My Mother's Diamonds

My Mother's Diamonds

Author: James Kirby

Publisher: Longman Publishing Group

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In January 1997 a night-watchman found a large bin load of files marked for shredding and thuse the Swiss Banks most guarded secret was out. What followed was a remarkable story of survivors and descendents of the holocaust victims taking on the huge Swiss banking institutions to be allowed to claim back their own assets. My Mother's Diamonds is an incredible story which begins in Melbourne when a lawyer, Henry Burnstyner, took on a brief which was to prove to be a landmark case. He represented the Barusch family, who fled Poland, against the Swiss Banking Corporation in the first successful claim in the world. The book continues through until June 1998 with the discovery that a set of paintings in a New Zealand gallery were under claim from a Jewish family in Florence.It is a personal account of ordinary people trying to get justice from the rich and powerful banks, insurers and galleries and it exposes the alleged corruption, secret and opportunism on the part of the Swiss financial industry.This is a story that will appeal to a wide cross section of people interested in current affairs, world history, the Jewish community, true life espionage and basically anyone who wants to be absorbed by an incredibly gripping story.


Diamond Moms

Diamond Moms

Author: Candace Conradi

Publisher: Coaches Choice

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9781585189489

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this delightfully inspiring and engaging book, Candice Conradi examines virtually every aspect of the world of baseball through a mother's eyes. She provides first-time insight and problem identification, as well as what-to-do solutions to many factors that often cause frustration and failure fat the ball park. Ideal for parents and coaches of athletes from T-Ball to college and beyond.


The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond

The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond

Author: Brenda Woods

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0147514304

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brenda Woods’ moving, uplifting story of a girl finally meeting the African American side of her family explores racism and how it feels to be biracial, and celebrates families of all kinds. Violet is biracial, but she lives with her white mother and sister, attends a mostly white school in a white town, and sometimes feels like a brown leaf on a pile of snow. Now that she’s eleven, she feels it’s time to learn about her African American heritage, so she seeks out her paternal grandmother. When Violet is invited to spend two weeks with her new Bibi (Swahili for "grandmother") and learns about her lost heritage, her confidence in herself grows and she discovers she’s not a shrinking Violet after all. From a Coretta Scott King Honor-winning author, this is a powerful story about a young girl finding her place in the world.


Diamonds & Deceit

Diamonds & Deceit

Author: Jeanne Hall

Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore

Published: 2020-08-12

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 1543759971

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A hilarious depiction of growing up with a sadistic father who is also a bit of a con artist. Life was indeed never dull with him around, but it was also not a loving, nurturing home either. Surviving the rollercoaster ride was tough but this story is told with much humor. A dark story with dark humor and my eternal optimism that shouts “things could’ve been a whole lot worse”. Funny as f...k.


My Mother's Daughter

My Mother's Daughter

Author: Perdita Felicien

Publisher: Anchor Canada

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0385689985

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A phenomenal, human story. . . . I could not put this book down." —CLARA HUGHES An instant national bestseller, this raw and affecting memoir is the story of a mother and daughter who beat the odds together. Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler running the biggest race of her life at the 2004 Olympics, she carried more than a nation's hopes—she carried her mother Catherine's dreams. In 1974, Catherine is determined and tenacious, but she's also pregnant with her second child and just scraping by in St. Lucia. When she meets a wealthy white Canadian family vacationing on the island, she knows it's her chance. They ask her to come to Canada to be their nanny—and she accepts. This was the beginning of Catherine's new life: a life of opportunity, but also suffering. Within a few years, she would find herself pregnant a third time—this time in her new country with no family to support her, and this time, with Perdita. Together, in the years to come, mother and daughter would experience racism, domestic abuse, and even homelessness, but Catherine's will would always pull them through. As Perdita grew and began to discover her preternatural athletic gifts, she was edged onward by her mother's love, grit, and faith. Facing literal and figurative hurdles, she learned to leap and pick herself back up when she stumbled. This book is a daughter's memoir—a book about the power of a parent's love to transform their child's life.


Coal to Diamonds: A Memoir

Coal to Diamonds: A Memoir

Author: Beth Ditto

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-10-09

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 0385529740

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A raw and surprisingly beautiful coming-of-age memoir, Coal to Diamonds tells the story of Mary Beth Ditto, a girl from rural Arkansas who found her voice. Born and raised in Judsonia, Arkansas—a place where indoor plumbing was a luxury, squirrel was a meal, and sex ed was taught during senior year in high school (long after many girls had gotten pregnant and dropped out) Beth Ditto stood out. Beth was a fat, pro-choice, sexually confused choir nerd with a great voice, an eighties perm, and a Kool Aid dye job. Her single mother worked overtime, which meant Beth and her five siblings were often left to fend for themselves. Beth spent much of her childhood as a transient, shuttling between relatives, caring for a sickly, volatile aunt she nonetheless loved, looking after sisters, brothers, and cousins, and trying to steer clear of her mother’s bad boyfriends. Her punk education began in high school under the tutelage of a group of teens—her second family—who embraced their outsider status and introduced her to safety-pinned clothing, mail-order tapes, queer and fat-positive zines, and any shred of counterculture they could smuggle into Arkansas. With their help, Beth survived high school, a tragic family scandal, and a mental breakdown, and then she got the hell out of Judsonia. She decamped to Olympia, Washington, a late-1990s paradise for Riot Grrrls and punks, and began to cultivate her glamorous, queer, fat, femme image. On a whim—with longtime friends Nathan, a guitarist and musical savant in a polyester suit, and Kathy, a quiet intellectual turned drummer—she formed the band Gossip. She gave up trying to remake her singing voice into the ethereal wisp she thought it should be and instead embraced its full, soulful potential. Gossip gave her that chance, and the raw power of her voice won her and Gossip the attention they deserved. Marked with the frankness, humor, and defiance that have made her an international icon, Beth Ditto’s unapologetic, startlingly direct, and poetic memoir is a hypnotic and inspiring account of a woman coming into her own.


Ordinary Life

Ordinary Life

Author: Elizabeth Berg

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 158836142X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “An extraordinary short story collection that deserves our closest attention.”—Detroit Free Press “Elizabeth Berg’s gift as a storyteller lies most powerfully in her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday.”—The Boston Globe In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into pivotal moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change. In “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together—and no, she isn't contemplating a divorce. She just needs some time to think, take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion. In “White Dwarf” and “Martin's Letter to Nan,” the secrets of a marriage are revealed with sensitivity and “brilliant insights about the human condition” (Detroit Free Press) that have become trademark of Berg's writing. The Charlotte Observer has said, “Berg captures the way women think as well as any writer.” Those qualities of wisdom and perception are everywhere present in Ordinary Life.


Diamonds at the Lost and Found

Diamonds at the Lost and Found

Author: Sarah Aspinall

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780008375164

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For readers of Hideous Kinky, Dadland and Bad Blood; the astonishing, beguiling story of Sarah Aspinall's harum scarum childhood, and a love letter to a woman who defied convention to live a life less ordinary.


My Mother's House

My Mother's House

Author: Francesca Momplaisir

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0525657169

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

One of the Best Books of the Year: Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture • This uncompromising look at the immigrant experience, and the depravity of one man, is an electrifying page-turner rooted in a magical reality • “Impossible to stop reading” —Vulture When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a run-down house in a quickly changing community, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay—“my mother’s house”—and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and necessary legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What he can’t begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.