Childhood Biography

When Areli was just a baby, her mama and papa moved from Mexico to New York with her brother, Alex, to make a better life for the family - and when she was in kindergarten, they sent for her, too. Everything in New York was different. Gone were the Saturdays at Abuela's house, filled with cousins and sunshine. Instead, things were busy and fast and noisy. Areli's limited English came out wrong, and schoolmates accused her of being illegal. But with time, America became her home.

This compelling memoir takes listeners through the eyes of a child surviving World War II in Nazi-occupied Poland. As a nine-year-old, the author witnessed his father being herded into a truck - never to be seen again. He, his mother, and sister fled to Warsaw to live in disguise as Catholics under the noses of the Nazi SS, constantly fearful of discovery and persecution. A sobering reminder of the personal toll of the Holocaust on Jews during World War II, this book is a harrowing portrait of one child’s loss of innocence.

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples.

Hayden Herrera’s parents each married five times; following their desires was more important to them than looking after their children. When Herrera was only three years old, her parents separated, and she and her sister moved from Cape Cod to New York City to live with their mother and their new hard-drinking stepfather. They saw their father only during the summers on the Cape, when they and the other neighborhood children would be left to their own devices by parents who were busy painting, writing, or composing music.

These personal essays have been called poignant, humorous, and mercifully short. Life’s adventures as seen through the eyes of a child and grownup. They have won contests, been published in books and newspapers, and performed at Jonathon Timpanelli's famous Open Mics at Shakespeare Bookstore in New York City.

Buried beneath the weight of insecurities and a hunger for acceptance, one woman's life becomes an electrifying tale of love, betrayal, and redemption. In a world where deceit and desire collide, she is thrust into a labyrinth of lies and chaos that transforms her into the very monster she has always feared. From Forbidden desires to shattered vows, Black Sheep, White Lies an unflinching exploration of resilience, takes you on a heart-stopping journey of power plays and toxic love.

For rural England, the 1950s and 1960s was a time of dramatic transition and change as we moved from wartime austerity with the radio and the local cinema as our entertainment, into the age of TV and the motor car. Social changes and changes in attitudes to sex, religion and the class system were also to have a major impact on rural life. This book attempts to capture this time of change as it affected the small hamlet of Fawler in North Oxfordshire, and to record for posterity a way of life now largely lost. It deals, sometime frankly, but sensitively with life as experience by the author ...

An old man, realizing cherished memories of the past are quickly fading, decides to run away in search of his youth. This creative memoir is about “going home again”, reliving early-life experiences, and re-establishing childhood friendships. He and old friends, the “boys in the band”, recall early tales of youth from their world during the late ’40s and early 1950s.

Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland have each suffered significant, debilitating brain injury - one through rare disease and the medical interventions that followed, the other through deep childhood trauma. In this brave and honest book, Jamila and Rosie share their parallel stories of becoming and being sick, alongside the experience and advice of those who've been there before. They reveal that their 'broken brains' have more in common than they initially realised, proving how mental and physical health are inextricably entwined.

"As you read this book you will be in the company of someone whose childhood was interwoven into the fabric of West Cork and who still loves the soul of his own place" - Alice Taylor, international best-selling author of "To School Through The Fields" In Klondike House, John Dwyer recounts his memories of growing up on the remote but beautiful Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland. The author's vivid and colorful stories describe his hard but happy life as part of an isolated but close-knit community, such as: - Early school days spent in a building with no running water or electricity - An...

A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel.

Leah Broad's magnificent group biography resurrects these four forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever.

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.

With a cancer diagnosis in his early forties, the author is compelled to revisit and resolve the mystery of his family’s sadness. The fourth of six children in an Irish-American household distinctly out-of-place in this affluent suburb of New York City, O’Brien grows up in a claustrophobic milieu of secrecy, lies, and mental illness. The turning point in his maturation is an older brother’s attempted suicide—an event he witnesses firsthand. From Scarsdale traces with sensitivity the complex histories and dynamics that lead to this trauma.

Every great artist started out as a kid. Forget the awards, the sold-out museum exhibitions, and the timeless masterpieces. When the world’s most celebrated artists were growing up, they had regular-kid problems just like you. Jackson Pollock’s family moved constantly - he lived in eight different cities before he was 16 years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists.

Brittany Means’s childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn’t care where they were going—to a roadside midwestern motel, a shelter, or The Barn in Indiana, the cluttered mansion her Pentecostal grandparents called home—as long as they were together. But every so often, her mom would surprise her—and leave.

They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you. But in this raw and powerful memoir, when Phil’s seemingly perfect life begins to unravel, he realizes there are secrets locked in his subconscious that, like a huge elephant surfacing beneath him, insist on forging their own path. After his unconventional brother, Holly, dies in a boating accident in San Francisco Bay, Phil is haunted by flashbacks and disturbing dreams, hinting at a buried trauma. As the memories claw their way to the surface, Phil's world starts to crumble.

For a boy growing up in the 1970s, rural northern New Jersey was a year-round playground, filled with secret fishing holes, enchanted woods, and private trails to explore with friends. But this childhood idyll was snatched from Clark Fredericks by a man he regarded as a local hero: Dennis Pegg, the town’s Boy Scout leader, a law enforcement officer with the Sussex County Sheriff’s Department, and, as Fredericks would discover, a serial predator.

Utilizing her extensive knowledge and love of American history and the research skills she honed while acquiring a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Lynne Cheney set out to explore her own and her husband's family trees. After years of research, she uncovered two family histories that spanned almost three centuries and shared common themes of optimism, perseverance, and undaunted courage. Both families moved westwards in a growing nation, seeking lives of greater opportunity.

When Donna Morrissey left the only home she had ever known, an isolated Newfoundland settlement, at age 16, she was ready for adventure. She had grown up without television or telephones but had absorbed the tragic stories and comic yarns of her close-knit family and community. The death of her infant brother marked the family, and years later, Morrissey suffers devastating guilt about the accidental death of her teenage brother, whom she'd enticed to join her in the oilfields.