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My First Summer in the Sierra (Mint Editions (the Natural World) Ser.)
By John Muir. 1998
From the photographer who brought Thoreau's Walden and Cape Cod to life comes a new work combining classic literature with…
brand-new photography. This time, Scot Miller takes on the seminal work of John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. The book details Muir's first extended trip to the Sierra Nevada in what is now Yosemite National Park, a landscape that entranced him immediately and had a profound effect on his life. The towering waterfalls, natural rock formations, and abundant plant and animal life helped Muir develop his views of the natural world, views that would eventually lead him to push for the creation of the national parks. My First Summer in the Sierra is illustrated with Miller's stunning photographs, showcasing the dramatic landscape of the High Sierra plus John Muir's illustrations from the original edition and several previously unpublished illustrations from his 1911 manuscript. The publication of My First Summer in the Sierra inspired many to journey there, and this newly illustrated edition will surely inspire many more. This book is being published in collaboration with Yosemite Conservancy and, for each copy sold, Scot Miller is making a donation to Yosemite Conservancy. My First Summer in the Sierra won the National Outdoor Book Award.Without Hope: A Childhood Ruined by the Man she should Trust the Most
By Barbara Naughton. 2010
Barbara's father was a sadistic man at the best of times - his idea of fun was to kill the…
family dog by tying it to the back of his car and driving off. Also for kicks, he took his children out on to the lake and held them under until they were gasping for their lives.He sexually assaulted Barbara from a young age, often when the rest of the family were in the house. He repeatedly threatened to kill her, and made two very serious attempts. During the final attempt, as he was raping and choking her, Barbara made a vow - if she survived, she would come forward and get justice against her father ...Without Hope is a powerful and inspiring true story of a girl who finally found the inner strength to escape her brutal childhood.When childcare worker Shane Dunphy meets Jason in 1991, he is a tiny, frightened five-year-old who has stopped speaking and…
terrorizes even the older children in the care home with his angry, violent behaviour. Eleven years later, Shane is shocked to find Jason's file on his desk again. Jason has committed some horrendous crimes and is facing a life of incarceration. Can Shane rebuild what had been a delicate friendship, and help Jason to face up to who he is, where he has come from, and what he has done?Vanessa: A Portrait of Evil
By Wensley Clarkson. 2011
The compelling and disturbing true story of Vanessa George and the evil abuse she doled out upon the children of…
more than 300 families.As a nursery worker, wife and mother, she was a figure to place trust in. Yet her adulterous relationship and sick love triangle with Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen drew her into a dark world of violence and sexual abuse. To compete for Blanchard's attention she would do everything in her power to impress him, even if this meant committing unspeakable acts of sexual violence on children as young as two years old.What could have driven a mother to betray not only her daughters and loving husband, but the very families who entrusted her with their children? How could a seemingly caring women become engaged in a sordid and vile love triangle with a man and woman she had never met? Were there events in her own childhood that pushed her to commit these acts?True crime expert Wensley Clarkson pieces together the events surrounding the case as well as new investigative research to compile a fascinating yet disturbing account of a case which shocked a nation.We may never know the full extent of Vanessa George's cruelty, but the horror of her story will remain as a chilling memory for generations.When Kids Kill
By Jonathan Paul. 2003
Jonathan Paul goes behind the sensationalist headlines of 'child killers' to investigate why these crimes happen. He examines child homicide…
in today's violent, confusing world and contextualises it against the cruel unforgiving retribution of yesterday.Children are increasingly experimenting with drugs and committing offences, but there are those who commit the worst possible crimes: to end another person's life before their own could properly have begun. The cases are shocking but sometimes the path towards them is even more so. This is a fascinating exploration of disturbing events aimed at discovering what happens when childhood is trodden underfoot, and when and why kids kill.What Daddy Did: The shocking true story of a little girl betrayed
By Donna Ford. 2008
In this haunting and frank account, Donna Ford, bestselling author of The Step Child, returns to the horrific abuse she…
