Publisher: Arcadia Press
Charles Angelo Siringo (1855-1928), was an American lawman, detective and agent for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is his autobiography. He was a very interesting guy.
If, in these pages, written in remembrance of my father, I should tell you, my dear friends, nothing new of him, I can, at least, promise you that what I shall tell will be told faithfully, if simply, and perhaps there may be some things not familiar to you. So begins chapter one of My Father as I Recall Him, the personal recollections of Mary Dickens, (Mamie, as she was called), the oldest daughter of the great novelist, Charles Dickens. (Summary from the text and Laura Caldwell)Show book
Nicholas was nine years old when he accidentally walked into a movie theatre playing Star Wars: A New Hope. It was 1977, and he unknowingly had just stumbled upon the thing that he would later credit in saving his life. From kindergarten through grade four, Nicholas endured horrific abuse at the hands of the Catholic priests who were entrusted with his education. As he grew up, he blamed himself for what had been done to him. His childhood had been stolen from him, and he had no way to cope. Star Wars gave Nicholas hope at the time he needed it most. His path to healing has been long and often dark, but that band of Rebels he met in his childhood proved to him that light could ultimately triumph. In this shocking, heartbreaking, yet forever hopeful memoir, Nicholas takes readers with him on his journey from victim, to survivor, to Jedi. Safe Space: A True Story of Faith, Betrayal, and the Power of the Force is for anyone who wants to understand how abuse continues to affect victims and their families long after the act.Show book
This is the heartbreaking story of the murder of 16-year-old Bristol schoolgirl Becky Watts, a personal and heartfelt account of a crime that shocked the nation in a unique way and tore a family in two. A vulnerable and shy girl, Becky Watts was brutally murdered and dismembered by her own step-brother on 19 February 2015. As her father Darren discovered the horrific details of what happened to his darling girl, his world fell apart. Writing about his darkest hours and unbearable pain, Darren uncovers what Becky’s relationship with her step-brother Nathan, a child he had raised as his own son, was really like. He recalls the devastation of discovering the truth about the depravity with which Becky was torn from him in the safety of her own home. And he recounts the torment of the legal battle to see his step-son sentenced to life behind bars. But, at its heart, Becky is a poignant personal story, a chance for Darren to pay tribute to his darling daughter, to celebrate her life and take back control of how she is remembered. Darren recalls with enduring love the daughter he fought so hard to get custody of after she was taken into foster care as an infant; the happy child who completed his life; and the innocent schoolgirl who brought joy and happiness to all her knew her. Both heartfelt and haunting, searingly honest and unflinching, this is the ultimate story of a family tragedy. This top-rated autobiography is a testament to a father's undying love and the lengths he would go to ensure justice for his daughter. It paints a vivid picture of the life of Becky, a girl whose life was tragically cut short, yet her memory continues to inspire and touch the hearts of many. For fans of Mae West (Love as Always, Mum xxx), Gregg Olsen (American Mother), Anna Ruston (Secret Slave), Karen Edwards (A Killer's Confession), and Kevin Wells (Goodbye, Dearest Holly).Show book
The Outermost House is a classic of American nature literature. In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go." Beston stayed for a year, meditating on humanity and the natural world. In The Outermost House, originally published in 1928, he poetically chronicled the four seasons at the beach; the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, storms, stars, and solitude. The landscape was his major character, and his writing provides a snapshot of the Cape, a place physically changed yet as soulful a century later. Like Henry D. Thoreau before him, and Rachel Carson after him, Beston was a writer of stunning beauty, importance and vision. Robert Finch once wrote of him, “His are burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud.” Henry Beston lived from 1888 to 1968. His Cape Cod house was declared a National Literary Landmark in 1964, but was destroyed by a winter storm in 1978.Show book
In the latest in a series on health reform, Betty Ann Bowser reports from California on what's being done to inspire medical students to address a shortage of primary care doctors.Show book
A Jewish history professor offers his personal account of the Holocaust, while depicting what he’s gone through to understand this moment in his past. Historian Otto Dov Kulka has dedicated his life to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust. Until now he has always set to one side his personal experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical, in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology one man constructed around his experiences. Auschwitz is for the author a vast repository of images, memories, and reveries: “the Metropolis of Death” over which rules the immutable Law of Death. Between 1991 and 2001, Kulka made audio recordings of these memories as they welled up, and in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death he sifts through these fragments, attempting to make sense of them. He describes the Family Camp’s children’s choir in which he and others performed “Ode to Joy” within yards of the crematoria, his final, indelible parting from his mother when the camp was liquidated, and the “black stains” along the roadside during the winter death march. Amidst so much death Kulka finds moments of haunting, almost unbearable beauty (for beauty, too, Kulka says, is an inescapable law). As the author maps his interior world, readers gain a new sense of what it was to experience the Shoah from inside the camps—both at the time, and long afterward. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past, and our shared history. Praise for Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death “[A] profound and melancholy book of remembrance . . . Death is in these pages a constant and close companion to the living . . . This is a grave, poetic and horrifying account of the Holocaust which does not so much revisit the Auschwitz of the past, but the Auschwitz of Kulka’s inner world. It is his own internalized city, with its own enduring horror.” —Arifa Akbar, The Independent (UK) “In this moving and poignant testimony, distinguished historian Otto Dov Kulka draws the reader into the horror of the death-camp through a montage of historical research, essays and poetical images of memory.” —Shereen Low, Northern Echo (UK)Show book
