Winner Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Dancing in the Narrows chronicles a mother and daughter’s multiyear journey through illness and trauma. At sixteen, Anna’s youngest daughter, Dana, is stricken with a mysterious and debilitating condition, eventually diagnosed as Lyme disease. Desperate to find a cure, the two women are thrust into the established medical world, then far beyond. Full of adventure, humor, and blind faith, Dancing in the Narrows is an inspiring story of self-discovery as a single mother fights to save the life of her child.
Nearly one hundred Labrador retrievers, many sick or dying, are discovered one hot summer day in a rural Colorado field.They’ve been abandoned by Dodie Cariaso, a college-educated woman from an upper middle-class Midwestern family.
What drove this tragedy? Former journalist and prosecutor Cary Unkelbach unfolds a riveting account of how Dodie’s early success as a talented potter devolves into unimaginable neglect. Along the way, Cary gives animal lovers everywhere insight into the pitfalls and responsibilities of dog ownership through uplifting tales of Max, a Labrador from Dodie’s kennel, who finds his forever home with the author’s family.
Heartbreak Kennel will shock you but will also give you a wealth of information for the canines in your life.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Farm Girl is a memoir of urgent grace that crosses boundaries of genre and time. In her second year of college, Megan finds herself bonded to a lover spiraling into addiction and two thousand miles away from her heart’s home—a stretch of forty certified-organic acres along the banks of the Connecticut River separating Vermont and New Hampshire. In the crucible of a rainy Portland winter, Megan is forced to decide whether to embrace her future as a farm girl or to continue growing into the woman everyone hopes she’ll become. Farm Girl is about two love affairs that force a decision: the love between two people and the love between Megan and the landscape. With innovative prose and lush description, Farm Girl raises the earth up as a character and asks questions about the work we choose to sustain us—how careful attention and devotion to the earth transcends human tragedy.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Only once in a lifetime does a war so brutal erupt. A war that becomes an official genocide, causes millions to run from their homes, compels the slaughtering of thousands in the most horrific of ways, and inspires terrorist attacks to transpire across the world.
That is the chilling legacy of the ISIS onslaught, and Only Cry for the Living takes a profoundly personal, unprecedented dive into one of the most brutal terrorist organizations in the world.
Journalist Hollie S. McKay offers a raw, on-the-ground journey chronicling the rise of ISIS in Iraq exposing the group's vast impact and how and why it sought to wage terror on civilians in a desperate attempt to create an antiquated caliphate.
The book, constructed chronologically through memos, captures the historical impact of ISIS across Iraq and Syria, as seen through the eyes of sex slave survivors, internally displaced people, persecuted minorities, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, military commanders, and even the terrorists themselves.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
The peaceful farm life of a teenage girl in Germany is abruptly upended when WWII comes knocking at her family’s door. One month before her sixteenth birthday, Mildred “Mickchen” Schindler and her family are captured by Russian Soldiers. Having already survived life in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, they now face the terror of a new enemy—Stalin’s Red Army.
Driven from their home, Mildred and her family become refugees along with a sad, slow-moving caravan of other families who have suffered the same fate. Cleverly disguised by her mother, Mildred avoids being taken to a work camp until one morning when authorities arrive unexpectedly. Her father has already been taken by Russian soldiers, and now she is taken from her mother and brother.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Desperate to find respite from her father's verbal abuse, his various affairs, and her step-mother's psychological torment, Gina spent hours doing Jane Fonda's workouts, smoked cigarettes instead of eating food, and became obsessed with her thinness... with the notion of fading away. She found solace in restlessness-drinking hallucinogenic mushroom tea and inhaling crushed pills and powders-perching herself on the periphery of danger again and again.
Gina soon glimpsed a better life for herself when her grandfather, a man who was a surrogate father to her, became terminally ill. She soon fell in love with John, a stranger who was utterly familiar, but who was addicted to heroin. She moved from New Hampshire to California, crossing the country in an attempt to alleviate her self-destructive tendencies, but found herself pulled back to New Hampshire, to John, a man with whom, despite his struggle, she could not deny the sense of home she felt.
What would it cost for a girl to run wildly and recklessly into womanhood, making instant, temporary homes?
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Born of illustrious New England stock, Rachel Field was a National Book Award–winning novelist, a Newbery Medal–winning children’s writer, a poet, playwright, and rising Hollywood success in the early twentieth century. Her light was abruptly extinguished at the age of forty-seven, when she died at the pinnacle of her personal happiness and professional acclaim.
Fifty years later, Robin Clifford Wood stepped onto the sagging floorboards of Rachel’s long-neglected home on the rugged shores of an island in Maine and began dredging up Rachel’s history. She was determined to answer the questions that filled the house’s every crevice: Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—so richly remunerated and widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today? The journey into Rachel’s world took Wood further than she ever dreamed possible, unveiling a life fraught with challenge, and buried by tragedy, and yet incandescent with joy.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Abandoned By Her Mother
Ronit was six years old when her mother left her and her four year old sister for India to follow a cult guru. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose commune was responsible for the largest biological attack on U.S. soil, preached that children were hindrances and encouraged sterilizations among his followers. Luckily Ronit's father, who'd left the family the previous year, stepped up and brought the girls to live with him first in Newark, New Jersey, and later in Flushing, Queens. On the surface, his nurturing was the balm Ronit sought, but she soon paid a second emotional price, taking on the role of partner and confidant to him, and substitute mother to her sister. By the end of her childhood, Ronit would discover she had lost her mother and the close and trusting relationship she once had with her father. Though they have had a relationship now for years, she grappled with the toll her mother's leaving took, measuring her self-worth by her absence.
Mary Steinhauser is the only peace officer in the history of penal institutions in Canada to willingly offer up her life in the service of her country. It was during a 1975 prison escape attempt and 41-hour hostage-taking by three desperate inmates of the British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster, B.C. that Mary volunteered to be the principal hostage. For 41 hours, she was held as a human shield, protecting not only the inmates but the fourteen other hostages sequestered in a nearby vault. Her calmness, composure and bravery throughout the entire hostage-taking was noted by the negotiators and penitentiary staff alike. She was killed there. This is her story.
This biography of Mary's life and tragic death is narrated by Margaret, her younger sister. From Mary's early childhood in rural B.C., it charts the evolution of a young nurse from social worker to symbol for those dedicated to prison reform. Mary's experiences are fascinating reading for any adult interested in local history, law enforcement, mental health awareness, and criminal justice. Her work as a psychiatric nurse in hospitals and institutions across Canada led to her introduction to prison life, which sparked her fierce determination to improve the inmate experience, prisoner justice, and prison reform.
In spring 1942, eighteen-year-old Bill Gemmill was eager to serve his country. After a recruiter stamped his paperwork “Deferred,” Bill reluctantly agreed to pursue a college football scholarship. It was the crash of a ferried bomber behind his frat house that changed his life and spurred him on to war.
Following fourteen months of training, Bill’s vision of fighting from the air finally took shape as his bombardier insignia was pinned by the girl he had to leave behind. Within a month, he and his crew were on their way to Southern Italy.
After more than twenty successful missions, on 22 November 1944, disaster struck: Bill and his crew were hit badly. Unable to re-cross the Alps, the decision was made to abandon ship. Parachuting into the Yugoslavian countryside, Bill found himself alone. Would he find his way back to Italy or end up in the hands of German allies? Would he be reunited with his crew? Ultimately, would he survive?
A mixture of memoir and biography, Chasing the Ghost: Nobelist Fred Reines and the Neutrino tells a deeply human story that appeals both to scientists and non-scientists. Although the book relates to the important discovery of neutrinos, it is more intimately about Fred Reines than the technical details of neutrino physics. Narrated in a fashion to interest and excite the reader, the science presented here is accessible to a broad audience. Coursing through Reines' life, his various challenges and encounters, the book reveals constants of his persona. Reines displayed a sustained consistency as a respected leader, admired by students and colleagues as a fount of big ideas and ambition. A continuing source of inspiration and motivation to others, his most basic consistency was his passion for science. The quest for knowledge about the wondrous universe is a profoundly human endeavor. Fred Reines' life and his unremitting scientific curiosity are emblematic of that truth.
Ice & Oil is indeed a biography of an unlikely titan. Meet Dan Murphy, the man who shaped Los Angeles as the 19th century turned into the 20th century Murphy and his endeavors parallel the history of California. But, because he’s shunned renown his name is virtually unknown. Author Joseph Francis Ryan delves into the complex life of Dan Murphy, businessman-turned-tycoon: Mentored by Southern Pacific’s Charles Crocker, he built the town of Needles the transfer point for a second transcontinental railroad. His ingenuity made it possible to transport citrus across the country. He honored Mojave culture in and the Native American’s respect. He saved the day when Edward Doheny needed money for his oil company. His California Portland Cement Company provided cement for Los Angeles just as it was becoming a 20th century metropolis and for the construction of Boulder dam. “Another important piece of California history has emerged.”
A young woman's gripping account of faith, courage, and survival during and after World War II. Follow Marion Ghent as she endures the death of her father, Japanese attacks during World War II, hiding among the feared Moros on Mindanao Island, becoming a Japanese POW, escaping, and then hiding out in the mountains and rain forests just trying to survive the war. Learn the miraculous story of how she reconnects with her father's American family, then comes to the USA to live among the family and complete her education. See how her constant Faith, Courage, and Strength saw her through every trial, and how she clung to the knowledge that she was "NEVER FORSAKEN!"
Nobody’s Child: A Biography is an urban drama. It takes place in the Brooklyn, Queens & Harlem sections of New York City, from the beginning of the Second Great Migration to the present day. It is a family drama rooted in the life experiences of a mother, my mother Brenda. It’s about overcoming drug addiction, complicated black family dynamics, surviving domestic violence, and the healing of family trauma. It’s about choices parents make and how those choices affect their children and everyone else around them. And, It’s also about secrets kept and the far-reaching, dysfunctional affects those secrets have on families. Finally, it’s about LOVE. Love between mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, love between women, sisters and friends, husbands and wives and fathers and their daughters.One thing is certain… no life is perfect. This story is about imperfect lives, the ones lived by my family, mainly my mother – a most beautiful, God-fearing soul.
