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Thirty years ago Tobias Wolff wrote a memoir that changed the form. This Boys Life is the story of the young, tough-on-the-outside but vulnerable Toby Wolff. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother travel from Florida to Utah to a small village in Washington state, with many stops along the way. As each place doesnt quite work out, they pick up to find somewhere new. In the story of their journey, Wolff masterfully recreates...
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Born into the middle of World War II, Gary Paulsen's turbulent childhood provided plenty of subject matter for his bestselling novels, and the librarians in his life gave him the inspiration and support to explore the world through books. As a soldier himself, his storytelling technique developed, and for the first time he shares his own.
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Growing up in rural Wyoming, Mark Spragg learned early to read the stars. At 11 he was instructed to quit dreaming, and he went to work for his father on the land. The ranch is a sprawling place where winter brings months of solitude and summer brings tourists from the real world--city types who want a taste of the outdoors and stare at the author and his family as if they were members of some exotic tribe. By the age of 14, he and his younger brother...
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The legendary American musician, singer, songwriter and documentary filmmaker offers a collection of stories, written by his own hand, that focus on the memories of his life, from his childhood to today.
Grohl offers an honest portrait of an extraordinary life made up of ordinary moments. From his deep connection to his hometown of Springfield, Virginia, to the awe he still feels about raising his daughters, he tells stories from his soul. Packed...
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When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage-learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio-and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory...
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Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema’ s childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that reads like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema’ s coming of age is colored by tent revivals...
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Memoir of a Cherokee boyhood in the 1930s, by the man who later went on to write the Josey Wales novels. The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression.
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"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
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From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller, known to friends and family as Bobo, grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerrilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself into their African life and its rugged farmwork with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything. She taught...
13) Indian boyhood
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A full-blooded Santee Sioux Indian describes his childhood experiences and training as a warrior in the 1870's and 1880's until he was taken to live in the white man's world at age fifteen.
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"On March 28, 1944, six-year-old Tati, her four-year-old sister Andra, and other members of the family were deported to Auschwitz. Their mother Mira was determined to keep track of her girls. After being tattooed with their inmate numbers, she made them memorize her number and told them to "always remember your name." In keeping this promise to their mother, the sisters were able to be reunited with their parents when WWII ended. An unforgettable...
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This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next fourteen years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years-a book in the tradition of...
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A Welsh poet recalls the celebration of Christmas in Wales and the feelings it evoked in him as a child.
This nostalgic recollection of Christmas past by celebrated Welsh poet Dylan Thomas evokes the beauty of the season at every turn. Cover comes with gold foil, glossy front picture; and sparkling snowflakes. Inside comes with blue endpapers sprinkled with more snowflakes.
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"Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents' dream that he become a national hero when he doesn't even have his own room? He's not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his little pencil, the underside of a massive...
19) Silk parachute
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A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES- IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES
The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here- highly varied in length and theme-McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods...
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With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away. The house on Mary Street was home to Jennifer; her older brother B.J.; their hardworking father, who smelled like aftershave and read her Snow...