Catalog Search Results
41) Black like me
Author
Language
English
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Formats
Description
The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just fourteen years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. Born in the U.S., Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system...
Author
Language
English
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Description
An extraordinary popular success when it was first published in 1912, The Promised Land is a classic account of the Jewish American immigrant experience. Mary Antin emigrated with her family from the Eastern European town of Polotzk to Boston in 1894, when she was twelve years old. Preternaturally inquisitive, Antin was a provocative observer of the identity-altering contrasts between Old World and New. Her narrative -- of universal appeal and rich...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Framingham - Banned Books
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
NYT - Paperback Nonfiction
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Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
NYT - Paperback Nonfiction
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Description
This story is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a penetrating look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who hated anything to do with domesticity. The Walls children learned to...
Author
Publisher
Candlewick Press
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Zion Clark has always had big dreams for himself despite the many hardships he faced growing up as a Black disabled child in the foster care system of Ohio. His childhood years were marked by instability as he moved from home to home, experiencing abuse and neglect. And yet his determination and grit pushed him to become an elite wrestler and wheelchair racer. His constant reinvention led him to activism, speaking out about the failings of the foster...
47) Punching bag
Author
Series
Memoir (Rex Ogle) volume 2
Language
English
Description
"The companion to Rex Ogle's award-winning Free Lunch is a searing account of adolescence in a household torn by domestic violence. Punching Bag is the compelling true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who brilliantly mapped his experience of hunger in Free Lunch, here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
At age fourteen, Cyndy Etler had escaped from her violent home only to be reported as a runaway and sent to a drug rehabilitation facility that changed her world. Behind the closed doors of Straight, Inc., the program used bizarre and intimidating methods to treat its patients. In this memoir, Cyndy recounts the living nightmare that she endured for sixteen months at Straight, Inc.
50) Almost a woman
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The acclaimed author of When I Was Puerto Rican continues the enchanting chronicle of her life. Emigrating from rural Puerto Rico to live in a tenement with seven (eventually ten) siblings, an inquisitive grandmother, and a strict mother who won't allow her to date, "Negi", 13, is ready to spread her wings. She yearns for her own bed, for privacy, and for her father, who stayed in Puerto Rica. When she starts to defy her mother, she discovers the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Medfield Juneteenth Display 2024
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Memoir Book Club Picks
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Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Memoir Book Club Picks
More Lists...
Description
The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
"Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...
Author
Language
English
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Formats
Description
From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual." With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at fourteen, alcohol poisoning at sixteen, a blacked-out sexual experience at nineteen,...
53) Hey, kiddo
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
[Lasell] Graphic Works Master List
Audie Awards
Medfield Self Discovery Stories for Teens - Graphic Memoirs
New England Book Awards
Audie Awards
Medfield Self Discovery Stories for Teens - Graphic Memoirs
New England Book Awards
Formats
Description
"In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka's teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett's family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett's life. His father is a mystery -- Jarrett doesn't know where to find him, or even what his name is. Jarrett lives with his grandparents -- two very loud, very loving, very opinionated people who had thought they were through...
Author
Language
English
Description
"An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials. The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery to his escape to the North in 1838. Douglass tells how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how...
56) Poor your soul
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"At age twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she soon embraced the pregnancy and became engaged to Andrew, the father. Five months later, an ultrasound revealed birth defects that would give the child no chance of survival outside the womb. Mira was given three options: terminate her pregnancy, induce early delivery, or wait and inevitably miscarry. Mira's story is woven together with the story of her mother,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country. By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A YA nonfiction story about Ariel and her twin sister's experience living with Crouzon Syndrome"--
At only eight months old, identical twin sisters Ariel and Zan were diagnosed with Crouzon syndrome, a rare condition where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. They were the first twins known to survive the disease. They endured numerous appearance-altering procedures as they grew up. Surgeons would break the bones in their heads and faces to make...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. In free verse, Anderson shares reflections, rants, and...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Interwoven with accounts of Thoreau's daily life (he did not live as a recluse but received visitors and almost daily walked into Concord) are meditations on human existence, society, government and other topics, expressed with clear-headed wisdom and remarkable beauty of style.
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