Download or read book Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World written by Nancy C. Atwood and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors--some eminent, some less well known--who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist. All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity--a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope.
Download or read book Welfare Brat written by Mary Childers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Childers's intimate and frank memoir tells the story of growing up in a family in which five out of seven children dropped out of high school and four different fathers dropped out of sight. With this lyrical and often humorous examination of how she became the first person in her family to attend college, Childers illuminates the causes of welfare dependence, generational poverty, and submission to a popular culture that values sexuality more than self-esteem and self-sufficiency.
Download or read book Hardscrabble Road written by George Weinstein and published by SFK Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The entire Macleod clan is haunted by secrets--and young "Bud" Macleod doesn't realize he carries the biggest secret of all.
Download or read book Stealing History written by Roger Atwood and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Atwood knows more about the market for ancient objects than almost anyone. He knows where priceless antiquities are buried, who is digging them up, and who is fencing and buying them. In this fascinating book, Atwood takes readers on a journey through Iraq, Peru, Hong Kong, and across America, showing how the worldwide antiquities trade is destroying what's left of the ancient sites before archaeologists can reach them, and thus erasing their historical significance. And it is getting worse. The discovery of the legendary Royal Tombs of Sipan in Peru started an epidemic. Grave robbers scouring the courntryside for tombs--and finding them. Atwood recounts the incredible story of the biggest piece of gold ever found in the Americas, a 2,000-year-old, three-pound masterpiece that cost one looter his life, sent two smugglers to jail, and wrecked lives from Panama to Pennsylvainia. Packed with true stories, this book not only reveals what has been found, but at what cost to both human life and history.
Download or read book Rerun Era written by Joanna Howard and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.
Download or read book A Seven Year Ache written by Fisher Lavell and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosie Kelvey is a spirited and willful prairie woman of the early twentieth century whose ache to pursue her own desires goes against the harsh and limiting moral landscape of her time. She has what the neighbours teasingly call “two men on her hook”: an older, passive husband and a virile, young lover. But life is perilous for those who are poor and female and, undeterred by the misfortunes that befall her wayward sisters, Rosie is inexorably drawn to an all-consuming flame. Through Rosie’s eyes and in her fresh, lusty voice, Fisher Lavell explores themes of poverty, loss, and upheaval. Based closely on the hardscrabble lives of the author’s errant aunties, A Seven Year Ache paints their tragedies, heartaches, and passions on a large and vibrant Prairie canvas.
Download or read book When I Crossed No Bob written by Margaret McMullan and published by Sandpiper. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years after the Civil War's end, abandoned Addy is taken from the horrid town of No-Bob by schoolteacher Frank Russell and his bride, but when her father returns to claim her she must find another way to leave her past behind.
Download or read book T T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul written by Ryan S. Schellenberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The T&T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul gathers leading voices on various aspects of Paul's biography into a thorough reconsideration of him as a historical figure. The contributors show how recent trends in Pauline scholarship have invited new questions about a variety of topics, including his social location, his mode of subsistence, his cultural formation, his place within Judaism, his religious experience and practice, and his affinities with other religious actors of the Roman world. Through careful attention to biographical detail, social context, and historical method, it seeks to describe him as a contextually plausible social actor. The volume is structured in three parts. Part One introduces sources, methods, and historiographical approaches, surveying the foundational texts for Paul and the early Pauline tradition. Part Two examines key biographical questions pertaining to Paul's bodily comportment, the material aspects of his career, and his religious activities. Part Three reconstructs the biographical portraits of Paul that emerge from the letters associated with him, presenting a series of “micro-biographies” pieced together by leading Pauline scholars.
Download or read book All Souls written by Michael Patrick MacDonald and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, where revelers dance and sing the dead person’s praises. In that same style, the book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”—The New York Times Book Review A 25th anniversary edition of the National Bestselling memoir, with a new afterword from Michael Patrick MacDonald, takes us deep into the South Boston housing projects during one of the city's most tumultuous times in history and tells the story of his family struggling the overcome the poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration that overtook the neighborhood. A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger’s crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald’s Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters. We meet Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. And there are Michael’s older siblings Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”
Download or read book Salvation on Sand Mountain written by Dennis Covington and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Dennis Covington, what began as a journalistic assignment - covering the trial of an Alabama preacher convicted of attempting to murder his wife with poisonous snakes - would evolve into a headlong plunge into a bizarre, mysterious, and ultimately irresistible world of unshakable faith: the world of holiness snake handling, where people drink strychnine, speak in tongues, lay hands on the sick, and, some claim, raise the dead. Set in the heart of Appalachia, Salvation on Sand Mountain is Covington's unsurpassed and chillingly captivating exploration of the nature, power, and extremity of faith - an exploration that gradually turns inward, until Covington finds himself taking up the snakes. University.
Download or read book Heartland written by Sarah Smarsh and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly* An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.* Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country. Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. “Heartland is one of a growing number of important works—including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville—that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra” *(The New York Times Book Review).
