Crazy Brave

Once in a House on Fire

Andrea Ashworth · 332 pages

Andrea Ashworth, at age twenty-eight one of the youngest fellows at Oxford University, is a young woman of remarkable charm, poise, and intelligence. Her path to her present life, however, has been far from conventional, and in this striking memoir, written with courage and delicacy, she shares a story that makes her achievements all the more astonishing. Although she only vaguely remembers her M

Once We Were Sisters

Sheila Kohler · 256 pages

At thirty-seven, Sheila Kohler received the news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned, she flew home determined to find answers. Flashing back to their storybook childhood at the family estate, Kohler evokes a bond between sisters that changes but never breaks.

Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir

Kambri Crews · 334 pages

In this memoir, a daughter looks back on her unconventional childhood with deaf parents in rural Texas while trying to reconcile it to her present life, one in which her father is serving a twenty-year sentence in a maximum-security prison. As a child, she wished that she had been born deaf so that she, too, could fully belong to the tight-knit deaf community that embraced her parents. Her beautif

Ordeal: An Autobiography

Linda Lovelace, Mike McGrady · 253 pages

Former porno movie star tells the true story of the brutality and horror behind her rise in the business from turning tricks in Florida to starring in "Deep Throat," all under the pressure of her sadistic boyfriend.

A Mother's Story

Rosie Batty, Bryce Corbett · 336 pages

Educated

Tara Westover

The daughter of survivalists, who is kept out of school, educates herself enough to leave home for university.

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong

Susan Blumberg-Kason · 340 pages

"When Susan, a shy Midwesterner in love with Chinese culture, started graduate school in Hong Kong, she quickly fell for Cai, the Chinese man of her dreams. As they exchanged vows, Susan thought she'd stumbled into an exotic fairy tale, until she realized Cai-- and his culture-- were not what she thought."--Page 4 of cover.

Escape

Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer · 426 pages

The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman's courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral par

The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes (5 Year Anniversary)

Dawn Schiller · 478 pages

Schiller reveals the perilous road John Holmes led her down-- from drugs and addiction to beatings, arrests, forced prostitution, and being sold to the drug underworld. Surviving the horrific Wonderland murders, she entered protective custody, ran from the FBI, endured a heart-wrenching escape from John, and ultimately turned him in to the police.

My Feudal Lord

Tehmina Durrani, William Hoffer, Marilyn Hoffer · 365 pages

An auto-biography of the writer beautifully and boldly written. From her childhood to her position of power as one of the several wives of a prominent and celebrated politician, she tells her story and that of her second husband Mustafa Khar as is with unabashed guts.

Not Without My Daughter

Betty Mahmoody · 423 pages

Imagine yourself alone and vulnerable, trapped by a husband you thought you trusted, and held prisoner in his native Iran; a land where women have no rights and Americans are despised. For one American woman, Betty Mahmoody, this nightmare became reality, and escape became only an impossible dream. Not Without My Daughter is the true story of one woman's desperate struggle to survive and to escape

A Man Named Dave

Dave Pelzer · 339 pages

From the Publisher: "All those years you tried your best to break me, and I'm still here. One day you'll see, I'm going to make something of myself." These words were Dave Pelzer's declaration of independence to his mother, and they represented the ultimate act of self-reliance. Dave's father never intervened as his mother abused him with shocking brutality. But even after he was rescued, his lif

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages

"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado · 251 pages

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Gal: A True Life

Ruthie Bolton · 288 pages

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

All Over But the Shoutin'

Rick Bragg · 329 pages

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the hab

Color Me Butterfly: A True Story of Courage, Hope and Transformation

L.Y. Marlow · 422 pages

Love Isn't Supposed to Hurt

Christi Paul

Like millions of other women, CNN's Headline News and truTV's In Session anchor Christi Paul blamed herself for the emotional abuse heaped on her by her first husband, whose violent, profanity-laced tirades left her feeling as though she had no value, no self-worth, and nowhere to turn for help. Then one day, when Christi was taking refuge in a church parking lot, the verse "Trust in the Lord with

The Reason You Walk

Wab Kinew · 273 pages

When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who'd raised him. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief, and an urban activist. Kinew writes af

The Right to Be Cold

Sheila Watt-Cloutier · 352 pages

A "courageous and revelatory memoir" (Naomi Klein) chronicling the life of the leading Indigenous climate change, cultural, and human rights advocate. For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of I

Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII

Chester Nez, Judith Schiess Avila · 320 pages