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

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.

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

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

Shot in the Heart

Mikal Gilmore · 403 pages

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, a

Humble Pie

Gordon Ramsay · 245 pages

I Can Jump Puddles

Alan Marshall · 256 pages

Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs

Elissa Wall, Lisa Pulitzer · 438 pages

In September 2007, a packed courtroom in St. George, Utah, sat hushed as Elissa Wall, the star witness against polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, gave captivating testimony of how Jeffs forced her to marry her first cousin at age fourteen. This harrowing and vivid account proved to be the most compelling evidence against Jeffs, showing the harsh realities of this closed community and the lengths

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs · 228 pages

The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to l

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.

Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet

Lewis B. Puller Jr. · 400 pages

This Life I Live

Rory Feek · 272 pages

The story she said he was born to write. Her story. His story. The love story of Joey and Rory. By inviting so many into the final months of Joey's life as she battled cancer, Joey and Rory Feek captured hearts around the world with how they handled the diagnosis; the inspiring, simple way they chose to live; and how they loved each other every step of the way. But there is far more to the story.

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.