Multicultural Memoirs & Autobiographies

"When Robyn Scott 's parents decide to uproot their young family from New Zealand and move to a converted cowshed in rural Botswana, life for six-year-old Robyn changed forever. In this wild and new landscape excitement can be found around every corner, and with each misadventure she and her family learn more about the quirks, charms, and challenges of living in one of Africa's most remarkable and beautiful countries as it stands on the brink of an epidemic. When AIDS rears its head, the Scotts witness the early appearances of a disease that will devastate this peaceful and prosperous country." - Penguin.com

“This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor.” (The New Yorker )

"Walking Through Fire is the second volume of Nawal El Saadawi’s autobiography, the story of her extraordinary adult life. We read of her work as a rural doctor, her attempts to set up women's organizations and to publish magazines and exile after her name appeared on a death list." (Amazon)

"[Dinesen] gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes." (Publisher)

A compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world which incorporates ancient pastoral ways and the congestion, brutality, and racist violence of city life. It is also the voice of a born storyteller who has a subject worthy of her gifts--a story for all the world to hear.

"Among Cooper's aims in becoming a journalist were to reveal the atrocities committed in her native country. With amazing forthrightness, she has done so, delivering an eloquent, if painful, history of the African migratory experience." (Ms. Magazine)

"Searing war-torn memories from a visionary African peacekeeper and women’s-rights activist….Gbowee stands responsible for what began as a tireless vocal demonstration and soon escalated to a standoff on the Presidential Mansion steps demanding peace. This course of action facilitated the war’s end in 2003 and the election of Africa’s first female president...." (Kirkus)

"Korn's remarkable memoir traces her steps from her childhood as part of a nomadic tribe in Somalia, to her position as a spokesperson against FGM--female genital mutilation. She herself was circumcised." (Booklist)

"In this powerful account of growing up black in South Africa, a young writer makes us feel intensely the horrors of apartheid." (Publishers Weekly)

Albert Luthuli is one of South Africa’s most admired political leaders, comparable in moral stature and international acclaim to Nelson Mandela. In 1960, Dr Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first South African ever. Grandson of a Chief, he was a school teacher before he in turn became Chief and eventually president of the ANC. In Let my people go he tells his own story, which is also the story of the ANC, from the Defiance Campaign, the drawing up of the Freedom Charter and the Treason Trial to the Alexandra bus boycott and the 1959 potato boycott up to the tragedies of Sharpeville, Langa and Nyanga. (David Krut Publishing)

"The Sandra Laing case made international news as an example of South Africa's apartheid at its nuttiest, when, in 1966, the nine-year-old Laing, who was significantly darker than her white-skinned parents, was reclassified as Coloured and expelled from the white school she was attending." (Publishers Weekly)

"Daoud, a Zaghawa tribesman in northern Darfur, fled his village, which was under attack by Sudanese militiamen, in 2003. Daoud fought back in his efforts as a translator to help document the carnage in his native land." (Booklist)

"Fauziya Kassindja describes her upbringing in a small Western Africa village as "part modern, part traditional, and Muslim throughout." Her Muslim father did not force his daughters to wear veils and encouraged their individualism. Most importantly, Kassindja's father instilled in her a distrust and fear of female circumcision, a controversial procedure still performed in many parts of the world." (Amazon)

"Set against the backdrop of the Rhodesian civil war, St. John's memoir of growing up on a farm and game preserve in the 1970s deftly conjures up the smells and sounds of the African bush and the era's climate of unashamed racism and feverish patriotism." (Publishers Weekly)

"The book opens with Meldrum's 2003 expulsion from the country that had become Zimbabwe; he'd butted heads with Mugabe's regime for 20-plus years, during which time he wrote a spate of articles exposing various facets of the president's murderous, corrupt regime." (Publishers Weekly)

"Princess is her name, not her title. Yet Zulu brings almost regal strength, hope, and a sense of responsibility to this memoir. Born in Kabwe, Zambia, Zulu had little more than a ninth-grade education, learning more on Africa's diverse streets. She tells of the toll AIDS took on her life, ripping away her parents before it came for her. With astounding perspective, Zulu happily claims her HIV-positive diagnosis as God's mission." (Publishers Weekly)

"In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family's captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang's family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language." - Publisher description

"After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstad penned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty." (Publishers Weekly)

