Survivor Biography

Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest cast a spotlight on the unspoken horrors of family violence and exorcised the demons of her childhood. But in the years following the controversial best seller’s publication, the author’s resilience was tested in ways she never expected. Crawford was forced to brave a stunning backlash intended to shame her, a film adaptation that bastardized her story and compounded the trauma, a descent into alcoholism, a divorce, and a massive stroke that left her paralyzed. Staying true to her fighting spirit, she made a remarkable comeback.

Philip Yancey, whose explorations of faith have made him a guide for millions, feels no need to defend the church. Yancey acknowledges that many spiritual seekers find few answers and little solace in the institutional church. How did Yancey manage to survive spiritually despite early encounters with a racist, legalistic church that he now views as almost cultic? In this, his most soul-searching book yet, he probes that very question.

After being separated from my mother twice in my 10 short years of life, I was more than a little excited at the prospect of being reunited with her again. Unfortunately, my elation was to be short-lived when the visits to my bedroom started. Threatening to send me away again or turn the loaded gun he kept in my wardrobe on us all, he kept my silence. It was to be another six years until I escaped the abuse of my mother’s husband and another 30 years before I was able to bring him to justice. Ironically, the one person that should have protected me and helped me fight to stop him, my ...

Holocaust survivor and licensed therapist Karmela Waldman shares brutally honest advice about life and death—often deploying brutally sharp wit—with her son and podcast co-host, Joel Waldman.

When Hitler's Nazis marched into Poland, it brought an abrupt, cruel end to Jack Eisner's childhood, shattered his loving family, and turned his peaceful Jewish community into a nightmarish world of atrocity and murder. Instead of entering the Warsaw Music Conservatory, to which he'd won a scholarship, Jack found himself climbing cemetery walls, leaping over rooftops, and tunneling through sewers with a gang of fellow teenagers to smuggle food, hope, and survival into his besieged home.

Mark Wales thought his life would end in a cornfield in Afghanistan. Mark and his SAS troops emerged from that scorched battlefield 12 hours later, his mentor gunned down, his dream career now a nightmare. Over four deployments of intense warfighting, Mark watched the line between right and wrong become blurred. When he left the SAS he was adrift, crippled by guilt. On a mission to rebuild himself, Mark turned his life around. He fought his way into the gates of a US Ivy League business school and into the boardrooms of top-tier international corporations.

Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet, despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida—meaning non-birth in Hebrew.

When detective Maggie Oliver first discovered that children as young as 10 were being groomed, abused and trafficked for sex by gangs of men in the Rochdale area, she felt like a lonely voice calling for people to act. Banging on closed doors, it seemed that nobody was able or willing to help her save these vulnerable girls, but she couldn't just sit back while countless lives were being destroyed forever in plain sight. Instead, she launched a one-woman campaign to bring down these sickening gangs.

Tom Crean was the farmer’s son from Kerry who sailed on three major expeditions to the unknown Antarctic over a century ago. He served with both Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton, spent longer on the ice than either and outlived them both. But Tom Crean returned to Ireland and never spoke about his exploits, taking his incredible story to the grave - until the publication of An Unsung Hero, which unearthed his story and saw him rightfully placed amongst the annals of the great explorers.

Betty Ford: First Lady, Women’s Advocate, Survivor, Trailblazer is the inspiring story of an ordinary Midwestern girl thrust onto the world stage and into the White House under extraordinary circumstances. Setting a precedent as first lady, Betty Ford refused to be silenced by her critics as she publicly championed equal rights for women and spoke out about issues that had previously been taboo - breast cancer, depression, abortion, and sexuality.

How do you survive when everything you hold dear has been ripped away? This is the question Radha Manickam asks himself during the three years and nine months he spends under the merciless rule of the Khmer Rouge. When Khmer Rouge forces take the city of Phnom Penh in 1975, Radha is a new Christian, passionate about living out his faith. Over the next years of his life, 1.7 million of his fellow Cambodians--including most of his own family--will perish due to starvation, disease, and unthinkable violence.

The story begins as Colleen and Newell Cerak first learn the doubtful, then shocking news that their daughter, buried five weeks earlier, is still alive. Forming a backdrop to the reunion are the faces of the Van Ryn family, strangers to the Ceraks, who are just coming to terms with the harsh reality that the girl whose bedside they have been posted at for five weeks is not their daughter after all - and that their own daughter, Laura, has already been buried under the name of Whitney Cerak.

It was one of the most traumatic events in maritime history, and Archibald Gracie was probably among the last to leave the sinking Titanic on that cold April night in 1912. In this unique account, he describes his personal experiences and remarkable escape from death in the icy waters of the Atlantic, painting a vivid picture of what it was like on board the Titanic in its final hours.

I glanced behind me and saw my husband being detained. The guards interrogated him and took his photo as the flashbulbs illuminated his face. The moment felt like an eternity as they searched Pe's body from head to toe. And then, he was forced to sign yet another confession. Looking on, I held my breath in anticipation as my 5-year-old son asked, "Are they going to let us go?" Nita Tin, born in Rangoon, Burma, and descended from nobility was raised in an opulent lifestyle. But as her country came under the control of a ruthless military dictator, her whole life changed.

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.

When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at home, life on the edge was supposed to be a thing of the past. Yet when Russia viciously attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Hall quickly volunteered to go. A few weeks later, while on assignment, Hall and his crew were blown up in a Russian strike.

The sound of snapping twigs closed in on the five teenagers enjoying an evening around a glowing campfire at Gitchie Manitou State Park. The night of music and laughter had taken a dark turn. Evil loomed just beyond the tree line, and before the night was over, one of the Midwest's most horrific mass murders had left its bloodstains spewed across the campsite. One managed to survive and would come to be known as the "Gitchie Girl".

Al Green has blessed listeners with some of the biggest hits of the past 50 years. "Love and Happiness", "I'm Still in Love with You", "Let's Get Married", and "I'm Tired of Being Alone" are but a sampling of the iconic songs that led a generation to embrace love in perhaps the most tumultuous period in this country's history, an unparalleled body of work that has many calling Green one of the greatest soul singers of all time.

In 2003, Carolyn Jessop, a lifelong member of the extremist Mormon sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), gathered up her eight children, including her profoundly disabled four-year-old son, and escaped in the middle of the night to freedom. After detailing the shocking conditions of FLDS and her harrowing flight in her memoir, Escape, Carolyn reveled in her newfound identity as a bestselling author, a devoted mom, and a loving companion to the wonderful man in her life. She thought she had put her past firmly behind her.

This is the story of Prof. Shaul Harel, formerly Charlie Hilsberg, who lost his shadow in 1942 at only five years old, when he was separated from his family and surroundings and saved from the furnaces of Auschwitz by the Belgian resistance. This book reveals his story, from his time as a “hidden child” in France and Belgium during the Holocaust, through his experiences in orphanages, his immigration to Israel, the serious injury he sustained in his military service, and more.