suffered at the hands of her stepmother. As a tiny girl of five, and for six long years, Donna was physically, mentally and sexually abused. She was starved, beaten and 'loaned out' to neighbours who raped and molested her ... and throughout her father stood by and did nothing. When her stepmother finally left the family home, Donna dreamed of a normal childhood in which she would be taken care of by the man who had, up until this point, failed her. But it was not to be. By telling the whole story of her Edinburgh childhood, Donna tries to understand why the man who should have loved her the most - her own father - was the one who deceived her the most, by continuing to allow men to abuse her. Instead of finding a future of love and happiness, Donna was once again thrust into a living nightmare of exploitation and betrayal by those who should have wrapped her up in their love. While this is a true story of appalling child abuse, it is also a tale of how exhilaration, tenderness and self-development can flourish despite childhood horrors. We take a journey with Donna to discover the woman she has become: a devoted mother of three and a talented artist and writer.'I squeezed through the narrow gap and out into the hallway and I stood for a moment, unable to decide…
where to go. Should I make a dash for the kitchen, where my mother would be swigging from a bottle? Or should I run upstairs and try to find somewhere to hide? It was a choice I didn't really need to make, because there was no escape'Anna Lowe grows up on the doorsteps of pubs, waiting for her mum to come out. Having to give up her bedroom to her mother's drunken friends. And regularly calling out the ambulance, after finding her mother unconscious and covered in vomit. But it is when they move in with her mother's boyfriend Carl that things take the ugliest turn. Not only is he violent with her mother, but he also sexually abuses Anna from the age of six - destroying any semblance of normal childhood she had left. Wake Up, Mummy is the heartbreaking true story of a little girl who eventually found the courage to break free from the past.Unhooked: The Rehab of a London Call Girl
By Clare Gee. 2012
Addicted to coke and booze and reliant on selling her body for cash, Katie, the heroine of Clare Gee's bestselling…
Hooked, can no longer cope with the life she's created for herself. She has messed up badly and thrown everything away.Mentally, she is an anxious wreck and physically she is in pieces. Yet she is terrified of who she will become without her vices. She has to do something, though, and her choices are get help or die. She leaves London and admits herself to a residential rehab centre for three months.In Unhooked, reformed addict Clare Gee draws on her own experiences of cocaine addiction, alcoholism and prostitution in telling a moving story of a young woman battling through hell to create a sober life for herself. There are threats of expulsion from rehab and relapses, but through dedication and honesty, Katie begins the long journey to becoming clean and finding peace of mind.Unforgivable
By Collette Elliott. 2014
Unforgivable is the shocking real-life story of suffering and survival from child abuse victim Collette Elliott."I brought you into this…
world and I can take you out with one click of my fingers."What if Baby P or Daniel Pelka had lived to tell their tale?Collette Elliott once had a similar story. She slipped through the net and only just survived. Her childhood was a place of filth and terror. Her prostitute mother abused and neglected Collette; leaving her with clients, starving her and beating her to a pulp.But the worst thing was that the people who were supposed to protect Collette turned a blind eye. This is the story of a little girl who waited years for justice. It's the story of a woman determined to protect other children from suffering her fate.Collette Elliott is a 35-year-old mother of four. She was born in Birmingham to Maureen Batchelor, a prostitute, and suffered years of physical and mental abuse. In April 2013, Birmingham City Council awarded her £20,000 in damages for the anguish she suffered and their failure to protect her. Collette is now happily married, a devoted mother to her girls, and is campaigning on behalf of other child abuse victims.Undaunted: The True Story Behind the Popular Shock-Jock
By Jon Gaunt. 2007
Millions know him as a loudmouth radio shock-jock and Sun columnist. Yet, in his life Jon Gaunt has had to…
overcome unimaginable hardship, solitude, bankruptcy and despair. His mother died suddenly when he was just twelve, his hard-drinking, womanising father abandoned him to suffer appalling treatment in a children's home. At twenty-eight, his business had a million pound turnover, but a stroke of fate caused catastrophe. Undaunted, Jon Gaunt has always fought back. Behind the outspoken media personality, this is the very human story of self-preservation, personal growth and forgiveness, told in Jon's inimitable forthright style.Trash: An Innocent Girl. A Shocking Story of Squalor and Neglect.