"Latifa was only 16 when the Taliban overran Kabul, changing her life dramatically. On the morning of September 26, 1996--the day the Taliban took Kabul--Latifa, her sister, Soraya, and their father drove to Aryana Square and saw the body of the murdered former president, Najibullah." (Booklist)

"The Story of My Life,' [is] in a certain sense, the world's most literate reality show." (Los Angeles Times)

"Born in England and raised on her father's fantastic stories of an Afghanistan she had never known, Shah spends her adult life searching for a mythic place of beauty. "Any Western adult might have told me that this was an exile's tale of a lost Eden: the place you dream about, to which you can never return. But even then, I wasn't going to accept that." What she finds is a place ravaged by decades of war, poverty and, later, religious puritanism." (Publishers Weekly)

"Ansary fired off an email on September 12 that found its way to millions of readers around the world (including FSG editorial). The e-mail, printed here in an appendix, included such comments as "When you think `Taliban,' think `Nazis.' When you think `Bin Laden,' think `Hitler.' And when you think `the people of Afghanistan,' think `the Jews in the concentration camps.' " Ansary, the son of a Pashtun Afghan father and Finnish-American mother, lived as a Muslim outside of Kabul until the early '60s, when he left on scholarship to attend an American high school, eventually going on to college and becoming an educational writer." (Publishers Weekly)

"On the night of April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest, and more than two hundred other Armenian politicians and intellectuals were arrested in Constantinople. Soon, Armenians across Turkey were massacred or forced to join a death march to the desert of Der Zor. Balakian walked among the displaced for months before he fled, disguising himself variously as a German engineer, a soldier, and a worker in the vineyards; he began this book while in hiding. (It was published in Armenian in 1922 and in 1959; the translator is Balakian’s great-nephew.) Both a memoir and an attempt at a history of the genocide, it assumes considerable familiarity with Ottoman politics, but remains fascinating first-hand testimony to a monumental crime." - From The New Yorker, 2008

"Ten-year-old Croatian Filipovic's graphic, firsthand account of life in embattled Sarajevo." (Publishers Weekly)

"Thant Myint-U tells the story of modern Burma, and the story of his own family, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Through his prominent family’s stories and those of others, he portrays Burma’s rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through a sixty-year civil war that continues today—the longest-running war anywhere in the world." - Publisher description

"Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind." - Publisher description

"In this "Age of Holocaust," Ung's memoir of her childhood in Pol Pot's Cambodia offers a haunting parallel to the writings of Anne Frank in the Europe of Adolf Hitler." -- Library Journal

"Li was born in 1940 to a harsh and punitive father and an emotionally distant mother. Hyperactive and curious, the lonely little boy was forbidden to go outdoors, and his only companion was his kindly nurse. When the political power shifted, Li's father was imprisoned and the family sent to live in a disease-infested slum." (School Library Journal)

"The author of this absorbing memoir was a misfit in the most misfit-intolerant place on earth. Coming of age during the Cultural Revolution, Kang kept secret diaries, disdained the political sloganeering at his university and was sent away for requesting the suspect novel Doctor Zhivago—crimes that landed him a three-year prison term and resettlement in a peasant commune where the work was almost as backbreaking as in the camps." (Publishers Weekly)

"Although the focus of this memoir is the author's struggle to be loved by a family that treated her cruelly, it is more notable for its portrait of the domestic affairs of an immensely wealthy, Westernized Chinese family in Shanghai as the city evolved under the harsh strictures of Mao and Deng." (Publishers Weekly)

"Jade Snow Wong grew up in a traditional Chinese family in San Francisco's pre-World War II Chinatown. It was a world in which wives were introduced by their husbands as "my inferior woman," rules were taught with corporal punishment, and home life was literally connected to the family business: "As much a part of home as her bedroom were the sewing machines she passed before she came to her bedroom door." (Amazon)

"While this is the story of his life, it is also the story of a family's struggle to balance ambition, expectations, and relationships, and it illustrates to the extreme the pressure many young people face to live up to their own and their parents' expectations. The writing is immediate and emotional, drawing readers into a life of hard work, dedication, music, competition, and performance. Lang Lang's life and creative choices demonstrate a willingness to take chances and trust his instincts, honed through years of battling insular established systems." (School Library Journal)

