Other books that might interest you

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  A Story of the Red Cross

  Clara Barton

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  Clara Barton was one of those diminutive New England women of the nineteenth century who was determined to make the world a better place. In 1881, she founded the American Red Cross to help the unfortunate victims of war and disaster, and served as its president from 1882 to 1904. The Red Cross of today stands as a living memorial to the lifelong efforts of this valiant lady. 
  Here Miss Barton tells the story of the first twenty-five years of the historic organization she founded. She shares details about the relief the Red Cross brought during the Texas Famine, the Mount Vernon Cyclone, the Johnstown Flood, the Sea Island Hurricane, and the Galveston Tidal Wave. The stories become all the more dramatic as a living eyewitness account told in Clara Barton's own words.

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  Life Unseen - A Story of Blindness

  Selina MILLS

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  Imagine a world without sight. Is it dark and gloomy? Is it terrifying and isolating? Or is it simply a state of not seeing, which we have demonised and sentimentalized over the centuries? And why is blindness so frightening? 
   
  In this fascinating historical adventure, broadcaster and author Selina Mills takes us on a journey through the history of blindness in Western Culture to discover that blindness is not so dark after all. 
   
  Inspired by her own experience of losing her sight as she forged a successful journalistic career, Life Unseen takes us through a personal and unsentimental historical quest through the lives, stories and achievements of blind people - as well as those sighted people who sought to patronize, demonize and fix them. From the blind poet Homer, through the myths and moralising of early medieval culture to the scientific and medical discoveries of the Enlightenment and modern times, the story of blindness turns out to be a story of our whole culture.

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  Go Back and Get It - A Memoir of...

  Dionne Ford

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  An unexpected family photograph leads Dionne Ford to uncover the stories of her enslaved female ancestors, reclaim their power, and begin to heal  Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift.  What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us. It manifests as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which she builds her own interracial family.  To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. “Anything,” she writes, “to keep from going back there.” But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.

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  Mum of Two

  Lauren Goodger

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  "I am a mum of two beautiful daughters, Larose and Lorena." 
   
  "My eldest, Larose, is the light of my life. She is so like I was as a child and with her big brown eyes, the double of her father too. And she loves to be the centre of attention... just like me." 
   
  "But my youngest, Lorena, is harder to picture. I was able to hold her as a baby and see her tiny face, but I don't know what the colour of her eyes would be now or who she would look like today. I've never heard the sound of her laugh, or her cry." 
   
  In Mum of Two, Lauren Goodger shares the story of losing her daughter, recounting the unimaginable, as she revisits navigating the hardest thing any parent could ever experience. This moving book explores not only the event itself, but the way in which the people around her responded, and how their actions drove her to become the strongest version of herself. 
   
  Lauren recounts this life-altering tragedy from the moment the midwife couldn't find a heartbeat through to the most difficult days, months and years of her life that followed in its wake. 
   
  In the aftermath of the worst thing that could happen to any mother, she realises none of those books, and none of those Instagram or TikTok videos, will tell you about what will happen if your baby doesn't make it. The reality is that you find out that no one will ever want to talk about it, or even talk to you, because no one knows what to say. Losing your baby doesn't turn off biology, your boobs still leak milk and you still bleed for days on end. You still have sleepless nights but it's your cries that keep you up, not your baby's. You might be terrified, like Lauren, of having that tiny wicker casket in your house and not knowing where to put it. 
   
  Mum of Two is an exploration of motherhood, loss, and grief - but also of immense inner- strength, courage, and resilience.

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  The New Ringer

  Roland Breckwoldt

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  A shy young man from the suburban outskirts takes himself to Gulf Country on a 1960s boys own adventure that changes his life forever. 
   
  'We can give you a start. You will need a six foot by four foot piece of canvas and blanket. If you stay for three months we will refund your fare. You will need to fly TAA out of Cloncurry and advise me your date of arrival.' 
  And so began the adventures and misadventures of young Roland Breckwoldt. It was 1960. He was not yet sixteen, and the unworldly Roland was leaving his home on the semi-agricultural fringes of Sydney to work as a stockman on the vast cattle stations of the Gulf Country of North Queensland. 
  A more unlikely stockman you would not find. Born in an internment camp in Central Victoria, his family had come to Australia from Germany via Shanghai. But it was out mustering on horseback and living in remote bush camps with characters as eccentric as any in outback Australia that Roland learnt about the world and discovered his place in it. 
  Full of youthful stumbles and told with great freshness and gentle humour, this beautifully written coming of age story is a nostalgic and evocative reminder of a disappearing way of life. 
   
  'A beautifully written - yet stunningly different - memoir of a young misfit. Absolutely loved it.'  RAY MARTIN

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  300 per hour - The price for my...

  Mathilde Davril

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  "I am Mathilde, alias Mathilda. I am 37 years old and I prostitute myself to be a free woman. I have been an executive assistant, a sales manager in media, a communication manager for an employers' confederation and a company director in business aviation. But I was a precarious woman, being used for a low price, like a great majority of women in France. In parallel to my work activities, I became an escort to get out of my social condition and not be a free and disposable object anymore. I have been leading this double life for 10 years in Lyon; and today men, but also women, respect me for what I am. I like this life and I embrace it fully."
  Like 5% to 10% prostitutes in France (and certainly many more), Mathilde engages in this profession freely and without constraint, to no longer be the prey of males and a patriarchal society. Free, authentic and without pretense, she takes the reader on a journey of discovery of a profession that fascinates and that no one talks about in this way. With a provocative but always human tone, she reveals with strength and fragility her non-conformist universe and her atypical personality. From her family to her friends, from her lovers to her clients, from her jobs to her first trick, Mathilde shares her way of life openly because her reality does not need to be hidden.

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