Southern Memoirs

Written in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, the author of this little book describes her plantation childhood, her marriage and parenthood, and her experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction. In response to what she believed were misconceptions about antebellum Southern slavery, she argues that while some slaveholders were cruel, the majority were conscientious about the well-being of their servants and looked upon them as members of the household.

For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day Edie woke up to her reality: a poverty-stricken world full of alcohol and violence, where getting out seemed impossible. She taught herself to drive a stick shift truck at 12 years old so she could get her drunk daddy home from the bar. She spent Saturdays at Brushy Mountain prison visiting her incarcerated cousin. She watched adults eat while her stomach gnawed.

Poor Man Always Dreams a Better Tomorrow...but Is the Life Worth the Cost? The oldest daughter who failed to weigh the cost of pleasing her much-loved father… The oldest son burdened with his father's expectations… The story of ego, pride, anger, revenge, guilt… With the powerful and raw memoir, The Guilt is Alive, author Hemalatha Gnanasekar gives an unconventional and unique examination of her life in an impoverished Indian family and explores her family's fateful decision to send the oldest son to Jamaica to work. Strap yourself in for a gripping, suspenseful, and bittersweet ...

What was it in Sandra Day O'Connor's background and early life that helped make her the woman she is today - the first female justice of the US Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America? In this beautiful, illuminating, and unusual book, Sandra Day O'Connor, with her brother, Alan, tells the story of the Day family and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona. Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world.

A Prophet with Honor is the biography Billy Graham himself invited and appreciated for its sympathetic but frank approach. Carefully documented, eminently fair, and gracefully written, it raises and answers key questions about Graham's character, contributions, and influence on the world religious scene. In this engaging and comprehensive book, William Martin gives readers a better understanding of the most successful evangelist in modern history, and the movement he led for over fifty years.

HEADING SOUTH is a light-hearted account of an English brother and sister’s reconnection with the Spanish side of their family. When the author was just four years old their father, Francisco, left the family home in Preston, Lancashire and disappeared from their lives. One day Adam, now twenty-eight, receives a letter from his errant dad and decides to take a break from supply teaching and accept an invitation to visit him in rural Malaga. Later joined by his sister Kate, a series of events begins to unfold which promises to change both their lives forever. Please ‘look inside’ ...

This is a brilliant dual biography charting British Robert Scott's and Norwegian Roald Amundsen's race to the South Pole during 1911-12. Huntuford's is the accepted, definitive account of the race and a reassessment of the two men. Thoroughly researched, revealing the adventures and misfortunes that befell them both, he describes the driving ambitions of the era, and the complex, often deeply flawed individuals who were charged with carrying them out.

The definitive book on the hunt to find the most ruthless serial killer in Los Angeles' history, told by the fearless reporter who broke the story. In 2008, Christine Pelisek broke the story of a terrifying serial killer who went unchecked in Los Angeles for decades, killing the most vulnerable women in one South Central neighborhood.

For nearly 80 years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed "overmined" and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling - particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their feet, and sending them into the air.

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins.

If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this book for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice - a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.

Since childhood Helene Stapinski heard lurid tales about her great-great-grandmother, Vita. In Southern Italy she was a loose woman who had murdered someone. Immigrating to America with three children, she lost one along the way. Helene's youthful obsession with Vita deepened as she grew up, eventually propelling the journalist to Italy, where, with her own children in tow, she pursued the story, determined to set the record straight.

In the early 2000s, Adrian Hong was a soft-spoken Yale undergraduate looking for his place in the world. After reading a harrowing account of life inside North Korea, he realized he had found a cause so pressing that he was ready to devote his life to it. Hong journeyed to China, outwitting Chinese security services as he helped ferry asylum-seeking North Korean escapees to safety. The Rebel and the Kingdom is an exhilarating account of a man who turns his back on the status quo—to instead live boldly by his principles.

A Southern Woman's Story (1879) is a chronicle of Phoebe Pember's experiences as matron of the Confederate Chimborazo Hospital from November 1862 until the fall of Richmond in April 1865. It is considered an important source on Confederate history, and is also a valuable work for scholars of women's history and the medical and social history of the Civil War.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

In 1942, Norman Hanson learned to fly the Royal Navy's newest fighter: the US-built Chance Vought Corsair. Fast, rugged, and demanding to fly, it was an intimidating machine. But in the hands of its young Fleet Air Arm pilots, it also proved to be a lethal weapon. Posted to the South Pacific aboard HMS Illustrious, Hanson and his squadron took the fight to the Japanese. Facing a desperate and determined enemy, Kamikaze attacks, and the ever-present dangers of flying off a pitching carrier deck, death was never far away.

In this memoir, the pseudonymous author, Ruthie Bolton, tells how she overcame tremendous obstacles to find her place in the world. Born into poverty in a rural Southern town, Bolton was abandoned by her 13-year-old mother and raised by her step-grandfather, an abusive tyrant who beat his wife to death and terrorized his children. With remarkable candor yet no trace of self-pity, Bolton describes how she used alcohol and drugs to try to escape her nightmarish existence.

Having had unparalleled access to the Chilean mine disaster, award-winning journalist Jonathan Franklin takes readers to the heart of a remarkable story of human endurance, survival, and historic heroism. 33 Men is the groundbreaking, authoritative account of the Chilean mine disaster, one of the longest human entrapments in history.