"Singer Namu describes growing up on the Chinese-Tibetan border in Moso country, "the Country of the Daughters." Detailing her late-1960s, early-'70s upbringing-she was known in her village as "the girl who was given back three times"-she sheds light on the unique matrilineal Moso culture, with its "walking marriages," where women take as many lovers as they want and the men continue to reside in their mothers' homes." (Publishers Weekly)

"In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century." (Amazon)

"The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward." (Amazon)

"Fascinating memoir of a young Chinese girl during the collapse of the Maoist regime. As a schoolgirl, Min distinguishes herself as a young communist--and a high point of her career as head of the Little Red Guard comes when she is persuaded to denounce her beloved teacher as a reactionary, thus ruining the woman's career and possibly placing her life in jeopardy." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Gandhi's nonviolent struggles in South Africa and India had already brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation, and controversy that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself." (Amazon)

"Phoolan became at once both symbol and avenger of atrocities committed against the lower castes-a woman who had taken justice into her own hands and achieved a singular vindication . . . as a creation of the worst aspects of a monstrous social structure, she could lead a credible challenge against the caste system that has defined India since ancient times." (Atlantic Monthly)

"Reversing his parents' immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new." (Publisher's description)

"A searing narrative of a Dalit family's odyssey through oppression."(Sahara Times)

"In this poignant autobiography, Farman Farmaian brings Persian history and culture alive. Her life spans nearly a century of tremendous change in Iran: from a sheltered childhood in her father's harem through her studies at the University of Southern California where she was the first Iranian student to attend to her return to Iran to found and direct the Tehran School of Social Work from 1958 until 1979 when radical students took over the school and forced her into exile." (Library Journal)

"The second-year Iranian college student in 2001 knew that making that speech meant trouble, but she had no real expectation of being kidnapped in the heart of Tehran and hustled off to the notorious Evin Prison." (Publisher's Weekly)

"In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels." (Amazon)

"The question "why did they stay?" haunts this engrossing memoir, as Salbi shows how Saddam Hussein "managed to make decent people like [her] parents complicit in their own oppression." "Growing up in Baghdad," the author remembers, "was probably not unlike growing up in an American suburb," but then Salbi's father became Saddam's private pilot." (Publishers Weekly)

"Readers can only be grateful to him for unearthing the history of a family, a people and a very different image of Iraq." (Publishers Weekly)

Autobiographical account of the internment of the Japanese American author's family in 1942. (Amazon)

"Sharing a personal perspective on the past three decades of world history, Queen Noor talks frankly of the many challenges of her life as wife and partner to the monarch, providing both an intimate portrait of the late King Hussein and a moving account of their public role." - Publisher description

"North Korea is among the most opaque nations on earth, its regime noted for repression and for the personality cult of its father and son leaders, the late Kim Il Sung and his successor, Kim Jong Il. Kang Chol-hwan draws from firsthand experience in explaining the repression." (Publishers Weekly)

"In this classic tale, Richard E. Kim paints seven vivid scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence in Korea at the height of the Japanese occupation, 1932 to 1945." (Amazon)

"Al-Shaykh, a Lebanese journalist and author of six novels, finally succumbs to her illiterate mother Kamila's haranguing to write her story." (Publishers Weekly)

"...Maalouf, traces his familial history from a tiny mountainside village in Lebanon to Cuba and back. Presented, upon the death of his father, with a trunkful of documents, Maalouf sifts through the detritus of letters, journals and diary entries in search of information on his great uncle Gebrayel, whose life is swathed in family legends." (Publishers Weekly)

In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, cuffed and beaten, as that country was seized by revolution. When he was freed, he went home. Not to Boston or Beirut—where he lives— or to Oklahoma City, where his Lebanese-American family had settled and where he was raised. Instead, he returned to his great-grandfather’s estate, a house that, over three years earlier, Shadid had begun to rebuild. House of Stone is the story of a battle-scarred home and a war correspondent’s jostled spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other.

"Apparently finished in the days just prior to her assassination, not to mention in anticipation of her US-sponsored return to power in Pakistan, this book by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto addresses Western audiences in an effort to dispel misconceptions about Islam, the role of Islam in politics and its compatibility with democracy, and the strategies of the US 'War on Terror.'" Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize. I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons. I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.

"Cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and was sent to the Siberian Gulag along with other captive Poles, Finns, Ukranians, Czechs, Greeks, and even a few English, French, and American unfortunates who had been caught up in the fighting. A year later, he and six comrades from various countries escaped from a labor camp in Yakutsk and made their way, on foot, thousands of miles south to British India." (Amazon)

In the twilight of the Cold War (the late 1980s), nine-year old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult, sets out to retrace his family's long trek, locate the strangers who fought for his freedom, and in the process, gain a future by understanding his past.

"This memoir is a journey into a complex world readers will find fascinating and at times repugnant. After being denied a visa to remain in the U.S., British-born Ahmed, a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, takes advantage of an opportunity, before 9/11, to practice medicine in Saudi Arabia. She discovers her new environment is defined by schizophrenic contrasts that create an absurd clamorous clash of modern and medieval.... It never became less arresting to behold." (Publishers Weekly)

"In this consistently gripping work, a Literary Guild alternate selection in cloth, the American-born Sasson recounts the life story of a Saudi princess she met while living in Saudi Arabia, offering a glimpse of the appalling conditions endured by even privileged women in the Middle East." (Publishers Weekly)

"Lum's heartfelt, harrowing memoir recreates the years her family emigrated to Singapore from China and endured the Japanese invasion of the British-controlled island during WWII. The narrator, born in 1933, is the second daughter of four siblings whose father is an official interpreter; his wages allow the extended family, including the formidable maternal grandmother, Popo, a cook and several indentured servants, to live comfortably and the children to attend English schools." (Publishers Weekly)

Eddie Huang was raised by a wild family of FOB ("fresh off the boat") immigrants--his father a cocksure restaurateur with a dark past back in Taiwan, his mother a fierce protector and constant threat. Young Eddie tried his hand at everything mainstream America threw his way, from white Jesus to macaroni and cheese, but finally found his home as leader of a rainbow coalition of lost boys up to no good: skate punks, dealers, hip-hop junkies, and sneaker freaks. This is the story of a Chinese-American kid in a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac blazing his way through America's deviant subcultures, trying to find himself, ten thousand miles from his legacy and anchored only by his conflicted love for his family and his passion for food.

A powerful, emotional memoir and an extraordinary portrait of three generations of Tibetan women whose lives are forever changed when Chairman Mao’s Red Army crushes Tibetan independence, sending a young mother and her six-year-old daughter on a treacherous journey across the snowy Himalayas toward freedom.

"The son of a wealthy Vietnamese woman and an American businessman, Nguyen was nearly eight when Saigon fell to the Vietcong. For the next decade he and his family endured hardships brought on by the privileged lives they had enjoyed under the capitalist regime." (Publishers Weekly)

:Hayslip was born a Vietnamese peasant in 1949; little more than 20 years later she left for the United States with an American husband. Her early years were spent as a Viet Cong courier and lookout; a black marketeer; an unwed mother; a bar girl; a hospital aide; and (once) a prostitute. She was tortured by the South Vietnamese army, raped by Viet Cong, and harassed by Americans." (Library Journal)

Nujood Ali's childhood came to an abrupt end in 2008 when her father arranged for her to be married to a man three times her age. With harrowing directness, Nujood tells of abuse at her husband's hands and of her daring escape. With the help of local advocates and the press, Nujood obtained her freedom--an extraordinary achievement in Yemen, where almost half of all girls are married under the legal age.

"In February, 2002, Ramonet, the editor of French monthly Le Monde diplomatique, began a two-year conversation with the controversial Cuban head of state, a collaboration that resulted in this Q&A-style, Castro-approved look into the revolutionary leader's life, from boyhood through his half-century in power." (Publishers Weekly)

“In this wonderful memoir, Ojito ransoms herself from the seductions of nostalgia and reclaims instead the beleageured Cuba of her childhood.” (The New York Times)

"Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones," "Yale historian Eire writes in this beautifully fashioned memoir, as he recounts one of many wonderfully vibrant stories from his boyhood in 1950s Havana." (Publishers Weekly)

"Chevrillon was the head of the Code Service in Paris for General de Gaulle's Delegation and served as the main communication link between the Free French Government in London and the Provisional Government in France. Her memoir gives a picture of daily life for the French elite under German occupation, and recounts the arrest and deportation of her Jewish relatives, her role in the underground network, her captivity in Paris' Fresnes prison, and the liberation of France." Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The author recounts his family's life during Hitler's rise to power and shows how even those who were not Nazis, helped make the success of fascism possible.

