Download or read book Autobiography of an American Orphan written by Walter James and published by Strategic Book Publishing. This book was released on 2009-08 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: in a confrontation with his past, the author reveals this heart-wrenching depiction of childhood in a New York City multicultural orphanage during the nineteen fifties.Funds were scarce and discipline severe.He describes the relationships between the orphans, the counselors, the nuns, and the priests, with an emphasis on how it shaped his life.As he grows and moves through various houses into his teenage years, the orphanage is faced with a surge of gang members.He befriends a Puerto Rican his own age, which ultimately leads them both to follow his friend’s brother, a heroin pusher and addict, into Spanish Harlem just at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His account entails descriptions of ghetto life there and in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district as well, underlining the devastating effects from the separation of his Irish-American family and siblings.While awaiting his next group of students in an empty classroom in South Korea, Walter James attempted to remember his past in an orphanage. The experiences that surfaced put him in a rage.He knew then that he had to confront his past and exorcize his demons.his book, which began as a psychological self-study, became the emotional account of his story, and took him to places he never thought he would visit again.
Download or read book American Orphan written by Jimmy Santiago Baca and published by Arte Publico Press. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There’s no way you can do this reentry thing,” Orlando Lucero tells himself after getting out of prison. He has spent most of his life institutionalized, first in an orphanage and then in the Denver Youth Authority for smuggling weed. Orlando knows nothing about freedom. What does one do with it? What is it? His brother promised to teach him the carpentry trade, but Orlando quickly discovers Camilo is—like their parents—an addict, robbing and stealing to feed his habit. So he turns to Lila, his prison pen pal who encouraged both his poetry writing and sexual fantasies. Soon he moves in with her and engages in the acts he dreamed about while incarcerated, but living the straight life seems impossible. “Freedom is full of hazards, lots of sharp edges, and they cut me at every turn.” As he is sucked back into a life of crime, he can’t help but think going back to prison would be a relief. Renowned poet Jimmy Santiago Baca explores in lyrical prose one young man’s attempts to break free from the cycle of addiction, violence and abuse that contributed to his imprisonment and impede his search for happiness and a productive life. In a society that considers him a criminal because of his brown skin, and where those in authority—including a parade of priests when he was just a boy—take advantage of him, Orlando must learn to believe in himself against all the odds, in spite of the institutionalized racism he has endured since boyhood.
Download or read book The Butler s Child written by Lewis M. Steel and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Butler's Child is the personal story of a Warner Brothers family grandson who spent more than fifty years as a fighting, no holds barred civil rights lawyer. Lewis M. Steel explores why he, a privileged white man, devoted his life to seeking racial progress in often uncomprehending or hostile courts. In fact, after writing a feature for The New York Times Magazine entitled "Nine Men in Black Who Think White," Lewis was fired from the NAACP and the entire legal staff resigned in support of him. Lewis speaks about his family butler, an African American man named William Rutherford, who helped raise Lewis, and their deep but ultimately troubled relationship, as well as how Robert L. Carter, the NAACP's extraordinary general counsel, became Lewis' mentor, father figure and lifelong close friend. Lewis exposes the conflicts which arose from living and working in two very different worlds - that of the Warner Brothers family and that of a civil rights lawyer. He also explores his more than fifty year marriage that joined two very different Jewish and Irish American families. Lewis' work with the NAACP and in private practice created legal precedents still relevant today. The Butler's Child is also an insider's look into some of the most important civil rights cases from the turbulent 1960's to the present day by a man still working to advance the civil rights which should be available to all.
Download or read book The Child s Book of American Biography written by Mary Stoyell Stimpson and published by Alpha Edition. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Child's Book of American Biography, is many of the old classic books which have been considered important throughout the human history. They are now extremely scarce and very expensive antique. So that this work is never forgotten we republish these books in high quality, using the original text and artwork so that they can be preserved for the present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.