Download or read book That Girl from the Dummy Line written by Martha Sanders and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "That Girl From the Dummy Line" is a first person account of growing up in severe poverty in the delta farm region of northeastern Arkansas in 50s and 60s in a tar-papered shack built on a dirt road known as the dummy line. The dummy line girl was the third of ten children born to an illiterate farmer and his wife, who didn't understand their daughter's love of education or her desire to go to college as she excelled in school. Indeed, they actively attempted to prevent her from leaving home to seek a college degree. The dummy line girl spent much of her childhood working in the cotton fields. Farm work and other chores took a toll on the dummy line girl's ability to stay on track with her studies and goals. Further complicating her life was a dysfunctional relationship with her parents and an abusive older sister. The local public school system became her refuge and provided her with the hope she needed in order to plan a better future for herself. This is a story about a girl who refused to accept the path given her by accident of birth - a girl who wanted more and believed she deserved more and was willing to work for it.
Download or read book Spirit Falls written by Robert E. Townsend and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirit Falls, is a coming-of-age novel set in the empty hardscrabble borderland between Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin. It is an affecting story of childhood friendship growing into profound love. The gypsy-like refugee Marina Svetaeva unexpectedly joins Ricky Belisle and Marie Jeanne, "M.J.," Charbonneau at curtain call on the night of their school's Christmas program. Her arrival looses a cascade of events that ultimately finds Ricky carrying M.J. in his arms across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100-year Lake Superior storm. If she survives he vows an ultimate sacrifice. Ricky Belisle is a boy born to first-generation immigrants. They bring with them the beliefs, manners and stories of the homeland and in so doing they create a disconnect in Ricky that forces him to begin the exploration that will eventually take him away from the land that has leached into his bones. Robert Townsend, a retired Air Force officer, was born and raised on a farm in northern Wisconsin and writes of a life he has witnessed. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War protests, Townsend flew 175 combat missions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In early 1971, he transferred to Berlin, Germany as a signals intelligence officer, then to the National Security Agency before returning as a war planner at HQ USAFE, Ramstein. From 1982-1989 he was deputy chief, Air Force Intelligence Agency, counter-deception directorate (at CIA). He is among some of the few men in America familiar with the war of ruse and stratagem between the US and the USSR. Spirit Falls is the prologue to a trilogy about deception and war and peace in a 20th century world of contrived and real moral ambiguities.
Download or read book Eight Mile High written by Jim Ray Daniels and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these linked stories, the constants are the places—from Eight Mile High, the local high school, to Eight Miles High, the local bar; from The Clock, a restaurant that never closes, to Stan’s, a store that sells misfit clothes. Daniels’s characters wander Detroit, a world of concrete, where even a small strip of greenery becomes a hideout for mystery and mayhem. Even when they leave town—to Scout camp, or Washington, DC, or the mythical Up North, they take with them their hardscrabble working-class sensibilities and their determination to do what they must do to get by. With a survival instinct that includes a healthy dose of humor, Daniels’s characters navigate work and love, change and loss, the best they can. These characters don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for themselves, even when they stumble. They dust themselves off and head back into the ring with another rope-a-dope wisecrack. These stories seem to suggest that we are always coming of age, becoming, trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in this world, attempting to figure out a way to forgive ourselves for not measuring up to our own expectations of what it means to lead a successful, happy life.
Download or read book Coming of Age in the 21st Century written by Mary Frosch and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following in the footsteps of the highly successful Coming of Age in America and Coming of Age Around the World, this new anthology of fiction and memoir explores coming of age in the new millennium. Twenty-one stories by noted authors including Sherman Alexie, Mary F. Chen, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Seth Kantner, and ZZ Packer explore the trials and tribulations of growing up in our increasingly fragmented world. Issues of identity, sexuality, solitude, and conflict are beautifully presented through the voices of writers of all ages and ethnicities, from Lan Samantha Chang tackling absent or dead parents in “The Eve of the Spirit Festival” to Emily Rabateau addressing race in “Mrs. Turner’s Lawn Jockeys.” With a preface and introductions to each piece by Mary Frosch providing cultural context, this collection is a stunning literary tribute to a new generation of global citizens that provides a distinctively American sense of hope.
Download or read book Dignity written by Chris Arnade and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A profound book.... It will break your heart but also leave you with hope." —J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy "[A] deeply empathetic book." —The Economist With stark photo essays and unforgettable true stories, Chris Arnade cuts through "expert" pontification on inequality, addiction, and poverty to allow those who have been left behind to define themselves on their own terms. After abandoning his Wall Street career, Chris Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald's. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America's Back Row--those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row's values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as naïve. As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: "a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God." This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who've been left behind.
Download or read book When We Were the Kennedys written by Monica Wood and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wood offers a moving memoir of the season in 1963 Mexico, Maine, as she, her mother, and her three sisters healed after the loss of their mill-worker father and then the nation's loss of its handsome young Catholic president.
