Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir

Educated

Tara Westover

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

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

I Can Jump Puddles

Alan Marshall · 256 pages

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.

Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence

Matthew Sanford · 288 pages

Matt Sanford's life and body were irrevocably changed at age 13 on a snowy lowa road. On that day, his family's car skidded off an overpass, killing Matt's father and sister and leaving him paralyzed from the chest down and confined to a wheelchair. His mother and brother escaped from the accident unharmed but were left to pick up the pieces of their decimated family. This pivotal event set Matt o

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

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

Crazy Brave

Joy Harjo · 176 pages

A memoir from the Native American poet describes her youth with an abusive stepfather, becoming a single teen mom, and how she struggled to finally find inner peace and her creative voice.

The Little Locksmith

Katharine Butler Hathaway · 237 pages

This is the memoir of Katharine Butler Hathaway. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, 1890, she attended Radcliffe college and later went on to write of her experiences in Maine, New York City, and Paris during the artists' culture of the 1920s. She writes of her life from her childhood with spinal tuberculosis at the age of five. She spent the next 5 years strapped to a board ... her body eventually bec

Poster Child: A Memoir

Emily Rapp · 240 pages

Emily Rapp was born with a birth defect that required, at the age of four, that her left foot be amputated. By the time she was eight she'd had dozens of operations and had lost her entire leg from just above the knee. She had also become the smiling, always perky, indefatigable poster child for the March of Dimes, and spent much of her childhood traveling around Wyoming making appearances and giv

Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet

Lewis B. Puller Jr. · 400 pages

If at Birth You Don't Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny

Zach Anner · 338 pages

"Comedian Zach Anner opens his frank and devilishly funny book, If at Birth You Don't Succeed, with an admission: he botched his own birth. Two months early, underweight and under-prepared for life, he entered the world with cerebral palsy and an uncertain future. So how did this hairless mole-rat of a boy blossom into a viral internet sensation who's hosted two travel shows, impressed Oprah, driv

Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had

Brad Cohen, Lisa Wysocky

Left For Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

Beck Weathers, Stephen G. Michaud · 304 pages

I am neither churchly nor a particularly spiritual person, but I can tell you that some force within me rejected death at the last moment and then guided me, blind and stumbling--quite literally a dead man walking--into camp and the shaky start of my return to life. On May 10, 1996, nine climbers perished in a blizzard high on Mount Everest, the single deadliest day ever on the peak. The following

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.

Still Me

Christopher Reeve · 316 pages

For the first time Christopher Reeve tells the full story of both his paralysis, and his journey to recovery.Through his leading role in the three 'Superman' films, Christopher Reeve became so closely identified with the superhero that he wasn't just seen as the actor who played Superman, he was Superman. Which is why the tragic riding accident which left him paralysed from the neck down shocked t

The Broken Cord

Michael Dorris · 300 pages

Ugly: My Memoir

Robert Hoge · 224 pages

This book is based on the author that had a tumor on his face that made him ugly. It is a depressing story.

The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa

Josh Swiller · 276 pages

Describes one young man's efforts to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving, hearing world by undertaking a two-year sojourn in a remote village in Zambia as a Peace Corps volunteer, where he finds a remarkable world marked by both beauty and violence.

Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio

Peg Kehret · 179 pages

What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

Alice Eve Cohen · 194 pages

A personal and medical odyssey beyond anything most women would believe possibleAt age forty-four, Alice Eve Cohen was happy for the first time in years. After a difficult divorce, she was engaged to an inspiring man, joyfully raising her adopted daughter, and her career was blossoming. Alice tells her fiance that shes never been happier. And then the stomach pains begin. In her unflinchingly hone

A Mother's Story

Rosie Batty, Bryce Corbett · 336 pages

Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16

Moshe Kasher · 310 pages

A rising comedian describes with humor the absurdity of his troubled youth in Oakland, California, where his mother walked him on a leash until he chewed through it and ran away and started taking drugs at age twelve.

And There Was Light

Jacques Lusseyran