Cultural Memoir

In this coming-of-age memoir about a privileged, protected childhood in the exotic milieu of 1950’s Egypt, author Jean Naggar describes a magical time that seemed as if it would never end. But Egypt’s nationalizing of the Suez Canal would set in motion events that would change her life forever. An enchanted existence suddenly ended by international hostilities, her family is quickly scattered far and wide, and Naggar is eventually swept into adulthood and the challenge of new horizons in America.

Acclaimed archeologist and historian Karolyn Smardz Frost painstakingly resurrects Thornton and Lucie Blackburn's perilous 1830s journey from Kentucky slavery to Canadian freedom.

Doaa Al Zamel was once an average Syrian girl growing up in a crowded house in a bustling city near the Jordanian border. But in 2011 her life was upended. Inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, Syrians began to stand up against their own oppressive regime. When the army was sent to take control of Doaa's hometown, strict curfews, power outages, water shortages, air raids, and violence disrupted everyday life.

In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what's funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from the bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories that span his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood to his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian-Canadian father. Antanas has a keen eye for social comedy.

Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands. Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the...

Ce poignant récit s’ouvre sur un vol d’étourneaux dont le murmure dans une langue secrète fait écho à toutes les migrations et surtout à celle d’aïeux, partis d’un village d’Inde en 1872 pour rejoindre l’île Maurice. C’est alors le début d’une grande traversée de la mémoire, qui fait apparaître autant l’histoire collective des engagés indiens que l’histoire intime de la famille de Nathacha Appanah.

Like much of North Korea, Songmi Han lived in desperate poverty. As a child, she and her family endured extreme hardship, with many meals consisting of little more than grass. Domestic abuse, grueling physical labor, emotional abuse, and hunger were constant in her life. School was out of the question, and she and her mother stole food to survive. Greenlight to Freedom: A North Korean Daughter’s Search for Her Mother and Herself, written by Songmi Han and Casey Lartigue Jr., recounts Songmi’s childhood and escape from North Korea in a perilous and gripping narrative.

Dogs of all shapes and sizes visit Ruth Shaw's three wee bookshops in Manapōuri in the far south of Aotearoa New Zealand. Local dogs, holiday house dogs, travelling dogs – many have great stories, be they funny, sad, strange, bemusing, quirky or sweet. Woven throughout are tales of the very special Hunza, the dog who worked with troubled teens alongside Shaw when she was a youth worker.

Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis.

The definitive, career-spanning collection of writing from Anthony Bourdain, assembled for the first time Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many people—and he had many sides. But no part of his identity was more important to him, and more longlasting, than that of a writer. The...

This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the...

Don’t Take Your Love to Town is a story of courage in the face of poverty and tragedy. Ruby recounts losing her mother when she was six, growing up in a mission in northern New South Wales and leaving home when she was 15. She lived in tin huts and tents in the bush and picked up work on the land while raising nine children virtually single-handedly. Later she struggled to make ends meet in the Koori areas of Sydney.

At five feet ten inches tall, running back Walter Payton was not the largest player in the NFL, but he developed a larger-than-life reputation for his strength, speed, and grit. Nicknamed “Sweetness” during his college football days, he became the NFL’s all-time leader in rushing and all-purpose yards, capturing the hearts of fans in his adopted Chicago.

In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily-white business world, he married a White woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally he set his White contemporaries' teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them.

Is anyone ever truly lost in the internet age? A moving, original memoir of a young woman reckoning with her parents’ absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world. “Brilliantly innovative . . . syncing a narrative of profoundly personal...

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

Nearing the age of forty, with an entire life already lived as a woman, Miles Borrero comes face to face with his father’s impending death. Suddenly realizing he has been stalling his transition for fear of losing his family’s love, this moment catalyzes Miles’s determination to be known as his father’s son. In Beautiful Monster, Miles chronicles his unusual childhood, by turns riveting and hilarious, in ’80s and ’90s Colombia during the Pablo Escobar years, as well as his move to Salt Lake City to pursue acting and the winding trajectory that eventually lands him in New York City.

A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other - but with certain differences. The neighbor's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. Then, in January 1959, the world changed....

NPR SPRING PICK An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature. A multifaceted genius...

As the 20th century was ending and the millennium approached, a new ethnic category was invented in the South. The Melungeons were born thrashing and squawling into the American consciousness. They were a tri-racial clan hidden away in the hills and hollers of Lower Appalachia with a genetic predisposition to six fingers and Mediterranean diseases and an unsavory reputation for moonshining, counterfeiting and secret cults.