"Although Ayaan Hirsi Ali remains Public Enemy #1 for radical Muslims, she refuses to be silenced. In this captivating memoir—an act of courage itself—she shares the evolution of her values, beliefs, and identity, all propelled by an urgent mission to educate Western countries about the bigotries of other nations." (Bookmarks Magazine)

"Irish Times columnist O'Faolain seeks to understand the events of her life by baring her soul to the world in a memoir of her experiences with love and loneliness and her journey of self-discovery. This autobiography is unlike most others in that O'Faolain's frank and open examination speaks to both American and European audiences. Transcending her rural Irish childhood (one of nine children, an alcoholic mother, and a philandering father), she tries to find purpose through reading, education, and a career rather than the traditional life of wife and mother." (Library Journal)

"Murphy's skillful storytelling and optimistic spirit give even the grimmest moments of her difficult life story levity in this hopeful, spunky sister to Angela's Ashes. Born in 1928, "a delicate child with a peculiar shape... chronically ugly and cross as a briar," Murphy was the third of seven children in a rural family. With few work prospects in the "middle of Ireland's bog land," she moved to Dublin to become a housekeeper, and after a few years was raped by her boyfriend, got pregnant and saw no other choice but to marry him." (Publishers Weekly)

" Bernstein writes, "There are few rules or unwritten laws that are not broken when circumstances demand, and few distances that are too great to be traveled," about the figurative divide ("geographically... only a few yards, socially... miles and miles") keeping Jews and Christians apart in the poor Lancashire mill town in England where he was raised." (Publishers Weekly)

With unequaled authority and dramatic detail, the first volume of Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher reveals as never before the early life, rise to power, and first years as prime minister of the woman who transformed Britain and the world in the late twentieth century. Moore has had unique access to all of Thatcher’s private and governmental papers, and interviewed her and her family extensively for this book. Many of her former colleagues and intimates have also shared previously unseen papers, diaries, and letters, and spoken frankly to him, knowing that what they revealed would not be published until after her death. The book immediately supersedes all other biographies and sheds much new light on the whole spectrum of British political life from Thatcher’s entry into Parliament in 1959 to what was arguably the zenith of her power—victory in the Falklands in 1982.

"This is a delightful and often touching book, full of sly rebellion. Bill Watkins has a perfect ear for the more nonsensical sides of the heritage instinct, and a shrewd eye on where he came from—and where he's going. Delicious." (Author-Frank Delaney)

"As he did so adroitly in his previous memoirs, Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, McCourt manages to uncover humor in nearly everything. He writes about hilarious misfires, as when he suggested (during his teacher's exam) that the students write a suicide note, as well as unorthodox assignments that turned into epiphanies for both teacher and students." (--Shawn Carkonen)

As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons.

National Book Award Finalist From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world--a world usually lost to history. Lepore's life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.

Born during the Islamic Revolution and raised by Persian parents amid an affectionate and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland of Dayton, Ohio, Melody Moezzi enjoyed all the amenities of a typical American youth - Froot Loops, Saturday-morning cartoons, and Catholic school - but also experienced a distinctly Iranian upbringing: Farsi class, unibrows, saffron on everything, and Ph.D.s or M.D.s for the whole family. When Moezzi battled severe physical illness at age eighteen, her community stepped up, filling her hospital rooms with roses, lilies, and hyacinths. But when she attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, there were no flowers. Locked in psych wards and bombarded with antipsychotics, she was encouraged to keep her illness a secret - by both her family and an increasingly callous medical establishment. Refusing to be ashamed, Moezzi instead became an outspoken advocate, determined to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness. Reporting from the no-man's-land between sickness and sanity, between the Midwest and the Middle East, Moezzi refused to be torn across cultural and social lines. Funny, caustic, and unique, Haldol and Hyacinths is a tribute to the healing power of hope and humor.

