In a poignant memoir, a freelance journalist describes growing up with her family on the grounds of an orphanage, where her father was the director and her mother served as a nurse, and her struggle to come to terms with her parents' need to share time and attention with the troubled orphans and her ultimate recognition of her own good fortune. 30,000 first printing
See Mississippi as you've never envisioned it in My Backyard Garden, Look Up Mississippi, a photo memoir. As the second book in the My Backyard Garden series, Look Up Mississippi spotlights Mississippi's natural beauty with 47 awe-inspiring landscape photos of the Mississippi Delta and surrounding areas. Author Debra Hester was inspired by the new 2021 Mississippi State Flag to offer her images and commentary as hope for a new future. Display this book to commemorate a new future for Mississippi and our world.
"After living in San Francisco for fifteen years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and the “star” of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that had once boasted one of the world’s highest per capita income levels but had become one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer could afford a lavish mansion, speculators scooped up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson was often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification. He also uncovered the misguided policies, flawed leadership, and unforgiving economic trends that lead to disasters like the Flint water crisis. Updated with a new preface, Young skillfully blends personal memoir, historical inquiry, and interviews with Flint residents, constructing a vibrant tale of a once-thriving city still fighting - despite overwhelming odds - to rise from the ashes. Hard-hitting, insightful, and often painfully funny, Teardown reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by the people who live there."--Back cover.
Set against the backdrop of the draconian apartheid regime, Behind the Walled Garden of Apartheid, Datnow’s memoir of growing up in South Africa deftly conjures up the era's blatant racism and the rich African landscape. The author vividly recreates her growing up years as white and Jewish at the height of the apartheid regime from 1948-1965, and her struggle as a young adult to come to terms with the wrongdoings of that dark era. The memoir is both a fascinating historical account and an intriguing personal narrative painted with humor and sensitivity.
Harpham recounts her story of fear and ultimate gratitude when--while separated from her polar-opposite husband--she gives birth of a girl with a serious illness.
Set in the tiny village of Orient, Long Island, and in New York City, Into the Garden with Charles is a memoir about falling in love. As a boy in suburban New York in 1940s, Clyde Wachsberger daydreams about storybook gardens where magic happens under the huge leaves. Through the 1960s and 1970s, when most gay men disdained monogamy, the author—an artist and set-designer in New York City—searches unsuccessfully for a soul mate. In 1983, approaching middle-age and having given up on finding love, he moves to a three-hundred-year-old house on a third of an acre, where he channels his passion into creating a garden appropriate to his historical home. Then remarkable circumstances lead him to Charles—a connoisseur of art, a gardener, and the man who will become his life-partner. Together they create a garden of sensuous wild beauty. Into the Garden with Charles is infused with the author's artistic sensibility and is written in a voice that is unaffected, generous, and straightforward. Enriched with the author's paintings—giving it the look and feel of an antique children's book—Into the Garden with Charles is a unique and moving memoir about growing old and falling in love.
