Childhood Memoir

In 1975, seven-year-old Doina Cornell left England with her father Jimmy Cornell, mother and brother to spend the next six years sailing around the world on a small yacht. The author has drawn on her memories, diaries and stories, to re-create the perfect life led by a sailing child: swimming, diving and playing the days away in deserted anchorages; visiting some of the most beautiful islands in the world; falling in love with the sea in all its ever-changing moods, from balmy trade wind ocean passages to the treacherous breakers that crash onto tropical reefs.

As one of the most profound and insightful scholars of the Middle East, Fouad Ajami’s sensibility was powerfully shaped by his childhood and youth in Lebanon in the ’50s and ’60s. The time was a transitional one - not only for the Middle East but for America and the world. Lebanon in this era was just coming into its own as a cosmopolitan destination of the international jet set as well as earnest American educators seeking to modernize Arab society.

In 1972, Patty Bear’s father, Robert Bear, was excommunicated from their church and subsequently shunned by members including Gale, his wife. For Amish and Old Order Mennonites, known as “Plain People”, shunning is a biblical practice meant to bring wayward members back into the community’s fold.

A highly unsettling blend of true crime and coming-of-age memoir— The Stranger Beside Me meets Prep—that presents an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of girlhood within Manhattan’s exclusive prep-school scene in the early 1990s, and a thoughtful meditation on adolescent obsession...

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage - learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio - and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska.

"We live so far in the backwoods, we have to pump sunshine through hollow logs," young Susanette's daddy says, when asked where the Howell family lives. Their cracker house, which has never been slapped by a loaded paintbrush, sits on a small tobacco farm near the Suwannee River in North Florida, 18 miles from the small town of Live Oak - a town that was, at the turn of the 19th century, the fifth largest town in Florida and the largest inland city in the state.

'I have just had one of those absolutely mad mornings when you go out to have a browse at tagines and end up coming home with a brand-new gas ring expander. I think I was probably as surprised as anybody. Sometimes life is just like that, isn't it?' Award-winning food writer Damien Trench takes you on a journey through his childhood and his early inspirations - culinary and otherwise - with occasional diversions to the present.

We all have past experiences we wish we could redo or undo altogether. In Nothing Wasted, counselor and teacher Kasey Van Norman's vulnerability invites you to discover God's personal and purposeful design for your future--not in spite of your story, but through it. What if the pain and...

Kid on the Go! is Neill McKee's third work of creative nonfiction. It's a standalone prequel to his award-winning Finding Myself in Borneo. In this new audiobook, McKee takes listeners on a journey through his childhood, adolescence, and teenage years, from the mid-40s to the mid-60s in the small, then industrially-polluted town of Elmira, Ontario, Canada.

“A profoundly emotional book, and a brave one.” —The New Yorker A literary sensation in Brazil, Luiz Schwarcz’s brave and tender memoir interrogates his ordeal of bipolar disorder in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence—the long echo of the Holocaust...

This is an engaging account of childhood years lived in the famous religious and socialist commune in upstate New York (1848-1880) dedicated to sharing property, work, and love. It is full of sketches of many community members and of their employees. It conveys the look and feel of the communal home, the Mansion House, and the surrounding world.

To Fred Archer, born in the village of Ashton-under-Hill in 1915 and growing up in the 1920s, nothing seemed to change except the seasons. This was the age of paraffin lamps, earth closets, and the last train from Evesham at 7 o’clock in the evening. The village was a self-sufficient community with its own hierarchy, strong Church and Chapel, fierce politics and home-made entertainment.

Reeves gives us her authentic account of growing up around the Montana town of Jardine which, today, is a virtual ghost town. Her stories are sometimes funny, as when she tells about a runt pig miraculously waxing fat after eating the crankcase oil from of a Model T Ford. Sometimes they're shocking, like "the worst day" in her life when her brother blew off his hand hammering a dynamite cap. Another brother almost died from eating carbide powder cookies he made. This kid had an unusual childhood, growing up by a dying silver mining town bordering Yellowstone Park.

Until he was 17, Brett Preiss lived in the dusty outback of Australia, where he was one of four siblings in a dysfunctional family. He learned how to survive under the most bizarre and extraordinary circumstances. In this book, he shares the trials and tribulations of his youth through anecdotes that will leave you in tears of joy or sorrow. Travel back to the ’60s and ’70s and watch Brett transform from a sperm to adolescence.

Recently hailed as "the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation" in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir. With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that V's first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.

Childhood Lost in Poverty is an account of the author’s childhood experiences, from infancy to young adulthood. The process enabled him to recognise how the poor parenting skills of his father, as well as his mother’s struggle to raise him and his sister up in poverty, compromised his relationships with his parents and affected his adult life.

Six-year-old Lovetta had no idea what was to come. The subtle hints lay in the whispers and silent tears of grownups, and the dark uneasiness in the air. Then, in the middle of the night, a stranger crept into her dark room. From that night on, the darkness enveloped her and started to smother the life and light out of her. Trapped in a god forsaken nightmare with nowhere to turn, she longed for freedom. Come along on this dark journey as Lovetta fights to find the light.

"No big deal"...for 15 years, these words kept Torey Ivanic from telling her parents, friends, and boyfriends about her interactions with the gymnastics coach who utterly confused her young mind, body, and soul - who had, she eventually came to understand, sexually violated her. In this memoir, Torey transparently and brilliantly shows how the abuse started, the collateral damage it created in her young life, her realization that it was a big deal, and her journey of healing and justice.

Dangerous and disregarding people don't simply drop out of the sky. Nor are they born bloodthirsty and cruel. When looking at the developmental years of adult criminals and juvenile delinquents or the selfish patterns of anyone that we must rub shoulders with, the question is asked "How does one get this way?" Typically we can see the answers within their genetic mental health history which may hint of possible concern and their first 5 years after birth which is their most impressionable social training ground.

When Norbert Elliot graduated from his New Orleans Catholic grammar school in 1966, he was determined to claw himself free from his family and the place they called home. Interlacing the history of one of America’s iconic cities with his childhood memories, Elliot explores two hundred and fifty years of intentional cruelty and promised charity. With a focus on disposable lives, his memoir calls into question traditional views of family and home and asks us to imagine the freedom of lives lived on the delicate line between what can, and cannot, be.