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List Price: $15.00Price: $10.20You Save: $4.8 (32%)
The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Author: Jeannette Walls
ASIN : 074324754X
Sales Rank : 1553
Studio : Scribner
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780743247542
ISBN : 074324754X
Number Of Pages : 288
Publication Date : December 09, 2006
Publisher : Scribner
Manufacturer : Scribner
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Scribner
Product DescriptionJeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever. Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home. What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms. For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor. Amazon.com ReviewJeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis
Reviews for the The Glass Castle: A Memoir
List Price: $14.95Price: $10.17You Save: $4.78 (32%)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Author: Bill Bryson
ASIN : 0767919378
Sales Rank : 8320
Studio : Broadway
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780767919371
ISBN : 0767919378
Number Of Pages : 288
Publication Date : December 25, 2007
Release Date : December 25, 2007
Publisher : Broadway
Manufacturer : Broadway
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Broadway
Product DescriptionFrom one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
Reviews for the The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
List Price: $12.95Price: $10.36You Save: $2.59 (20%)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Author: Marjane Satrapi
ASIN : 037571457X
Sales Rank : 291
Studio : Pantheon
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780375714573
ISBN : 037571457X
Number Of Pages : 160
Publication Date : December 01, 2004
Release Date : December 01, 2004
Publisher : Pantheon
Manufacturer : Pantheon
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Pantheon
Product DescriptionA New York Times Notable Book
A Time Magazine “Best Comix of the Year”
A San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times Best-seller
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
Reviews for the Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Price: $7.99
Running with Scissors: A Memoir
Author: Augusten Burroughs
ASIN : 0312938853
Sales Rank : 2952
Studio : St. Martin's Paperbacks
Binding : Mass Market Paperback
EAN : 9780312938857
ISBN : 0312938853
Number Of Pages : 352
Publication Date : December 29, 2006
Release Date : December 29, 2006
Publisher : St. Martin's Paperbacks
Manufacturer : St. Martin's Paperbacks
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : St. Martin's Paperbacks
Product DescriptionRUNNING WITH SCISSORS is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year-round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing, and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances…
Running with Scissors Acknowledgments
Gratitude doesn’t begin to describe it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to express my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I would like to thank the real-life members of the family portrayed in this book for taking me into their home and accepting me as one of their own. I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-working people. The book was not intended to hurt the family. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I would like to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique. Amazon.com ReviewThere is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe
Reviews for the Running with Scissors: A Memoir
List Price: $12.95Price: $10.36You Save: $2.59 (20%)
The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Family
Author: Dave Pelzer
ASIN : 1558745157
Sales Rank : 2692
Studio : HCI
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9781558745155
ISBN : 1558745157
Number Of Pages : 250
Publication Date : December 01, 1997
Publisher : HCI
Manufacturer : HCI
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : HCI
Product Description"The Lost Boy" is the harrowing but ultimately uplifting true story of a boy's journey through the foster-care system in search of a family to love. This is Dave Pelzer's long-awaited sequel to "A Child Called "It". The Lost Boy" is Pelzer's story--a moving sequel and inspirational read for all.
Reviews for the The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Family
List Price: $15.00Price: $10.20You Save: $4.8 (32%)
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Author: Alexandra Fuller
ASIN : 0375758992
Sales Rank : 8050
Studio : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780375758997
ISBN : 0375758992
Number Of Pages : 336
Publication Date : December 11, 2003
Release Date : December 11, 2003
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Product DescriptionIn Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.
Reviews for the Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
List Price: $25.00Price: $16.50You Save: $8.5 (34%)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Author: Bill Bryson
ASIN : 076791936X
Sales Rank : 15607
Studio : Broadway
Binding : Hardcover
EAN : 9780767919364
ISBN : 076791936X
Number Of Pages : 288
Publication Date : December 17, 2006
Release Date : December 17, 2006
Publisher : Broadway
Manufacturer : Broadway
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Broadway
Product DescriptionFrom one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
Reviews for the The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
List Price: $13.95Price: $11.16You Save: $2.79 (20%)
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Today Show Book Club #3)
Author: Haven Kimmel
ASIN : 0767915054
Sales Rank : 12148
Studio : Broadway
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780767915052
ISBN : 0767915054
Number Of Pages : 282
Release Date : December 03, 2002
Publisher : Broadway
Manufacturer : Broadway
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Broadway
Product DescriptionWhen Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period–people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.
Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy.
Reviews for the A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Today Show Book Club #3)
List Price: $14.00Price: $11.20You Save: $2.8 (20%)
Fargo Rock City : A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota
Author: Chuck Klosterman
ASIN : 0743406567
Sales Rank : 39761
Studio : Scribner
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780743406567
ISBN : 0743406567
Number Of Pages : 288
Publication Date : December 01, 2002
Publisher : Scribner
Manufacturer : Scribner
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Scribner
Product Description Empirically proving that -- no matter where you are -- kids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman's hilrious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakotoa (population: 498). With a voice like Ace Frehley's guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock -- his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet -- but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize.
Reviews for the Fargo Rock City : A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota
Price: $9.95
A Child's Christmas in Wales
Author: Dylan Thomas
ASIN : 0811217310
Sales Rank : 95745
Studio : New Directions
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780811217316
ISBN : 0811217310
Number Of Pages : 64
Publication Date : December 15, 2007
Publisher : New Directions
Manufacturer : New Directions
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : New Directions
Product DescriptionIn print for fifty years, this gem of lyric prose has enchanted both young and old from its very first edition.<.B>
Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century, captures a child's-eye view, and an adult's fond memories, of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.
"The piece continues to work beautifully, blending the mock heroics of childhood with enduring images of the annual rituals of the season.... The language is enchanting and the poetry shines with an unearthly radiance."—The New York Times
"In a voice more alluring than Circe's, Thomas recalls 'All the Christmases that roll down toward the two-tongued sea.'"—Publishers Weekly
"Surely this Christmas story ranks among the great experiences of the language."—Harper's Magazine
"If you'd rather not gather your holiday eve around the TV, then build a fire and try a new tradition fixed back in Wales.... How he laced so many lines with perfect imagery is beyond me...this book is a holiday pearl."—The Bloomsbury Review
"This is a story to stir one's own emotions, with recollections perhaps untapped since childhood."—Baltimore Evening SunBR>
"Try it for a break from violent robots."—The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Reviews for the A Child's Christmas in Wales
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