Best of
Memoir

1953

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary


Marta Hillers - 1953
    The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.

A Writer's Diary


Virginia Woolf - 1953
    The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world??—??the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision??—??of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”??—??New York Times Book ReviewEdited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

Angel Unaware: A Touching Story of Love and Loss


Dale Evans Rogers - 1953
    But their excitement turned to concern when they were informed that Robin was born with Down's Syndrome and advised to "put her away." The Rogers ignored such talk and instead kept Robin, and she graced their home for two and a half years. Though Robin's time on earth was short, she changed her parents' lives and even made life better for other children born with special needs in the years to come. Angel Unaware is Robin's account of her life as she looks down from heaven. As she speaks to God about the mission of love she just completed on earth, the reader sees how she brought her parents closer to God and encouraged them to help other children in need. This book, which changed the way America treated children with special needs, is now available to a new generation. It is the perfect gift for parents of special needs children, parents grieving the death of a child, or anyone whose life has been touched by a special child.

The Wild Place


Kathryn Hulme - 1953
    They were the human reckage of World War II - the displaced persons.Waiting to receive them was a handful of workers dedicated to one of humanity's most gigantic tasks - the resettlement of more than two million people without a country

Life Among the Savages


Shirley Jackson - 1953
    But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont. Fans of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Cheaper by the Dozen, and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jackson's home and neighborhood: children who won't behave, cars that won't start, furnaces that break down, a pugnacious corner bully, household help that never stays, and a patient, capable husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day."Our house," writes Jackson, "is old, noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books." Jackson's literary talents are in evidence everywhere, as is her trenchant, unsentimental wit. Yet there is no mistaking the happiness and love in these pages, which are crowded with the raucous voices of an extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life.

A House Is Not a Home


Polly Adler - 1953
    Adler's notorious Lexington Avenue house of prostitution functioned as a sort of social club for New York's gangsters and a variety of other celebrities, including Robert Benchley and his friend Dorothy Parker. According to one New York tabloid, it made Adler's name "synonymous with sin."This new edition of Adler's autobiography brings back into print a book that was a mass phenomenon, in both hardback and paperback, when it was first published. A self-consciously literary work, A House Is Not a Home provides an informal social history of immigrant mobility, prostitution, Jewish life in New York, police dishonesty, the "white slavery" scare of the early twentieth century, and political corruption. Adler's story fills an important gap in the history of immigrant life, urban experience, and organized crime in New York City. While most other accounts of the New York underworld focus on the lives of men, from Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York through more recent works on Jewish and Italian gangsters, this book brings women's lives and problems to the forefront.A House Is Not a Home is compellingly readable and was popular enough to draw Hollywood's attention in the early 1960s—leading to a film starring Shelley Winters as Adler. The book has been largely forgotten in the ensuing decades, lost both to its initial audience of general readers and to scholars in women's studies, immigration history, and autobiography who are likely to find it a treasure trove. Now, with a new introduction by Rachel Rubin that contextualizes Adler's life and literary achievement, A House Is Not a Home is again available to the many readers who have come to understand such "marginal" life stories as a special refraction of the more typical American success narrative.

Selected Letters of C.G. Jung 1909-1961


C.G. Jung - 1953
    The correspondence supplies a variety of insights into the genesis of Jung's theories and a running commentary on their development.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Only Parent


Louise Dickinson Rich - 1953
    Rich tells about being a widowed mother of two children, from the time they lived in the wilderness of the North Woods, through their days in a small town where they moved when the kids were of school age, up to their move back home to Bridgewater, Mass.

Commando: Memoirs of a Fighting Commando in World War Two


John Durnford-Slater - 1953
    This is the engaging memoir of the man selected by the British War Office to raise the first commando unit.