Download or read book The Girl s Guide to Homelessness written by Brianna Karp and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brianna Karp entered the workforce at age ten, supporting her mother and sister throughout her teen years in Southern California. Although her young life was scarred by violence and abuse, Karp stayed focused on her dream of a steady job and a home of her own. By age twenty-two her dream became reality. Karp loved her job as an executive assistant and signed the lease on a tiny cottage near the beach. And then the Great Recession hit. Karp, like millions of others, lost her job. In the six months between the day she was laid off and the day she was forced out onto the street, Karp scrambled for temp work and filed hundreds of job applications, only to find all doors closed. When she inherited a thirty-foot travel trailer after her father's suicide, Karp parked it in a Walmart parking lot and began to blog about her search for work and a way back.

Download or read book Almost a Woman written by Esmeralda Santiago and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the enchanting story recounted in When I Was Puerto Rican of the author’s emergence from the barrios of Brooklyn to the prestigious Performing Arts High School in Manhattan, Esmeralda Santiago delivers the tale of her young adulthood, where she continually strives to find a balance between becoming American and staying Puerto Rican. While translating for her mother Mami at the welfare office in the morning, starring as Cleopatra at New York’s prestigious Performing Arts High School in the afternoons, and dancing salsa all night, she begins to defy her mother’s protective rules, only to find that independence brings new dangers and dilemmas.

Download or read book Wait Till Next Year written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.

Download or read book An Italian Girl in Brooklyn written by Santa Montefiore and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From #1 internationally bestselling author Santa Montefiore comes a spellbinding new novel about dark secrets and hidden sorrows—set in war-torn Italy and the streets of New York. New York, 1979. It is Thanksgiving and Evelina has her close family and beloved friends gathered around, her heart weighted with gratitude for what she has and regret for what she has given up. She has lived in America for over thirty years, but she is still Italian in her soul. Northern Italy, 1934. Evelina leads a sheltered life with her parents and siblings in a villa of fading grandeur. When her elder sister Benedetta marries a banker, to suit her father’s wishes rather than her own, Evelina swears that she will never marry out of duty. She knows nothing of romantic love, but when she meets Ezra, son of the local dressmaker, her heart recognises it like an old friend. Evelina wants these carefree days to last forever. She wants to bask in sunshine, beauty, and love, and pay no heed to the grey clouds gathering on the horizon. But nothing lasts forever. The shadows of war are darkening over Europe and precious lives are under threat…

Download or read book Persian Girls written by Nahid Rachlin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-12-27 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years, heartache prevented Nahid Rachlin from turning her sharp novelist's eye inward: to tell the story of how her own life diverged from that of her closest confidante and beloved sister, Pari. Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores, and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America. When Nahid received the unsettling and mysterious news that Pari had died after falling down a flight of stairs, she traveled back to Iran--now under the Islamic regime--to find out what happened to her truest friend, confront her past, and evaluate what the future holds for the heartbroken in a tale of crushing sorrow, sisterhood, and ultimately, hope.

Download or read book Knocked Down written by Aileen Weintraub and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids. Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months. As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all? Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take.

Download or read book Trove written by Sandra A. Miller and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Gold-medal winner of the Nautilus Book Award for memoir (2020) • Gold-medal winner of the National Indie Excellence Award for memoir (2020) • Featured on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books podcast. (2020) "A stirring memoir that beautifully and humorously captures the pain of unresolved loss.” — Kirkus Reviews The true story of a woman whose life is up-ended when she begins an armchair treasure hunt—a search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places—with a man who, as she points out, is not her husband. In this eloquent, hilarious, sharply realized memoir, Sandra A. Miller grapples with the death of her difficult mother and the regret and confusion that so often accompanies middle age. In a very real way, Miller has spent her life hunting for buried treasure. As a child, she trained herself to find things: dropped hair clips, shiny bits of broken glass, discarded lighters. Looking to escape from her volatile parents and often-unhappy childhood, Miller found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in each of these objects. Now an adult and facing the loss of her last living parent—her mother who is at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny—Miller finds herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon becomes an obsession, forces her to dredge up painful pieces of her past, confront the true source of her sorrow, and finally discover what it is she has been looking for all these years. "Trove is the treasure. It's the kind of story that gives you a new best friend in a narrator. Your get to travel with her on an emotional journey with laughs and tears. I am happy to be shut in with this wonderful story that has taken me to so many places." — Meredith Goldstein, advice columnist and entertainment reporter for The Boston Globe.