Download or read book AMERICAN ORPHAN The Life and Times of Roger Dean Kiser written by Roger Dean Kiser and published by Cyberwit.net. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are my stories of my abuse, years that I suffered while living in a Jacksonville, Florida orphanage. The pain, suffering and mental anguish is not easy to read. These stories tell of my feelings. How I took that suffering boldly and how I tried, as best I could, to ease the pain of others. The abuse, hurt and pain I suffered as a child has never left my mind and I feel it as strongly today as I did when I was a child. Forever these memories live with me as a reminder of where I came from and who I am. If the quote above is indeed true, then why I did not turn out to be an abuser. Many who read my stories of my abusive childhood marvel at how I could become a contributing member of society. How I can become a published author with only a 6th grade education, how I can focus on the horrible abuse, and how I earnestly strive, through my books and my media coverage, to seek public and government reform. How can I help others when so much in me goes unhealed? So, why did I not turn out to be an abuser myself ? It is because I could no longer stand to see the pain abuse causes in the hearts and mind of my fellow man. I know the desperation very well. I was there and it happened to me. I cannot recall even one instance where I physically abused my children. I suppose this is because the abuse, the hurt and the pain that I suffered as a child has left such a devastating effect on me I promised myself I would never do this to my children. I find I make that conscious decision everyday. My children are grown and have children of their own. Now, I reaffirm my decision for my grandchildren's sake. I choose not to abuse. It is a decision that I make every day of my life. I help others because I have no choice. When I see the pain of others, my own past reappears and it hurts me so badly. I see myself in their faces, I understand their mental torture, and I know their hopelessness. I need to let them know that I am here and I am a friend. I understand because I have been where they are. Nobody was there for me but I am determined I will be there for them. I must do what I can to save them in order to save myself. Roger Dean Kiser's Bio Published author and internet writer Roger Dean Kiser's stories take you into the heart of a child abandoned by his family and abused by the system responsible for his care. Through his stories he relives the sadness and cruelty of growing up an orphan in the early 1950s. Today Kiser lives in Brunswick, Georgia with his wife Judy, where he continues to write, publishing most of his work on his internet web site: www.rogerdeankiser.com and short story index at: www.geocities.com/trampolineone/survive/noframe.htm. Since it's beginning "AMERICAN ORPHAN" has become one of the most read child abuse web sites in the world. At last count it had a readership of about 4.6 million since November of 1999. It is through his writing that Kiser has begun healing the pain, suffering and sadness of the orphan within him. Unknowingly at first and by the power of the internet Kiser's stories have touched millions. In the vain of Mark Twain Roger Dean Kiser's collection of almost 400 stories have captured the drama and emotion of not only his childhood but of his current day tales. Kiser's short stories carry with them strong images and feelings that search out and find that common thread which connects each of us to our own emotions. Roger will never forget how he and about 300 other children were treated as though they were less than human while living in a Jacksonville, Florida orphanage in the 1950s and 1960s. Roger's has taken those feelings and has done his very best to help those less fortunate than himself. Roger's short stories have also been published in books and magazines around the world. Publications such as: Chicken Soup for the Grandparent's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Caregiver's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Friend's Soul (USA), Heartwarmers (USA), Heartwarmers of Love (USA), A Cool Collection I and A Cool Collection II (Israel), Faith & True Stories of Friendship (USA), Teen Miracles (USA), Man's Best Friend (Australia), The Next Voice You Hear (USA), Soul Disclosures (USA), Dog Buddies (Australia), Skyline Magazine IV (USA), Venice, Gulf Coast Living, Petwarmers CD Collection (USA), Kiwanis Magazine, as well as his own CD titled "The Life and Times of Roger Dean Kiser". Roger's short story "The Bully" was made into a short film by Nicholas Delfino and Edward Asner (Mary Tyler Moore Show) and has been entered into several major film festivals in the United States. Between Edward Asner's bustling, award winning career and a busy political agenda the actor has still made himself available to lend his support and voice to Roger Dean Kiser. Asner is credited as a factor in the publishing of Kiser's first book Orphan in 2001 and was the Executive Producer on the short film The Bully, written and directed by Nicholas Delfino and adapted from the Kiser short story by the same name. More recently he recorded two of Kiser's works Butterflies and Elvis Died in a Florida Barber College as audio stories for Bear-Buca Entertainment. Asner has also been very supportive in the development of a possible feature film or television series based on Kiser's stories.
Download or read book Invisible Child written by Andrea Elliott and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “vivid and devastating” (The New York Times) portrait of an indomitable girl—from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott “From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for reimmersion in its Dickensian depths.”—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Library Journal In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter “to protect those who I love.” When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself? A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality—told through the crucible of one remarkable girl. Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the Bernstein Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
Download or read book A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains written by Victoria Golden and published by . This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homeless at age four, he found an extraordinary path through nine decades of U.S. history.
Download or read book The Child s Book of American Biography written by Mary Stoyell Stimpson and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Orphans Nine Commandments written by William Roger Holman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Roger Bechan was six, his mother packed his suitcase and took him to the Oklahoma Society for the Friendless. He never saw her again. No wonder he and his orphan friends omit the tenth commandment—to "honor your father and mother." His long journey through three orphanages and several foster homes is recalled with surprising humor and insight. Eventually, the boy finds a home in a small Oklahoma oil town, obtains degrees from two universities, marries and raises three sons, and becomes the youngest director of the San Francisco Public Library and an award-winning book designer. The book is an unsentimental look at Bechan’s life in the child welfare system of Depression-era Oklahoma.
Download or read book A Chance in the World written by Stephen Pemberton and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Pemberton’s beautifully told story is a rags to riches journey—beginning in a place and with a jarring set of experiences that could have destroyed his life. But Steve’s refusal to give in to those forces, and his resolve to create a better life, shows a courage and resilience that is an example for many of us to follow.” —Stedman Graham, author, educator Home is the place where our life stories begin. A Chance in the World is the astonishing true story of a boy destined to become a man of resilience determination and vision. Down in the dank basement, amidst my moldy, hoarded food and beloved worm-eaten books, I dreamed that my real home, the place where my story had begun, was out there somewhere, and one day I was going to find it. Taken from his mother at age three, Steve Klakowicz lives a terrifying existence. Caught in the clutches of a cruel foster family and subjected to constant abuse, Steve finds his only refuge in a box of books given to him by a kind stranger. In these books, he discovers new worlds he can only imagine and begins to hope that one day he might have a different life, that one day he will find his true home. A fair-complexioned boy with blue eyes, a curly Afro, and a Polish last name, he is determined to unravel the mystery of his origins and find his birth family. Armed with just a single clue, Steve embarks on an extraordinary quest for his identity, only to find that nothing is as it appears. Through it all, Steve’s story teaches us that no matter how broken our past, no matter how great our misfortunes, we have it in us to create a new beginning and to build a place where love awaits.
