Childhood Memoir

When Claire Hoffman's alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven - Iowa - to live in Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire's mother, Transcendental Meditation - the Maharishi's method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life - was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart.

The Roots of Resilience: My Childhood and Life in Cameroon-Central Africa is an inspiring memoir by Amaelle, chronicling her journey from Bafoussam, Cameroon, to the vibrant cities of Douala and Yaoundé. Narrating her childhood and her life in Cameroon.

From a young age, Layla Salek has experienced some people as colors—her mother brown, her father green, her husband rainbow. As she notes, sometimes, when words fail, colors speak. Chaos in Color is the captivating story of Layla’s journey from childhood to adulthood with a mother who suffered from untreated bipolar disorder. Each chapter paints a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the abuse, neglect, and trauma that she experienced as she grew up at the mercy of her mother’s bipolar swings, an incompetent mental health system, and the strangers with whom she was often left.

Offering a nuanced and transformative take on immigration, multiculturalism, and America's role on the global stage, The Newcomers follows and reflects on the lives of 22 immigrant teenagers throughout the course of their 2015-2016 school year at Denver's South High School. Unfamiliar with American culture or the English language, the students range from the ages of 14 to 19 and come from nations struggling with drought, famine, or war.

In her memoir, Jevranne explores the effects trauma has on the body and how it can often result in blocked-out memories. She shares her personal journey with grief and the struggles that appeared when silencing herself because of not feeling valid in her pain- a childhood and generational wound embedded through the years.

When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of 128 children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year psychological experiment that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in an abusive marriage to a man with a violent history and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped the person she became and her life choices. Is she the narrator of the story of her life, or is something else?

"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person." ( The World According to Mister Rogers)

Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.

Inspirational words on parenting from the beloved Fred Rogers, showing appreciation for parents whose children are grown as well as giving advice to those parents raising young ones.

Set against a backdrop of East End London, Georgia experienced a childhood few of us could imagine. Though brought up in a loving family, she watched her family break apart through deceit and her mother descend into heroin addiction. Escaping into what she felt was a loving sanctuary, Georgia ended up trapped in a violent relationship with a man who would beat and abuse her. After having her three children by him, she knew she had to escape to finally find safety. Now Georgia is sharing her story of survival to help others and prove there is hope even after trauma and heartache.

The sweet-natured Laura Meer dreams of a superhero and spends days trying to provide for herself while being half-neglected by her parents, who couldn’t take good care even of themselves. Her father constantly tries to kill her mother, and the police refuse to help. Developing faith in God is Laura’s only strength. But will she be able to protect her mother?

Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden - just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat - Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war - and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime - aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in.

For all the roads we choose to travel, and even those we don't, Fred Rogers has an observation, a story, some insights to share. Whether you're facing graduation, a new job, a new baby, marriage, any change in your life, expected or not, the wisdom that Mister Rogers offers can contribute mightily to the grace with which you handle the change. It all comes down to knowing we're valuable, and that we're worthy of that value. As Fred would say, "You don't have to be anything more than who you are right now."

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this best-selling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power of spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou’s latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth in every minute.

Wise and embodied, fearless and necessary, Being (Sick) Enough is both a wild awakening and a love letter to your whole self: the pains and suffering, joys and brightness, and vital connections that hold each of us as we navigate what it means to be here, like this, right now.

Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to see a high school production of Les Misérables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Broadway turns to Truman High when trying out controversial shows such as Rent and Spring Awakening before they move on to high school theater programs across the nation. Volpe’s students from this blue-collar town go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders.

These five stories, written and read by Gerald Durrell himself, are taken from his books Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fillets of Plaice. They were recorded on Jersey in 1985 and are used by kind permission of the Estate of Gerald Durrell.

Justin Webb's childhood was far from ordinary. Between his mother's un-diagnosed psychological problems and his step-father's untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn't much better. And the backdrop to this coming of age story? Britain in the 1970s. Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and Free. Strikes, inflation and IRA bombings. A time in which attitudes towards mental illness, parenting and masculinity were worlds apart from the attitudes we have today.

Introducing Releasing Me: A Memoir" by Kimberly Y. Frederick-Griffin. In this powerful narrative, Kimberly shares the deeply personal story of her tumultuous childhood, marked by trauma and emotional turmoil that shaped her relationships and hindered her pursuit of happiness. Through candid reflections, she unveils the struggles she faced, from battling destructive patterns to grappling with feelings of isolation and unacceptance.

When Gail Gallant was five months old, she died. A year later, she was reborn. Or so her mother said. The crash occurred on a July night in 1955. The truck hit the Gallant family's car head-on; a few weeks later, newborn baby Gail died from her injuries. Mad with grief, her mother prayed feverishly for Gail's return, convinced that God would bring her child back to her. And when she gave birth within a year to a baby girl who looked identical to her lost child, she believed her prayers had been answered. She named that newborn baby Gail.