Download or read book The Arrogant Years written by Lucette Lagnado and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit—hailed by the New York Times book review as a “crushing, brilliant book”—returns with this, the extraordinary follow-up memoir In The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, Lucette Lagnado offered a heartbreaking portrait of her father, Leon, a successful Cairo boulevardier who was forced to take flight with his family during the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, and of her family’s struggle to rebuild a new life in a new land. In this much-anticipated new memoir, Lagnado tells the story of her mother, Edith, coming of age in a magical old Cairo of dusty alleyways and grand villas inhabited by pashas and their wives. Then Lagnado revisits her own early years in America—first, as a schoolgirl in Brooklyn’s immigrant enclaves, where she dreams of becoming the fearless Mrs. Emma Peel of The Avengers, and later, as an “avenging” reporter for some of America’s most prestigious newspapers. A stranger growing up in a strange land, when she turns sixteen Lagnado’s adolescence is further complicated by cancer. Its devastating consequences would rob her of her “arrogant years”—the years defined by an overwhelming sense of possibility, invincibility, and confidence. Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young coeds at Vassar and Columbia in the 1970s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to make sense of her own choices.

Download or read book Give a Girl a Knife written by Amy Thielen and published by Clarkson Potter Publishers. This book was released on 2017 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Thielen, author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook The New Midwestern Table, traces her journey from Park Rapids, Minnesota, to cooking professionally under some of New York City's finest chefs -- including David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten -- and then back home again. A love of food and an overwhelming desire to get the hell out of small-town America drive Thielen to New York to seek out its intense culinary world, which she embraces enthusiastically, while her boyfriend finds success in its fickle art world. After years of living in the city, with frequent trips back home in the summertime, the couple eventually chooses life deep in the woods in a cabin Thielen's husband built by hand. There Aaron can practice his craft while Amy takes the skills she learned cooking professionally and turns them to undoing years of processed foods to uncover true Midwestern cooking, which begins simply with humble workhorse ingredients such as potatoes and onions.

Download or read book In Pursuit of Disobedient Women written by Dionne Searcey and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world. “A story you will not soon forget.”—Kathryn Bigelow, Academy Award–winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front. In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram–conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Readers will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.

Download or read book When I Was Puerto Rican written by Esmeralda Santiago and published by Palabra. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic, sexual tension, high comedy, and intense drama move through an enchanted yet harsh autobiography, in the story of a young girl who leaves rural Puerto Rico for New York's tenements and a chance for success.

Download or read book Somebody s Daughter written by Ashley C. Ford and published by Flatiron Books: An Oprah Book. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NBCC John Leonard Prize Finalist Indie Bestseller “This is a book people will be talking about forever.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed “Ford’s wrenchingly brilliant memoir is truly a classic in the making. The writing is so richly observed and so suffused with love and yearning that I kept forgetting to breathe while reading it.” —John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her incarcerated father. Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley C. Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he’s in prison, and she doesn’t know what he did to end up there. She doesn’t know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father’s incarceration . . . and Ashley’s entire world is turned upside down. Somebody’s Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.

Download or read book Girl Walks Out of a Bar written by Lisa F. Smith and published by SelectBooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of escaping her insecurity and negativity became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story of her formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Smith describes how her spiraling circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication, nurturing an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.

