Across Many Mountains: A Tibetan Family's Epic Journey from Oppression to Freedom

A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

Qais Akbar Omar · 416 pages

**An unforgettable memoir about a boy who grew up in Kabul surrounded by gardens, poetry, and family traditions—until war shattered the world he knew.** **Translated into more than twenty languages, *A Fort of Nine Towers* was selected as an Editor’s Choice by *The New York Times Book Review*, named a *Washington Post* Notable Book, and recognized as one of the Best Books of the Year by *The Seat

The Best We Could Do

Thi Bui · 335 pages

The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.

The Complete Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi · 352 pages

From inside front cover: The story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a ... loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a coutnry plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, fina

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

Lucette Lagnado · 340 pages

Lagnado re-creates the cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between World War II and Nasser's rise to power. Her father, Leon, was a boulevardier who conducted business in his signature white sharkskin suit on the elegant terrace of Shepheard's Hotel, and later, in the cozy, dark bar of the Nile Hilton. But with the fall of King Farouk, Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are ren

Not Even My Name: A True Story

Thea Halo · 321 pages

Not Even My Name is a rare eyewitness account of the horrors of a little-known, often denied genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Pontic Greek minorities in Turkey were killed during and after World War I. As told by Sano Halo to her daughter, Thea, this is the story of her survival of the death march at age ten that annihilated her family, and the mother-daughter pilgrimage to

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

Kao Kalia Yang · 294 pages

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to

On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family

Lisa See · 394 pages

In 1867, Lisa See's great-great-grandfather left China in search of riches on the 'Gold Mountain', the Chinese name for the promised land of America. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws that prohibited unions between the races. Through sheer endeavour and entrepreneurial genius he became one of the most successful Chinese men in the coun

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang · 544 pages

"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

Art Spiegelman · 135 pages

"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out o

Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

Leslie Maitland · 494 pages

Investigative reporter Leslie Maitland grew up enthralled by her mothers accounts of forbidden romance and harrowing flight from the Nazis. Her book is both a journalists vivid depiction of a world at war and a daughters pursuit of a haunting question: what had become of the handsome Frenchman whose picture her mother continued to treasure almost fifty years after they parted? It is a tale of memo

Bound Feet & Western Dress

Pang-Mei Natasha Chang · 215 pages

Translated from the spanish edition of Seix Barral Editorial: > *Bound feet & Western dress* narrates the story of an exceptional woman born in 1900 and deceased in 1988, who not only overcame difficult situations in the strict environment of traditional China, but also managed to develop her education and obtain relevant position in the banking and commerce fields. > This life symboli

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

Malika Oufkir, Michele Fitoussi · 294 pages

Ava's Man

Rick Bragg · 265 pages

The Pulitzer Prize--winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River, made boats out of car

The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family

Laurence Leamer · 946 pages

Monumental in scope and extraordinary in sensitivity, The Kennedy Women chronicles five matrilineal generations in our nation's premier political dynasty. Not merely distinguished cultural history, it is a story of epic sweep, brimming with triumph and tragedy, courage and compliance, self-sacrifice and self-delusion. Moving from steerage on an immigrant vessel to the slums of Boston, from the Co

The Children of Willesden Lane. Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival

Mona Golabek, Lee Cohen · 288 pages

World-renowned concert pianist Mona Golabek shares her mother's journey through World War II and of the extraordinary gift that became her enduring legacy to her daughter, the gift of music.

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt

David McCullough · 445 pages

This biography of young Theodore Roosevelt covers his youth when he demanded a strenuous life despite his asthma, weak eyes, and patrician family.

The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War

Denise Chong · 373 pages

On June 8, 1972, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned by napalm, ran from her blazing village in South Vietnam and into the eye of history. Her photograph-one of the most unforgettable images of the twentieth century-was seen around the world and helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War.This book is the story of how that photograph came to be-and the story of what happened to that gir

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr. · 456 pages

The rich mystery of a reclusive, eccentric heiress Huguette Clark: a true story of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance.

God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir

John Bul Dau, Michael S. Sweeney · 295 pages

"Lost Boy" John Bul Dau's harrowing experience surviving the brutal horrors of Sudanese civil war and his adjustment to life in modern America is chronicled in this inspiring memoir and featured in an award-winning documentary film of the same name. Movingly written, the book traces Dau's journey through hunger, exhaustion, terror, and violence as he fled his homeland, dodging ambushes, massacres

Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi

Dean Faulkner Wells · 271 pages

In this book the author recounts the story of the Faulkners of Mississippi, whose legacy includes pioneers, noble and ignoble war veterans, three never convicted murderers, the builder of the first railroad in north Mississippi, the founding president of a bank, an FBI agent, four pilots (all brothers), and a Nobel prize winner arguably the most important American novelist of the twentieth century

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

From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey

Pascal Khoo Thwe · 304 pages

Traces the life of a former Burma student rebel leader who won a Human Rights Watch award in 2002, describing his tribal upbringing, experiences with political turmoil and poverty, participation in the insurrection of 1988, and flight to England, where he attended college.

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Blaine Harden · 256 pages

The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk. In Escape From C

Einstein: His Life and Universe

Walter Isaacson · 704 pages

The first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. Biographer Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk--a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate--became the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom an