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The red house : a novel / by Morris, Mary,1947-author.;
"Award-winning novelist Mary Morris weaves together an unsolved family mystery, a poignant coming of age story, and a little-known corner of World War II history in this lyrical novel of family, art, and love. Thirty years ago, Laura's mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her jewelery, her strangely compelling paintings, and her insulin. Viola never returned, and her family never recovered. Decades later, at a crossroads in her marriage, Laura returns to Italy, where her parents met after World War II and where Laura spent the earliest years of her childhood, in an attempt to uncover the past her mother refused to speak about after the family moved to New Jersey and settled into the American dream. As Laura retraces her mother's path from her girlhood in Turin to wartorn Naples, following the few puzzle pieces she has to go on, she uncovers fragments of Viola's story which interweave with Laura's own investigation. As Laura reconnects with old neighbors and her mother's wartime compatriots, she uncovers a shadowy local legend in her search for answers: the Red House, one of Italy's Jewish internment camps, where Viola spent part of the war, and which become the repeat subject of her most arresting paintings. Mary Morris brings a family and a forgotten moment in history to vivid life with thought-provoking, sensitively wrought prose, as seen through Laura and Viola's eyes"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Internment camps; Missing persons; Mothers and daughters; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Alone : Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk : defeat into victory / by Korda, Michael,1933-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Combining epic history with rich family stories, Michael Korda chronicles the outbreak of World War II and the great events that led to Dunkirk. In an absorbing work peopled with world leaders, generals, and ordinary citizens who fought on both sides of World War II, Alone brings to resounding life perhaps the most critical year of twentieth-century history. For, indeed, May 1940 was a month like no other, as the German war machine blazed into France while the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line crumbled, and Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in an astonishing political drama as Britain, isolated and alone, faced a triumphant Nazi Germany. Against this vast historical canvas, Michael Korda relates what happened and why, and also tells his own story, that of a six-year-old boy in a glamorous movie family who would himself be evacuated. Alone is a work that seamlessly weaves a family memoir into an unforgettable account of a political and military disaster redeemed by the evacuation of more than 300,000 men in four days--surely one of the most heroic episodes of the war. "The incredible, almost miraculous story of what happened at Dunkirk in the year 1940--and why--is unfolded in Alone with great narrative skill and superb delineation of a highly interesting cast of characters, including, importantly, the author himself and his own remarkable family." -- David McCullough.
Subjects: Korda, Michael, 1933-; Dunkirk, Battle of, Dunkerque, France, 1940.; World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis [electronic resource] : by Vance, J. D..aut; cloudLibrary;
Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance’s powerful origin story…. From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class.  THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Poverty & Homelessness; State & Local; Rural; 21st Century; Personal Memoirs;
© 2018., HarperCollins,
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Good Dirt A Novel [electronic resource] : by Wilkerson, Charmaine.aut; cloudLibrary;
The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick “Engrossing . . . Wilkerson masterfully weaves these threads of love, loss and legacy [into] a thoroughly researched and beautifully imagined family saga.”—The New York Times When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get. So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future. In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Literary; Historical; Contemporary Women;
© 2025., Random House Publishing Group,
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Apron strings : navigating food and family in France, Italy, and China / by Wong, Jan,author.;
"Jan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn't keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn't pass up. On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures. In southeast France, they move in with a family sheltering undocumented migrants. From Bernadette, the housekeeper, they learn classic French family fare such as blanquette de veau. In a hamlet in the heart of Italy's Slow Food country, the locals teach them how to make authentic spaghetti alle vongole and a proper risotto with leeks. In Shanghai, they cook firecracker chicken and scallion pancakes with the nouveaux riches and their migrant maids, who are part of the biggest demographic shift in world history. Along the way, mother and son explore their sometimes-fraught relationship, uniting--and occasionally clashing--over their mutual love of cooking. A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious."--
Subjects: Wong, Jan; Food; International cooking.; Globalization.; Families.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Unconditional : a guide to loving and supporting your LGBTQ child / by Eriksen, Telaina,author.;
Includes bibliographical references.