Download or read book Cook Korean written by Robin Ha and published by Ten Speed Graphic. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestseller • A charming introduction to the basics of Korean cooking in graphic novel form, with 64 recipes, ingredient profiles, and more, presented through light-hearted comics. Fun to look at and easy to use, this unique combination of cookbook and graphic novel is the ideal introduction to cooking Korean cuisine at home. Robin Ha’s colorful and humorous one-to three-page comics fully illustrate the steps and ingredients needed to bring more than sixty traditional (and some not-so-traditional) dishes to life. In these playful but exact recipes, you’ll learn how to create everything from easy kimchi (mak kimchi) and soy garlic beef over rice (bulgogi dupbap) to seaweed rice rolls (gimbap) and beyond. Friendly and inviting, Cook Korean! is perfect for beginners and seasoned cooks alike. Each chapter includes personal anecdotes and cultural insights from Ha, providing an intimate entry point for those looking to try their hand at this cuisine.

Download or read book We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders written by Linda Sarsour and published by 37 Ink. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of the Women’s March, shares an “unforgettable memoir” (Booklist) about how growing up Palestinian Muslim American, feminist, and empowered moved her to become a globally recognized activist on behalf of marginalized communities across the country. On a chilly spring morning in Brooklyn, nineteen-year-old Linda Sarsour stared at her reflection, dressed in a hijab for the first time. She saw in the mirror the woman she was growing to be—a young Muslim American woman unapologetic in her faith and her activism, who would discover her innate sense of justice in the aftermath of 9/11. Now heralded for her award-winning leadership of the Women’s March on Washington, Sarsour offers a “moving memoir [that] is a testament to the power of love in action” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow). From the Brooklyn bodega her father owned, where Linda learned the real meaning of intersectionality, to protests in the streets of Washington, DC, Linda’s experience as a daughter of Palestinian immigrants is a moving portrayal of what it means to find one’s voice and use it for the good of others. We follow Linda as she learns the tenets of successful community organizing, and through decades of fighting for racial, economic, gender, and social justice, as she becomes one of the most recognized activists in the nation. We also see her honoring her grandmother’s dying wish, protecting her children, building resilient friendships, and mentoring others even as she loses her first mentor in a tragic accident. Throughout, she inspires you to take action as she reaffirms that we are not here to be bystanders. In this “book that speaks to our times” (The Washington Post), Harry Belafonte writes of Linda in the foreword, “While we may not have made it to the Promised Land, my peers and I, my brothers and sisters in liberation can rest easy that the future is in the hands of leaders like Linda Sarsour. I have often said to Linda that she embodies the principle and purpose of another great Muslim leader, brother Malcolm X.” This is her story.

Download or read book A Natural Woman written by Carole King and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read the New York Times Bestselling memoir that is "revealing, humble, and cool-aunt chatty" about the incredible life that inspired the hit Broadway musical Beautiful (Rolling Stone). Carole King takes us from her early beginnings in Brooklyn, to her remarkable success as one of the world's most acclaimed songwriting and performing talents of all time. A Natural Woman chronicles King's extraordinary life, drawing readers into her musical world, including her phenomenally successful #1 album Tapestry, and into her journey as a performer, mother, wife and present-day activist. Deeply personal, King's long-awaited memoir offers readers a front-row seat to the woman behind the legend. The book will include dozens of photos from King's childhood, her own family, and behind-the-scenes images from her performances.

Download or read book One Day We ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter written by Scaachi Koul and published by Picador. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of NPR's Best Books of the Year A DEBUT COLLECTION OF FIERCE, FUNNY ESSAYS ABOUT GROWING UP THE DAUGHTER OF INDIAN IMMIGRANTS IN WESTERN CULTURE, ADDRESSING SEXISM, STEREOTYPES, AND THE UNIVERSAL MISERIES OF LIFE In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself. With a sharp eye and biting wit, incomparable rising star and cultural observer Scaachi Koul offers a hilarious, scathing, and honest look at modern life.