Family Memoir

"There is really no better indicator you're a mother than acquiring the ability to catch throw-up in a plastic bag, disinfect your hands, and immediately ask your friend to pass the beef jerky as you put on another Taylor Swift song and act as if nothing has happened." This is the type of insight Melanie Shankle offers in this quirky memoir of motherhood.

When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain’s orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. “I had hope, just a little, you were still alive,” Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend.

An engrossing, epic saga of one family’s experiences on both sides of WWII, All Ships Follow Me questions our common narrative of the conflict and our stark notions of victim and perpetrator, while tracing the lasting effects of war through several generations.

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.

Raised up from poverty by a determined single mother, gifted and beautiful twin sisters Christa and Cara Parravani were able to create a private haven of splendor and amusement that they shared between themselves. They earned their way into a prestigious college, established careers as artists (a photographer and a writer, respectively), and entered young marriages. But plagued by their father's early rejection of them and further damaged by being raped as a young woman, Cara veered into depression, drugs, and a shocking early death.

Steve Patterson has been thinking about dad-dom for quite a while. In Dad Up! he gives his all to be the best father possible to two young girls while imparting his hard-won wisdom and insights to listeners everywhere. Dad Up! charts the awesome experience of watching tiny infants that you somehow had a hand in creating evolve into confident and crafty little people, and the lessons that they teach along the way.

Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission to legitimize their conflicting emotions. Adoptee and counselor Cameron Lee Small names the realities of the adoptee's journey, narrating his own and other adoptees' stories in all their complexity.

A true story detailing the events surrounding the murder of wealthy North Carolinian Lieth von Stein. The case seemed cold until police followed a trail leading to von Stein's stepson, a smart young man who was obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and wrapped up in drugs.

John Perkins, founder of Voice of Calvary ministries, was born in New Hebron, Mississippi, in 1930. His family was made up of sharecroppers, and he grew up in grinding poverty, part of a system that preserved prejudice and racism. After his brother was killed, Perkins left Mississippi for California, where he found job opportunities, racism of another kind, and faith in Jesus Christ. He returned to Mississippi to share the gospel and help his own people find equality, justice, and economic independence.

When her children left for college, Melissa Shultz was certain that she had prepared them well for their new lives - but her own life was a different matter entirely. Her house was empty, her purpose unclear. If her life was no longer dominated by the day-to-day demands of being "Mom", then who exactly was she? And how would she ever move forward?

At the age of 27, Whitney Dafoe was forced to give up his life as a photographer who traveled the world. Bit by bit a mysterious illness stole away the pieces of his life: First, it took the strength of his legs, then his voice, and his ability to eat. The Puzzle Solver follows several years in which he desperately sought answers. Whitney's father, Ron Davis, PhD, a world-class geneticist at Stanford University whose legendary research helped crack the code of DNA, suddenly changed the course of his career in a race against time to cure his son's debilitating condition.

Gazza's tears in the 1990 World Cup semi-final launched the boom of interest in football that continues to this day. Suddenly, Paul Gascoigne found himself the centre of attention in a way that only George Best and David Beckham have ever experienced. So much has been written about Gazza over the years, but he has said little - until now. For the first time, he talks in depth about the key events in his life.

At six-foot-four-inches and 375 pounds, Jack Garcia looked the part of a mobster, and he played his part so perfectly that his Mafia bosses never suspected he was an undercover agent for the FBI. "Big Jack Falcone," as he was known inside La Cosa Nostra, learned all the inside dirt about the Gambino organized crime syndicate and its illegal activities---from extortion and loan-sharking to assault and murder.

Cassy is the first of her generation born into a Christian Lebanese family after they emigrated to Australia, and she was set to be the golden grandchild. But when it was discovered that she had cerebral palsy, the promise of her wonderful future vanished, and a veil of shame descended. Now an embarrassment to the family, Cassy was hidden away from the community, just tolerated at home, and told she was an embarrassment, useless and would have no future.

Fishing was Mark Hume’s passion since he was a young boy, a lifeline through a childhood marked by his family’s frequent moves. When he became a father, he knew he wanted to pass on his love of water, fishing, and the natural world to his daughters. Most of all, he wanted to give them hope for their future. As soon as they were old enough, Mark taught his girls how to read the water and see the patterns in nature. He discovered that fly fishing and fatherhood require many of the same skills: patience, flexibility, and the knowledge of when to reel in and when to let go.

In 1997, Daniel Trush, a bright, active, outgoing twelve-year-old, collapsed on the basketball court and fell into a deep coma. Rushed to the hospital, he was found to have five previously undetected aneurysms in his brain. One had burst, causing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. While Daniel remained comatose, the uncontrolled pressure inside his skull caused him to suffer multiple strokes.

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.

Set in California's lush Napa Valley and spanning four generations of a talented and visionary family, The House of Mondavi is a tale of genius, sibling rivalry, and betrayal. From 1906, when Italian immigrant Cesare Mondavi passed through Ellis Island, to the Robert Mondavi Corporation's 21st-century battle over a billion-dollar fortune, award-winning journalist Julia Flynn Siler brings to life both the place and the people in this riveting family drama.

When Louis and Lilly Zabar rented a counter in a dairy store on 80th Street and Broadway in 1934 to sell smoked fish, they could not have imagined that their store would eventually occupy half a city block and become a beloved mecca for quality food of all kinds. A passion for perfection, a keen business sense, cutthroat competitive instincts, and devotion to their customers led four generations of Zabars to create the Upper West Side shrine to the cheese, fish, meat, produce, baked goods, and prepared products that heralded the 20th-century revolution in food production.

In this irresistible memoir, the New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Anna Quindlen writes about looking back and ahead - and celebrating it all - as she considers marriage, girlfriends, our mothers, faith, loss, all the stuff in our closets, and more. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen’s status as America’s laureate of real life.