A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities. Richard Blanco's childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents' nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba and his imagined America, the country he saw on reruns of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver--an "exotic" life he yearned for as much as he yearned to see "la patria." Navigating these worlds eventually led Blanco to question his cultural identity through words; in turn, his vision as a writer--as an artist--prompted the courage to accept himself as a gay man. In this moving, contemplative memoir, the 2013 inaugural poet traces his poignant, often hilarious, and quintessentially American coming-of-age and the people who influenced him. A prismatic and lyrical narrative rich with the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of Miami, Richard Blanco's personal narrative is a resonant account of how he discovered his authentic self and ultimately, a deeper understanding of what it means to be American. His is a singular yet universal story that beautifully illuminates the experience of "becoming;" how we are shaped by experiences, memories, and our complex stories: the humor, love, yearning, and tenderness that define a life.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul.

The popular ESPN basketball analyst and former Duke player looks at the true meaning of toughness.
If anyone knows tough, it’s Jay Bilas. A four-year starter at Duke, he learned an incomparable work ethic under coach Mike Krzyzewski, battling against the greatest college players in the game. After playing professionally overseas for several years, he returned to Duke, where he served as Krzyzewski’s assistant coach for three seasons, during which the Blue Devils won back-to-back titles. A graduate of Duke Law School, he has since become one of basketball’s most recognizable faces through his insightful, intelligent work on ESPN’s SportsCenter and College GameDay.

GB Tran is a young Vietnamese American artist who grew up distant from (and largely indifferent to) his family's history. Born and raised in South Carolina as a son of immigrants, he knew that his parents had fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. But even as they struggled to adapt to life in America, they preferred to forget the past--and to focus on their children's future. It was only in his late twenties that GB began to learn their extraordinary story. When his last surviving grandparents die within months of each other, GB visits Vietnam for the first time and begins to learn the tragic history of his family, and of the homeland they left behind. In this family saga played out in the shadow of history, GB uncovers the root of his father's remoteness and why his mother had remained in an often fractious marriage; why his grandfather had abandoned his own family to fight for the Viet Cong; why his grandmother had had an affair with a French soldier. GB learns that his parents had taken harrowing flight from Saigon during the final hours of the war not because they thought America was better but because they were afraid of what would happen if they stayed. They entered America--a foreign land they couldn't even imagine--where family connections dissolved and shared history was lost within a span of a single generation.

We Were Not Spoiled chronicles the life of Lucille Verreault Ledoux, a Mainer born in 1921. Born and raised in Lewiston, her life is typical of many Franco-Americans of her generation and, as such, is an important addition to our understanding of Maine's ethnically diverse communities in the last century.

"Out of the traditions of healers, shamans, and other leaders of complementary medicine, the healing ways of renowned Lakota Sioux medicine man Gary Holy Bull are featured in this profile of his life and teachings. Using Holy Bull's own words and writings, the traditional ways of the Lakota Sioux are evoked through texts, contemporary and historical photographs, quotations, profiles, and first-person accounts. His descriptions of the Yuwipi ceremony, the Sun Dance, and other healing rituals illustrate his emergence as a respected elder and as the embodiment of Lakota beliefs." - Publisher description

Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In 'Rez Life', his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist's storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present.With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the waves of public policy that have disenfranchised and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension that has marked the historical relationship between the United States government and the Native American population. Through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges,he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of Native American life.A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in mainstream America. Exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture, 'Rez Life' is a strikingly original work of history and reportage, a must read for anyone interested in the Native American story.

"Drawing on his memories and an oral tradition, Allen Sockabasin returns to his Passamaquoddy village of Mud-doc-mig-goog, or Peter Dana Point, near Princeton, Maine. When Allen was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, his village was isolated and depended largely on subsistence hunting and fishing, working in the woods, and seasonal harvesting work for its survival. Passamaquoddy was its first language, and the tribal traditions of sharing and helping one another ensured the survival of the group. To the outside world, they lived in poverty, but Allen remembers a life that was rich and rewarding in many ways. He recalls the storytellers, tribal leaders, craftsmen, basketmakers, hunters, musicians, and elders who are still his heroes, and he explains why preserving the Passamaquoddy traditions and language is so critical to his people's survival in modern times." - Publisher description

Personal accounts highlighting Nickerson's career while serving as a Maine State Trooper from 1977 to 2005.

