This book is a biography of University of California-Berkeley sociology professor Troy Duster. Troy Duster received an MA and PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Duster is a black man who was born in South Chicago. His maternal grandmother is the famous Ida B. Wells. He initially had a research interest in the sociology of law and later in human genetics. He worked with approximately 100 graduate students at Berkeley, all minority students. Each of his research in...
At 49 Chri Kitch started to climb out of her desperate situation; in the past seven years she has graduated with a BA Hons degree in English and women's studies, and has been accepted at Oxford to do a Master's degree. Her story is not self-pitying and it is not full of anger; it is compassionate and intelligent. Chris Kitch has been to hell and back and has emerged able to look at her extraordinary life witg humour and realism.
First person account of a journalist from Ahmedabad, India, of his experiences of the earthquakes of 2001 in Gujarat, India, and communal riots of 2002 in the state.
Sylvia Nasar, the author of the phenomenal bestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through the epic story of the making of modern economics, and how it rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands, rather than in Fate. Nasar's account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid 19th century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world. This was a new...
Family has always been fertile ground for writers. To the usual familial themes, adoption adds its own potent elements: mystery, luck, the questing for origins, the yearning for a child, the importance (or not) of blood ties, and fundamental questions about what it is to become a parent and a family. A. M. Homes writes of being relentlessly tracked down by her birth mother, and Bernard Cornwell about being adopted by members of a repressive religious sect; Tama Janowitz comically describes meeti...
This is the story of a mother's attempts to regain her children. In 1984 Catherine Laylle, a Frenchwoman living in London, met and married a German medical student. The couple had two sons, and the family moved to Germany. Catherine subsequently returned to England with the boys, who spent the school holidays with their father in Germany - until the summer of 1994, when Catherine's husband had the custody ruling of a London court overturned in Germany, and the boys were taken from her.
The great Swiss psychologist and theorist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) had much to say about the developing mind. He also had plenty to say about his own development, much of it, as Fernando Vidal shows, plainly inaccurate. In the first truly historical biography of Piaget, Vidal tells the story of the psychologist’s intellectual and personal development up to 1918. By exploring the philosophical, religious, political, and social influences on the psychologist’s early life, Vidal alters our basic ass...
In 1995, NPR editor and producer Marcus D. Rosenbaum met his grandmother-fifty years after her death. Rosenbaum and his family were attending to the bittersweet business of cleaning out the family home after his father died when, in an old closet, in a ziplock bag, his niece discovered a gateway to the early part of the century and into the life of Helen Jacobus Apte, a Southern Jewish woman living in post-Victorian era Florida and Georgia. The covers of his grandmother's diary were cracked and...
Bitter Tears I Shed for Thee chronicles the remarkable stories of a handful of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and their impact on the history of this country during the American Civil War and the push westward. Author Mel Young, the firstborn grandson of Jewish immigrants, offers touching profiles of these extraordinary immigrants, along with personal recollections of his own family and his experiences as a first-generation American. Bitter Tears I Shed For Thee explores the forgotte...
After eight months in his childhood home helping his mother through her bout with cancer, Matthew Frank and his wife were themselves desperate for comfort. They found sanctuary in the most unlikely place—amid a collection of outcasts and eccentrics on a plot of land miles outside their comfort zone: a “mostly medical” marijuana farm in California. Pot Farm details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, popula...
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mo...
Thomas Beatie electrified the world in April 2008 with his announcement that he was seven months pregnant and due to give birth in July. The news made headlines across the globe, but it's only one chapter in a fascinating saga. Labor of Love reveals Beatie's unique life experiences: his less-than-idyllic childhood in Hawaii, his feelings of being a young man trapped in the body of a woman, his fight to conceive a child, and the obstacles surrounding the delivery. This astonishing narrative permi...
A true story of how one woman went from mother to escort, escort to madam. Dawn Annandale tells all in this shocking and yet poignant memoir of her life on and off the game. 'Call Me Madam' continues Dawn Annandale's fascinating journey from wife and mother to high class call girl and then proprietor of her own escort agency. After the breakdown of her marriage which left her with six children and a mountain of debts, Dawn Annandale took the only route she believed she had left and became an e...
This is the true story of an 18-year career in prostitution that began in a seedy massage parlour in Dublin's Thomas Street. By 1994, Marese O'Shea was the owner of one of the world's leading escort agencies. So famous and successful had she become that she was known as "The Vice Queen", and her agency was recognized by the national print media and Irish television. Marese O'Shea changed the face of prostitution in Ireland, instituting the vetting of customers, protecting escorts for whom she ac...
First-person account of the extraordinary life of America's greatest civil rights leader. It begins with his boyhood as the son of a preacher, his education as a minister, his ascendancy as a leader of civil rights, & his complex relationships with leading political & social figures of the day.
The world knows Freud as a thinker--one of the founding giants of modern culture. Now Lydia Flem paints a unique and unforgettable portrait of Frued the man: a father, husband, and friend, a secular Jew with passion for classical antiquity and European culture, torn between his need to be fully accepted in an anitsemitic society while remaining fatihful to his orgins. Flem enters into the depths of Freud's creativity, showing how his thinking is connected to his immersion in the arts, the histo...