Family Memoir

This kaleidoscope of frank, funny, and tender tales are about sin and prayer, about good intentions and unattended sorrows, and about finding our way back home. Growing up in California in the 1950s and 60s, Catherine Clemens Sevenau was raised primarily by an older sister, survived five years living with an unhinged erratic mother, and spent summers working at her father's five-and-dime in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.

Beloved British journalist Daniel Finkelstein tells the extraordinary story of the years before his mother met his father—years of war and trials they barely survived. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank. But in those years safety was an illusion: Anne Frank famously went into hiding and Daniel's mother, Mirjam, also still a child, was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters.

Almost There begins at that moment when Nuala O'Faolain's life began to change. It tells the story of a life in subtle, radical, and unforeseen renewal. It is a tale of good fortune chasing out bad - of an accidental harvest of happiness. But it is also a provocative examination of one woman's experience of the "crucible of middle age."

The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell. The book is divided into three sections, marking the three villas in which the family lived on the island. Apart from Gerald (the youngest) and Larry, the family comprised their widowed mother, the gun-mad Leslie, and diet-obsessed sister Margo together with Roger the dog.

In this blistering street-level account, "Mafia survivor" Frank DiMatteo teams up with true-crime master Michael Benson to take down one of the most notorious figures in the American La Cosa Nostra. This is the real inside story of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, from his crime-filled childhood on the streets of Brooklyn to the long-term jail sentences that didn't stop him from controlling his criminal empire, with the help of his brother - the equally kill-crazy Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico.

Diane Keaton has spent a lifetime coloring outside the lines of the conventional notion of beauty. In Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, she shares the wisdom she’s accumulated through the years as a mother, daughter, actress, artist, and international style icon. This is a book only Diane Keaton could write—a smart and funny chronicle of the ups and downs of living and working in a world obsessed with beauty.

Based on extensive research, Ian Halperin delivers the salacious details behind the Kardashians' rise to fame. With revelations exposing the family's foundation as shaky at best and scandalous at worst, Halperin scrutinizes their self-made multimillion-dollar brand. Focusing on three key players - Kris Jenner, Rob Kardashian, and (formerly Bruce) Caitlyn Jenner - Halperin provides an unparalleled glimpse into the events and scandals that have propelled the Kardashians to worldwide celebrity, for better or worse.

Kirk Herbstreit is a reflection of the sport he loves, a reflection of his football-crazed home state of Ohio, where he was a high school star and Ohio State captain, and a reflection of another Ohio State football captain thirty-two years earlier: his dad Jim, who battled Alzheimer’s disease until his death in 2016.

A New York Times number-one best-seller, In an Instant is a heartfelt true account of the tragedy that nearly took the life of ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff - and of the subsequent recovery that proves miracles do exist. Lee and Bob Woodruff themselves tenderly narrate this harrowing, yet ultimately redeeming, journey of devotion and hope.

Fishing with Tardelli contemplates the relations among four parents—mother, father, stepfather, and a Brazilian fishing companion—and the author. Over marriages and remarriages, fathers and mothers become stepfathers and stepmothers, and brothers gain and lose stepbrothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters across two continents. The various homes become part of Besner’s internal geography; memory, dream, story, fable become permeable layers folded over bald facts baldly stated.

An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother's unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother's searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.

Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth - she and her family had already been living it.

In her most revealing memoir yet, Carrie is candid about the challenges of marriage, motherhood, and keeping one’s identity in the midst of raising a family. She gives the listener a glimpse into life with a diagnosed child. She shares their experience with puberty, social media, high school, and steps toward independent living. Composed as a series of powerful letters, her writing is gritty yet tender. In prose that is nearly poetic, Carrie makes you feel as though you are old friends, sitting down for a cup of coffee and a heartfelt conversation.

The Close sisters are descended from very prominent and wealthy ancestors. When the Close sisters were very young, their parents joined a cult called the MRA, or Moral Rearmament. The family was suddenly uprooted to a cult school in Switzerland and, ultimately, to the Belgian Congo where their father became a surgeon in the war-ravaged republic, and ultimately the personal physician to President Mobutu.

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan's father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later Forhan "bravely considers the way he is and is not his father's son" (Larry Watson).

Eine eindrucksvolle, mitreißende Familienchronik - der Bestseller der bekannten Journalistin endlich als ungekürzte Lesung. Am 26. August 1944 wird der Abwehroffizier Hans Georg Klamroth wegen Hochverrats hingerichtet. Jahrzehnte später sieht seine jüngste Tochter in einer Fernsehdokumentation über den 20. Juli Bilder ihres Vaters aufgenommen während des Prozesses im Volksgerichtshof. Ein Anblick, der Wibke Bruhns nicht mehr loslässt. Wer war dieser Mann, den sie kaum kannte, der fremde Vater, der ihr plötzlich so nah ist.

Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education. But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three....

In a coming-of-age memoir about a woman who loved being a girl and what made her finally grow up, Kelly Corrigan brilliantly explores the "middle place" between childhood and adulthood and how one woman made the leap to the other side.

Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious, Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father - a hunter, a fighter, and a football coach. Harrison, with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging, couldn't have been less like Pop, and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well or otherwise make his father happy, he resolved to become everything his father was not.

In 2009, Jodie Patterson, mother of five and beauty entrepreneur, has her world turned upside-down when her determined toddler, Penelope, reveals, "Mama, I’m not a girl. I am a boy." The Pattersons are a tribe of unapologetic Black matriarchs, scholars, financiers, Southern activists, artists, musicians, and disruptors, but with Penelope’s revelation, Jodie realizes her existing definition of family isn’t wide enough for her child’s needs. In The Bold World, we witness Patterson learning how to meet the needs of her transgender son.