Retired Maine Game Warden John Ford has seen it all. He's been shot at by desperate prison escapees, been outwitted by wily trappers, and rescued scores of animals. As a tenacious and successful warden, he was always willing to spend the time needed to nab violators of the state's fish and game laws. At the same time, though, he wasn't a cold,heartless, go-by-the-book enforcer; he usually had a good quip ready when he slipped the handcuffs on a violator,and he wasn't above accepting a lesson learned as sufficient penalty for breaking the law. Ford is also a very gifted storyteller and he writes of his adventures in Suddenly, the Cider Didn't Taste So Good, a collection of true tales, both humorous and serious, from the trenches of law enforcement, and also includes heartwarming accounts of his rescue of hurt or abandoned animals.

"Gerda Weissmann Klein moves you, and not just because the story she can tell is so horrific. It is the passion with which she looked through the horror and found a heart-felt and basic goodness in humanity . . . All But My Life is filled with wonderful acts of decency and normalcy, even as she describes three years in labor camps and three months of a forced winter march from Germany to Czechoslovakia." (Royal Ford, The Boston Globe)

"Anne Frank's diaries have always been among the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. This new edition restores diary entries omitted from the original edition, revealing a new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations, hardships, and passions. Anne emerges as more real, more human, and more vital than ever." (Amazon.com)

"This book, published months after Italian writer Primo Levi's suicide in 1987, is a small but powerful look at Auschwitz, the hell where Levi was imprisoned during World War II." (Amazon.com)

"A very detailed description of day-to-day life, if we can call it that, in Hell's inmost circle...jammed with infernal information too terrible to be taken all at once." (Terrence Des Pres)

"A Dutch-Jewish Holocaust survivor now living in California, Van Beek recalls her harrowing experiences at the mercy of the Nazis. In 1939, fearing a German invasion of Holland, the 18-year-old Van Beek left her Rotterdam family for Argentina with her German-Jewish boyfriend, Felix." (Publishers Weekly)

"Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel." (Amazon.com)

"Spiegelman's Maus, A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon, 1987) was a breakthrough, a comic book that gained widespread mainstream attention. The primary story of that book and of this sequel is the experience of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived the concentration camps of Nazi Germany during World War II." (Library Journal)

"As a courier protected by his gentile looks and false indentity papers, and as a leader of the daring group of 500 poorly armed, untrained men and women of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), the author, known as Kazik, helped stave off the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto for a month in 1943, an operation the Germans expected to complete within three days." (Publishers Weekly)

"In the short novel Dawn (1961), a young man who has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine is apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang. In The Accident , (1962), Wiesel again turns to fiction to question the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old?" (Syndetics)

"This extraordinary work is the autobiographical story of young Seren (Sara) Tuvel, an intelligent and resourceful child of a Jewish family, growing up in Romania during Hitler's rise to power." (Booklist)

"Isaacson tells of evading selection by the feared Dr. Mengele for transport with other young women to the Russian front; of her transfer to Lichentau; and, after the Allied liberation, meeting the American intelligence officer who became her husband." (Publishers Weekly)

"In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance." (Syndetics)

In this rich memoir, the first of two volumes, Paul Farmer traces the story of A39, the Cornish political theatre group he co-founded and ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Farmer offers a unique insight into A39's creation, operation, and artistic practice during a period of convulsive political and social change. The reader is plunged into the national miners' strike and the collapse of Cornish tin mining, the impact of Thatcherism and 'Reaganomics', and the experience of touring Germany on the brink of reunification, alongside the influence on A39 of writers Bertolt Brecht, John McGrath and Keith Johnstone. Farmer, a former bus driver turned artistic director, details the theatre group's inception and development as it fought to break down social barriers, attract audiences, and survive with little more than a beaten-up Renault 12, a photocopier and two second-hand stage lights at its disposal: the book traces the progress from these raw materials to the development of an integrated community theatre practice for Cornwall. Farmer's candour and humour enliven this unique insight into 1980s theatre and politics. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in theatre history, life in Cornwall, and the relationship between performance and society during a turbulent era.

First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers.
The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement.
From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market.
For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.

"Most of the students in my memoir workshops at Lehman College in the Bronx are immigrants, first generation American, and/or people of color. They come the Dominican Republic, India, Gambia, Kazakhstan – all over the world – and their writing is rich with fresh perspectives and beloved customs. Whether their grandmothers soothed them with warm parathas, milk chai, feta cheese bureks or Pastelon de Papas, the writers in these essays evoke both their love for their background cultures and their pursuit of an elusive American dream..."
(note: each story has its own Creative Commons copyright - cite them accordingly)