As bedtime stories, I told our children my personal stories of life on a Pennsylvania farm with a city-slicker father who yearned to be a successful farmer. Growing up in a Jewish orphanage in the early 1900s, he dreamed of someday owning a farm and breathing the fresh air of the country. So many funny stories from the farm encouraged our children to say “Tell me a story when you were little, Mommy,” every night. I decided to write these down and they became my first memoir The Road Home. I love memoir and through my YouTube channel, I encourage others to “Write Your Story for Your Generations to Come.”
An orphan boy, well versed in the school of hard knocks, meets a country girl who thinks she wants a life of travel and excitement. Together they show how living an honest, but sometimes hilarious life that is essential to a happy family. The Road Home brings fun, laughter, a few tears, and rich recollections of an innocent time of life. From a small farm in Pennsylvania, Daddy and Mom teach their young children lessons such as: Never tarnish your good name, Make wise choices, Know when to get out of dodge and so many more. It doesn't matter if you grew up in a bustling city or on a farm in the country, you will relate to and be able to recall learning the same life lessons.
I love this book’s honest look at questioning the goodness of God. When Delia, at 28 years old, finds she has only a short time to live, she considers her options. Her husband, Remon, never once doubts his options; Delia has to fight this incurable cancer ravaging her body. The life lessons she learns and shares with her readers put pain, life, and faith, in a new perspective for me. I especially love memoirs that teach life lessons, since my own book does the same thing. When we learn from others’ experiences, our world widens to us. Delia and Remon’s story has been a testimony of God’s goodness to countless people throughout the world.
D.N. Grace tells her story as a cancer survivor. Still in her twenties, Grace sees her life goals unfolding just as she planned. With a passion to serve God, her dream school within reach, and the love of her life at her side, she suddenly finds her life out of control and turned upside down taking a very different path. In Your Pain Is Not A Waste, Grace tells her story of being diagnosed with stage 3 soft tissue sarcoma and given two years to live, only if the chemotherapy drugs work.
When I heard Ginny Dent Brant interviewed about her books, I couldn’t wait to purchase them for myself. Finding True Freedom recounts Ginny’s uncertain days of watching her father’s passion for politics. (Lots of well-documented info about his and others’ involvement in Watergate.) But Harry Dent experienced a conversion and left politics for the mission field of Romania. I wouldn’t normally read a book about politics; however, I highly recommend Finding True Freedom as it was a page-turner for me and taught me that true freedom is not the easiest to find, especially in highly charged Washington politics.
In the 1960s Harry Dent entered political service for love of country and liberty. Highly successful, Dent became known as the “Southern Strategist” who helped Nixon win the United States presidency. When the Watergate scandal broke and Dent was accused, his efforts at propagating American freedom seemed wasted. But Dent was found to be “more of an innocent victim than the perpetrator.” He could not deny God’s grace: Dent and Henry Kissinger were the only two of Nixon’s staff not given prison sentences. In 1978 Harry Dent embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ that his daughter Ginny had faithfully lived…
I used this memoir with my 10th graders when I taught English. The story of a 14-year-old Jewish boy from Poland is caught up in the horrific ugliness of WWII and concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I had students question the truth of the story that reveals the dehumanization and silence that the Nazis used to control and eventually slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Within the small book, Wiesel tells of such a time when people were treated worse than cattle. Through this study, my students learned to question “Could this happen again?” and “How can we keep it from happening again?” A riveting read for all.
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of…
Angela’s Ashes made such an impression on me. It was a real page turner as I followed Frank McCourt through his childhood of poverty in Limerick, Ireland. His mother tries to care for the children in spite of her husband continually drinking away any wages he ever earns. The family has to use boards from the walls of their rent house to burn for heat in the winter. They endure near-starvation and cruelty from both relatives and neighbors. Through the telling of a horrendous upbringing, Frank teaches life lessons. He finds a redeeming quality in his father where he learns the art of storytelling. Frank also teaches how to forgive and move on. A great life lesson for all.
The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies.
Jeannette Walls tells a story of her early childhood growing up in a highly dysfunctional family with parents who are free spirits doing what makes each of them happy at the moment. Her father promises her that someday, he will build her a glass castle on the beach. She dreams of this beautiful home, but throughout the years, she and her siblings are homeless and learn to care for themselves while their parents take off for places unknown. She teaches life lessons of resilience, redemption, and forgiveness that have stayed with me for a very long time.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
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