By Britney Fuller. 2014
‘To start: it was just me and my mom. I am an only child, and she is a single parent.…
My mother is a trash hoarder. Ever since I can remember the house was always messy and stunk. At around age 9ish I noticed that something was wrong. I started throwing bags of trash away every day, just to have my mom freak out when she got home. We didn’t eat at home anymore because the fridge was disgusting, and she used the sink as a trash can, so it got clogged. We always ate out, we never had a home-cooked meal, and I’ve never had a family dinner at a dinner table. I had a stool in the corner of the living room. That is what I sat on, and that alone. I kept that corner as clean as I could. Made sure there was foot space, and that there wasn’t dust on the walls. That was my corner, my space. It never seemed to matter though, eventually that spot would get overrun with trash too...’Trash is Britney Fuller's shocking account of growing up in the house of a hoarder.Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival.
By Victoria Spry. 2015
As a child, Victoria Spry was brutally beaten, neglected and starved by the woman she called Mummy.To the outside world…
Eunice Spry was a devoted parent, but behind closed doors she was an evil tyrant. Instead of protecting, loving and caring for Victoria, she forced bleach and urine down her throat, knocked out her teeth, tied her up naked and made her live in squalor. It took eighteen years of heartache and despair before she found the courage to expose her mum.Tortured is Victoria’s gripping story of survival.Nauvoo: Mormon City on the Mississippi River
By Raymond Bial. 2006
In 1839, persecuted Mormons fled Missouri, across the Mississippi River, seeking freedom from violence. They hoped to find a safe…
haven on the banks of the river in an Illinois city that they called Nauvoo, “the city beautiful.”The Mormons did not flourish for long in Nauvoo. In neighboring cities some grew resentful of the prosperity that Joseph Smith and his people were enjoying. Religious misconceptions further fueled hostility toward the Mormons. Would the oft-persecuted Mormons have to flee their city beautiful?Through poignant writing and photographs of Nauvoo today, Raymond Bial tells the story of the city that many Mormons consider to be the wellspring of their religion.Poor People
By William T. Vollmann. 2007
That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result…
of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie
By Christopher Ingraham. 2019
An NPR Best Book of the YearThe hilarious, charming, and candid story of writer Christopher Ingraham’s decision to uproot his…
life and move his family to Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, population 1,400—the community he made famous as “the worst place to live in America” in a story he wrote for the Washington Post.Like so many young American couples, Chris Ingraham and his wife Briana were having a difficult time making ends meet as they tried to raise their twin boys in the East Coast suburbs. One day, Chris – in his role as a “data guy” reporter at the Washington Post – stumbled on a study that would change his life. It was a ranking of America’s 3,000+ counties from ugliest to most scenic. He quickly scrolled to the bottom of the list and gleefully wrote the words “The absolute worst place to live in America is (drumroll please) … Red Lake County, Minn.” The story went viral, to put it mildly. Among the reactions were many from residents of Red Lake County. While they were unflappably polite – it’s not called “Minnesota Nice” for nothing – they challenged him to look beyond the spreadsheet and actually visit their community. Ingraham, with slight trepidation, accepted. Impressed by the locals’ warmth, humor and hospitality – and ever more aware of his financial situation and torturous commute – Chris and Briana eventually decided to relocate to the town he’d just dragged through the dirt on the Internet.If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now is the story of making a decision that turns all your preconceptions – good and bad -- on their heads. In Red Lake County, Ingraham experiences the intensity and power of small-town gossip, struggles to find a decent cup of coffee, suffers through winters with temperatures dropping to forty below zero, and unearths some truths about small-town life that the coastal media usually miss. It’s a wry and charming tale – with data! -- of what happened to one family brave enough to move waaaay beyond its comfort zoneHeart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans
By Kadir Nelson. 2020
The story of America and African Americans is a story of hope and inspiration and unwavering courage. In Heart and Soul,…
