Family Memoir

At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy.

As the biggest criminal trial since the Boston Strangler draws nearer, the public’s fascination with the life and crimes of mob boss Whitey Bulger continues to heat up. Many stories have been told about the murders Whitey and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi committed, and the tacit permission they received from the FBI.

In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth is visiting a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who will tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS.

Napoleon Hill, born into poverty in 1883, began writing as a reporter for small town newspapers while just a teenager. When industrialist Andrew Carnegie commissioned him in 1908 to interview over 500 successful men and women to help prove his theory that success could be distilled down to a clear-cut formula, Hill met with hundreds of the richest and most famous people of the time.

Raising an Entrepreneur presents 76 stories from the mothers of some of the most successful entrepreneurs today. Entrepreneurs are the new rock stars - they're the ones who turn their passions into ingenious projects, because they're willing to risk failure to make their dreams come true.

From the bestselling author and host of the wildly popular Undisclosed podcast, a warm, intimate memoir about food, body image, and growing up in a loving but sometimes oppressively concerned Pakistani immigrant family.

Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

When Erika Simpson was growing up, her mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story served as a Genesis. Her departure from home and a cheating husband, pursuing higher education along the way a kind of Exodus. Her rules for survival, often repeated like the Ten Commandments, guided Erika’s own journey into adulthood. And the most important rule? Throughout her life, Sallie Carol preached the power of a testimony—which often proved useful in talking her way out of a bind with bill collectors.

Prior to November 3, 1992, life had been fairly ordinary for the Leavitt Family. Then, with the closing of the polls and a flurry of election night projections, it wasn't. This book provides insight into not just the unusual and unique aspects of our life as a family after that evening, but also the ordinary.

Written by the seventh-generation Beam family member and master distiller Frederick Booker Noe III, Beam, Straight Up is the first audiobook by a Beam, the family behind the 217-year whiskey dynasty and makers of one of the world's best-selling bourbons.

At age 11, Ralph becomes man of the family and an entrepreneur. He continues his horse riding and cattle driving, and the Moody's start a cooking business.

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.

For more than a decade, Kathy Harrison has sheltered a shifting cast of troubled youngsters - the offspring of prostitutes and addicts; the sons and daughters of abusers; and teenage parents who aren't equipped for parenthood. All this, in addition to raising her three biological sons and two adopted daughters. What would motivate someone to give herself over to constant, largely uncompensated chaos? For Harrison, the answer is easy.

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....

In the early morning hours of August 29, 1986, Clarkson University sophomore Katy Hawelka - bright, pretty, and full of life - strolled back to her upstate New York campus after a night out. On the dimly lit path beside the university's ice hockey arena, a stranger emerged from the darkness. A Stranger Killed Katy is the true story of a life cut tragically short, and of the fight by a grieving mother and others more than 30 years later to ensure that a killer would spend the rest of his life behind bars.

As early as she could remember, Laya Steinberg asked questions. She didn’t always ask them out loud or right away; instead, she observed the world around her and came to her own conclusions. It was this sharp intelligence and spirit that led her to her ultimate choice: breaking away from Jewish Orthodoxy to marry the love of her life.

Tragedy has a terrible way of hitting when one least expects it. This was the case for Roni Hollis, a small-town Missouri teacher, a wife and a mother, when her life changed forever on a normal December day. When a work-related accident killed her beloved husband, Mike, Roni found herself in the throes of grief and depression. She was left with bills she couldn’t pay, a farm she didn't know how to run by herself, a ten-year-old son to raise alone, and a heart completely shattered. Relying on her faith in God and believing in her ability to rise from the ashes, Roni found within herself a ...

On May 5, 1981, three rebellious members of New York's Bonanno crime family were gunned down in a Brooklyn social club. One of the gunmen was Vito Rizzuto, a man who would rise to the top of the underworld in Canada and then expand his reign across continents to become a global superboss. The Sixth Family, now revised and updated, reveals the hidden history of the rise of the Rizzuto clan, the alliances it forged around the world, and the bloody events that led to charges against Vito Rizzuto in the United States and Italy for racketeering and corruption.

A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen.

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays a lesbian partnership, a "bastard" son, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unraveled a family at an earlier moment in history. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger.