Other books that might interest you

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  Autobiography of a Face

  Lucy Grealy

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  "I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison." 
   
   
   
  At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.

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  Up From Slavery (Unabridged)

  Booker T. Washington

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  Up from Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). The book describes his personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, to his work establishing vocational schools-most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama-to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. He reflects on the generosity of both teachers and philanthropists who helped in educating blacks and Native Americans. He describes his efforts to instill manners, breeding, health and a feeling of dignity to students. His educational philosophy stresses combining academic subjects with learning a trade (something which is reminiscent of the educational theories of John Ruskin). Washington explained that the integration of practical subjects is partly designed to reassure the white community as to the usefulness of educating black people.

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  I'm Telling the Truth but I'm...

  Bassey Ikpi

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  2020 Audie Finalist – Short Stories/Collections 
  In I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying Bassey Ikpi explores her life—as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist—through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty and brutal intimacy. 
  A Bitch Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2019 • A Bustle 21 New Memoirs That Will Inspire, Motivate, and Captivate You • A Publishers Weekly Spring Preview Selection • An Electric Lit 48 Books by Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 • A Bookish Best Nonfiction of Summer Selection 
  ""We will not think or talk about mental health or normalcy the same after reading this momentous art object moonlighting as a colossal collection of essays.”     —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy 
  From her early childhood in Nigeria through her adolescence in Oklahoma, Bassey Ikpi lived with a tumult of emotions, cycling between extreme euphoria and deep depression—sometimes within the course of a single day. By the time she was in her early twenties, Bassey was a spoken word artist and traveling with HBO's Def Poetry Jam, channeling her life into art. But beneath the façade of the confident performer, Bassey's mental health was in a precipitous decline, culminating in a breakdown that resulted in hospitalization and a diagnosis of Bipolar II. 
  In I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, Bassey Ikpi breaks open our understanding of mental health by giving us intimate access to her own. Exploring shame, confusion, medication, and family in the process, Bassey looks at how mental health impacts every aspect of our lives—how we appear to others, and more importantly to ourselves—and challenges our preconception about what it means to be ""normal.""  Viscerally raw and honest, the result is an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are—and the ways, as honest as we try to be, each of these stories can also be a lie.

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  Ronald Reagan: an Audio...

  Geoffrey Giuliano

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  The grand old man of the Republican Party started out as a B actor and ended up president of the United States. Here are his greatest moments: his monumental speeches, political philosophy, and common sense pronouncements, which have since been morphed into a philosophy followed by conservatives worldwide. Narrated by the author with the chronological speeches of Ronald Wilson Reagan. Recommended for all school and library collections.

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  The Son of Seven Mothers - A...

  Benjamin Risha

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  A man shares his story of growing up in a late 20th-century American cult—and how he escaped—in this gripping autobiography.   As the adopted son of two cult leaders, Benjamin Risha was raised to someday assume a place of leadership in the Alamo Christian Foundation, with the Bible, and his parents’ interpretations of it, as his guide. He believed the prophecies of his adoptive mother and father, Tony and Susan Alamo, including them being the two prophets foretold in the Book of Revelations who precede the second coming of Jesus Christ, them rising from the dead after they died, and such dire warnings as the ground opening up to swallow non-believers into hell. And he was sure that Susan Alamo could raise the dead as promised.   However, when none of it happened, and the foundation slid from bucolic communal lifestyle to insufferable criminality that included absolute obedience to the Alamos, and polygamous marriages with girls as young as eight years old, Benjamin knew he had to escape. If he were caught trying to escape, he would be severely beaten, forced to go without food and water for his sins, and shamed in the community. So, he embarked on a journey to locate his birth parents, discover the truth about a world he knew nothing about . . . and find himself.   In The Son of Seven Mothers, Benjamin Risha takes readers on a harrowing journey that few in the United States can imagine. And eventually he must choose between the life he knows and was “chosen” to lead, and his freedom.

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  The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells -...

  Rebecca Rego Barry

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  The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells is the first biography of one of the “lost ladies” of detective fiction who wrote more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s. Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene. In the 1920s, when she was churning out three or more books annually, she was dubbed “about the biggest thing in mystery novels in the US.” On top of that, Wells wielded her pen in just about every literary genre, producing several immensely popular children’s books and young adult novels; beloved anthologies; and countless stories, prose, and poetry for magazines such as Thrilling Detective, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. All told, Wells wrote over 180 books. Some were adapted into silent films, and some became bestsellers. Yet a hundred years later, she has been all but erased from literary history. Why? How? This investigation takes us on a journey to Rahway, New Jersey, where Wells was born and is buried; to New York City’s Upper West Side, where she spent her final twenty-five years; to the Library of Congress, where Carolyn’s world-class collection of rare books now resides; and to many other public and private collections where exciting discoveries unfolded. Part biography and part sleuthing narrative, The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells recovers the life and work of a brilliant writer who was considered one of the funniest, most talented women of her time.

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