will to live, to forgive, and find love. I accepted God's grace and mercy for my life, and I hope I can help someone else.

Pulling Down the Barn eloquently recalls author Anne-Marie Oomen's personal journey as she discovers herself an outsider on her family farm located in western Michigan's Oceana County, in the township of Elbridge - a couple hundred acres in the middle of rural America. Written as a series of heartfelt interlocking narratives, this collection of essays portrays the realities of farm life: haying, picking asparagus and cherries, the machinery of tractors and pickers.