Download or read book Child Star written by Shirley Temple and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shirley Temple-Black, the popular child star of the 1930s and 1940s, tells of the ups and downs of life as a Hollywood prodigy. She writes of her relationship with her parents, how her finances were controlled, two attempts on her life, her first marriage at 17 and her second, happier marriage to Charlie Black.
Download or read book Looking for Home written by Arleta Richardson and published by David C Cook. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his mother dead, his father gone, and his older brothers and sisters unable to help, eight-year-old Ethan Cooper knows it’s his responsibility to keep him and his younger siblings together—even if that means going to an orphanage. Ethan, Alice, Simon, and Will settle into the Briarlane Christian Children’s Home, where there’s plenty to eat, plenty of work, and plenty of talk about a Father who never leaves. Even so, Ethan fears losing the only family he has. How can he trust God to keep him safe when almost everything he’s known has disappeared? The first book in the Beyond the Orphan Train series, Looking for Home takes us back to 1907 Pennsylvania and into the real-life adventures of four children in search of a true home.
Download or read book Lydia Maria Child written by Lydia Moland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-10-07 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, a compelling biography of Lydia Maria Child, one of nineteenth-century America’s most courageous abolitionists. By 1830, Lydia Maria Child had established herself as something almost unheard of in the American nineteenth century: a beloved and self-sufficient female author. Best known today for the immortal poem “Over the River and through the Wood,” Child had become famous at an early age for spunky self-help books and charming children’s stories. But in 1833, Child shocked her readers by publishing a scathing book-length argument against slavery in the United States—a book so radical in its commitment to abolition that friends abandoned her, patrons ostracized her, and her book sales plummeted. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the abolitionist cause, becoming one of the foremost authors and activists of her generation. Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life tells the story of what brought Child to this moment and the extraordinary life she lived in response. Through Child’s example, philosopher Lydia Moland asks questions as pressing and personal in our time as they were in Child’s: What does it mean to change your life when the moral future of your country is at stake? When confronted by sanctioned evil and systematic injustice, how should a citizen live? Child’s lifetime of bravery, conviction, humility, and determination provides a wealth of spirited guidance for political engagement today.
Download or read book Orphan Bachelors written by Fae Myenne Ng and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng’s father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger’s son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America’s two slamming doors. As Ng’s father said, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born.” Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors--men without wives or children, Exclusion’s living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng’s family grocery store their haven. Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion’s legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the 60s, to Manhattan in the 80s, to the high desert of California in the 90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. A a child, Ng believed her father’s lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.
Download or read book American Baby written by Gabrielle Glaser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other. “[T]his book about the past might foreshadow a coming shift in the future… ‘I don’t think any legislators in those states who are anti-abortion are actually thinking, “Oh, great, these single women are gonna raise more children.” No, their hope is that those children will be placed for adoption. But is that the reality? I doubt it.’”[says Glaser]” -Mother Jones During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love and became pregnant. Her enraged family sent her to a maternity home, where social workers threatened her with jail until she signed away her parental rights. Her son vanished, his whereabouts and new identity known only to an adoption agency that would never share the slightest detail about his fate. The adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Adoption agencies and other organizations that purported to help pregnant women struck unethical deals with doctors and researchers for pseudoscientific "assessments," and shamed millions of women into surrendering their children. The identities of many who were adopted or who surrendered a child in the postwar decades are still locked in sealed files. Gabrielle Glaser dramatically illustrates in Margaret and David’s tale--one they share with millions of Americans—a story of loss, love, and the search for identity.
Download or read book An American Family written by Khizr Khan and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Khan electrified viewers around the world when he took the stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. When he offered to lend Donald Trump his own much-read and dog-eared pocket Constitution, his gesture perfectly encapsulated the feelings of millions. The oldest of ten children born to farmers in Pakistan, Khan was a university student who read the Declaration of Independence and was awestruck by what might be possible in life. He and his wife instilled in their children the ideals that brought to America, and then tragically lost a son, an Army captain killed while protecting his base camp in Iraq. Here Khan tells readers why we must not be afraid to step forward for what we believe in when it matters most.
Download or read book Before and After written by Judy Christie and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families. Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results. Advance praise for Before and After “In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate tackle the true stories behind Wingate’s blockbuster Before We Were Yours, of the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. With a journalist’s keen eye and a novelist’s elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the stories that inspired Before We Were Yours with the lives that were changed as a result of reading the novel. Readers will be educated, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed book.”—Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale and The Lost Girls of Paris