Kadir Nelson's stirring paintings and words grace 100-plus pages of a gorgeous picture book—a beautiful gift for readers of all ages, a treasure to share across generations at home or in the classroom.Heart and Soul is about the men, women, and children who toiled in the hot sun picking cotton; it's about the America ripped in two by Jim Crow laws; it's about the brothers and sisters of all colors who rallied against those who would dare bar a child from an education. It's a story of discrimination and broken promises, determination, and triumphs.Kadir Nelson's Heart and Soul—the winner of numerous awards, including the Coretta Scott King Author Award and Illustrator Honor, and the recipient of five starred reviews—is told through the unique point of view and intimate voice of a one-hundred-year-old African-American female narrator.This inspiring book demonstrates that in striving for freedom and equal rights, African Americans help our country on the journey toward its promise of liberty and justice—the true heart and soul of our nation.In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of…
the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont concert, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s.In the annals of rock history, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, has long been seen as the distorted twin of Woodstock—the day that shattered the Sixties’ promise of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by a member of the Hells Angels, the notorious biker club acting as security. While most people know of the events from the film Gimme Shelter, the whole story has remained buried in varied accounts, rumor, and myth—until now.Altamont explores rock’s darkest day, a fiasco that began well before the climactic death of Meredith Hunter and continued beyond that infamous December night. Joel Selvin probes every aspect of the show—from the Stones’ hastily planned tour preceding the concert to the bad acid that swept through the audience to other deaths that also occurred that evening—to capture the full scope of the tragedy and its aftermath. He also provides an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead’s role in the events leading to Altamont, examining the band’s behind-the-scenes presence in both arranging the show and hiring the Hells Angels as security.The product of twenty years of exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including medical staff, Hells Angels members, the stage crew, and the musicians who were there, and featuring sixteen pages of color photos, Altamont is the ultimate account of the final event in rock’s formative and most turbulent decade.Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
By Brandy Colbert. 2021
A searing new work of nonfiction from award-winning author Brandy Colbert about the history and legacy of one of the…
most deadly and destructive acts of racial violence in American history: the Tulsa Race Massacre. Winner, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District—a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives.In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass? What exactly happened? And why are the events unknown to so many of us today?These are the questions that award-winning author Brandy Colbert seeks to answer in this unflinching nonfiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In examining the tension that was brought to a boil by many factors—white resentment of Black economic and political advancement, the resurgence of white supremacist groups, the tone and perspective of the media, and more—a portrait is drawn of an event singular in its devastation, but not in its kind. It is part of a legacy of white violence that can be traced from our country's earliest days through Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement in the mid–twentieth century, and the fight for justice and accountability Black Americans still face today.The Tulsa Race Massacre has long failed to fit into the story Americans like to tell themselves about the history of their country. This book, ambitious and intimate in turn, explores the ways in which the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre is the story of America—and by showing us who we are, points to a way forward.YALSA Honor Award for Excellence in NonfictionA Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress
By David Levering Lewis, Deborah Willis. 2003
The Underground Railroad
By Raymond Bial. 1999
By ones, twos, and threes, in the years before the Civil War thousands of enslaved people slipped through the night…
on their way to freedom, riding the Underground Railroad. Hidden and hunted, the escape of southern slaves to the North remains a compelling event in American history. Within the pages of this book are documented, in prose and elegantly articulate photographs, examples of "stations" on the Railroad, along with images of the routes, lives, and hardships of both the "passengers" and "conductors."