Subjects: Coming out (Sexual orientation); Gay teenagers.; Gay youth.; Parents of gays.; Parents of sexual minority youth.; Parents of transgender children.; Sexual minority youth.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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We Used to Dream of Freedom A Memoir of Family, the Holocaust, and the Stories We Don't Tell [electronic resource] : by Chaiton, Sam.aut; cloudLibrary;
“Chaiton's fearless and moving memoir is a precious gift to anyone who yearns for a better understanding of intergenerational trauma and the path to true liberation.” — JEANNE BEKER, author, fashion editor, and television personality A child of Holocaust survivors grapples with his parents’ untold stories and their profound effect on the course of his extraordinary life. Growing up in Toronto, Sam Chaiton and his brothers knew their parents had been prisoners in Bergen-Belsen. But what their parents wouldn’t share about their history — including the fact they had also been in Auschwitz — ended up shaping their children’s lives. We Used to Dream of Freedom explores what a family is or could be; the psychology of survivors and the impact of survivor silence on their family; and the responsibility of second generations from traumatized communities to share knowledge from their own histories to help alleviate the suffering of others. Irreverent, moving, and tragic, often all at once, at its heart it is a story of a man who disappeared on his family, his quest to understand why he had to leave, and the long-overdue discovery about his parents that brought him back.General adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Personal Memoirs; Holocaust;
© 2024., Dundurn Press,
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The Phoenix Pencil Company A Novel [electronic resource] : by King, Allison.aut; CloudLibrary;
A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic—of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life—holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space. Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade. Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue. Monica’s discovery of a hidden family history is exquisitely braided with Yun’s own memories as she writes of her years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII rages outside their door, Yun and her cousin, Meng, learn of a special power the women in their family possess: the ability to Reforge a pencil’s words. But when the government uncovers their secret, they are forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive. Combining the cross-generational family saga and epistolary form of A Tale for the Time Being with the uplifting, emotional magic of The Midnight Library, Allison King’s stunning debut novel asks: who owns and inherits our stories? The answers and secrets that surface on the page may have the unerasable power to reconnect a family and restore a legacy. 
Subjects: Electronic books.; Literary; Contemporary; Coming of Age; Historical; Epistolary; Asian American; Family Life;
© 2025., HarperCollins,
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Grandpa Was an Emperor. by Marks, Constance,film director.; Freestyle Digital Media (Firm),dst; Kanopy (Firm),dst;
Originally produced by Freestyle Digital Media in 2021.The great-granddaughter of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia embarks on a quest to discover what happened to her relatives during the 1974 coup. For the first time, the Royal Family examines the events that led to the end of a 3,000-year dynasty.Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Subjects: Documentary films.; Political science.; Social sciences.; African studies.; Foreign study.; History, Modern.; Documentary films.; Current affairs.; History.;
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Unnatural history [sound recording] / by Kellerman, Jonathan,author.; Rubinstein, John,1946-narrator.; Random House Audio Publishing,publisher.;
Read by John Rubinstein."The most enduring detectives in American crime fiction are back in this electrifying thriller of art and brutality from the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense. Los Angeles is a city of stark contrast, the palaces of the affluent coexisting uneasily with the hellholes of the mad and the needy. It is that shadow world and the violence it breeds that draw brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis into an unsettling case of altruism gone wrong. On a superficially lovely morning a woman shows up for work with her usual enthusiasm. She's the newly hired personal assistant to a handsome, wealthy photographer and is ready to greet her boss with coffee and good cheer. Instead, she finds him slumped in bed, shot to death. The victim had recently received rave media attention for his latest project: images of homeless people in their personal "dream" situations, elaborately costumed and enacting unfulfilled fantasies. There are some, however, who view the whole thing as nothing more than crass exploitation, citing token payments and the victim's avoidance of any long-term relationships with his subjects. Has disgruntlement blossomed into homicidal rage? Or do the roots of violence reach down to the victim's family-a clan, sired by an elusive billionaire, that is bizarre in its own right? Then new murders arise, and Alex and Milo begin peeling back layer after layer of intrigue and complexity, culminating in one of the deadliest threats they've ever faced"--
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Novels.; Psychological fiction.; Thrillers (Fiction); Delaware, Alex (Fictitious character); Sturgis, Milo (Fictitious character); Murder; Photographers; Police; Psychologists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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