The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption


Barbara Bisantz Raymond - 2007
    Part social history, part detective story, part exposé, The Baby Thief is a riveting investigative narrative that explores themes that continue to reverberate today.

A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France


Miranda Richmond Mouillot - 2015
    Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him.  To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents.  As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory.  She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive – making a home in the village and falling in love.With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.

Deadly Innocence


Scott Burnside - 1995
    Billed as the crime of the century in Canada, this case has received a great deal of media coverage on both sides of the border. Includes eight pages of photos.

Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside The Lebensborn


Ingrid von Oelhafen - 2015
    I was stolen as a baby to be part of one of the most terrible of all Nazi experiments: Lebensborn.’ Watch the 2016 interview with the author. In 1942 Erika, a baby girl from Rogaška Slatina, the Slovenian town that was renamed Sauerbrunn (another town with the same name exists in Austria, which made it harder for the author to find her roots after the war) by Nazi occupiers of the northern part of Slovenia, the only present-day European nation that was trisected and completely annexed into both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during WWII, was one of many children that were stolen from their parents by the Nazi occupiers, declared an ‘Aryan’, her true identity erased, and sent to German couples who could not have their own children under the pretense that children were saved from dysfunctional families, struck by prostitution and whatnot, so she was renamed Ingrid, and given new surname "von Oelhafen".After the war, Erika/Ingrid began to uncover her true identity, the full scale of the Lebensborn scheme and the Nazi obsession with bloodlines became clear -- including the kidnapping of up to half a million babies like her and the deliberate murder of children born into the program who were deemed ‘substandard.’The Lebensborn program was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race, leaving behind thousands of displaced victims in the wake of the Nazi regime.Written with insight and compassion, this is a powerful meditation on the personal legacy of Hitler’s vision, of Germany’s brutal past and of a divided Europe that for many years struggled to come to terms with its own history.

After You: Letters of Love, and Loss, to a Husband and Father


Natascha McElhone - 2010
    Presents a story of a magical love affair and all-consuming grief, of being a mother alone and trying to live for the future.

The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing


Betsy Bonner - 2020
    An ID in a nearby purse reads "Atlantis Black." The police report states that the body does not seem to match the identification, yet the body is quickly cremated and the case is considered closed.So begins Betsy Bonner's search for her sister, and the unraveling of the mysterious final months before her disappearance, alleged overdose, and death. With access to Atlantis’ email and social media accounts, Bonner attempts to decipher and construct a narrative: frantic and unintelligible Facebook posts, alarming images of Atlantis with a handgun, Craigslist companionship ads, DEA agent testimony, video surveillance, police reports, and various phone calls and moments conjured from memory. Through a history only she and Atlantis shared—a childhood fraught with abuse and mental illness, Atlantis's precocious yet short rise in the music world, and through it all an unshakeable bond of sisterhood—Bonner finds questions that lead to only more questions and possible clues that seem to point in no particular direction. In this haunting memoir and piercing true crime account, Bonner must decide how far she will go to understand a sister who, like the mythical island she renamed herself for, might prove impossible to find.

Daddy's Little Secret: A Daughter's Quest to Solve Her Father's Brutal Murder


Denise Wallace - 2016
    In her quest to assist the detectives, the daughter and author discovers deadly secrets that could help her father's killer escape the death penalty, should she come forward.From the Book: "He cruised by slowly, peering intently over his steering wheel at the well-manicured grounds. Though he had been brought up in the Bible Belt of North Carolina, Wes had not attended worship services there. He had gone to the church on this day for another reason: Derek Carney.Carney was a twenty-two-year-old white youth who had been sleeping on the church grounds. Wes wanted to once again offer him a place to stay for the night and was hoping the young man would take him up on the offer this time. The young heroin addict had discovered that he could shoot up in the bathroom of the church despite his filthy, disheveled appearance and not get caught. Most other churches kept their facilities locked at night, but the pastor, Reverend Bill Withers, had a notoriously kind heart. The first time he had come across Carney sleeping on the church lawn, he had awoken him, invited him in for counsel, and taken him to breakfast.As Wes passed in his car the reverend gave him a wave from the open door of the church. Wes waved back at him and grinned, then threw his head back and took a long drag on his Marlboro cigarette."From the author: What surprises me about the book is my love of Florida that comes through. Not only is the book an inside look at the complex and fascinating psyche of my father, it is also a historical look at south Florida and it's colorful past. The reader gets to experience places like E. R. Bradley's Saloon on the island of Palm Beach, where patrons were known to have danced on the bar as it became a rowdy party scene after dark.

The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas- How a Cat Brought a Family the Gift of Love


Julia Romp - 2010
    For Julia already had her hands full with her son George, who suffered from autism. Quiet and withdrawn, ten-year-old George appeared lost in his own world, upset by the slightest change in his routine and unable to make friends with other children.But George wasn’t scared by the little black-and-white visitor; instead his face lit up at the sight of him and before long George was inseparable from his new friend Ben. It was the miracle Julia had been hoping for; George began to play with Ben and create stories about their adventures together, excitedly recounting them at tea-time. For Julia, it was a magical way to communicate with her son, and Ben had made it possible. That’s why when Ben went missing Julia knew she had to do everything in her power to bring him home…Captivating, uplifting and geniunely touching, A Friend Like Ben is a remarkable true story of the extraordinary devotion and empathy between a little boy and his cat, and a mother's determination to make her son happy again."You see, Ben's not just a cat - he is George's window onto the world, the key to the door which unlocks him. Call me daft, but Ben is like my second son, so I had to find him when he went missing. Because if not, I was more scared than I can say that I would never see the light in George's eyes again. There was only one way to make sure it came back: I had to bring Ben home." ~ Julia

Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story


Charlie McDowell - 2013
    His followers multiplied and he got the attention of everyone from celebrities to production studios to major media outlets such as Time and Glamour.  Now Dear Girls breaks out of the 140-character limit as Charlie imagines what would happen if he put the wisdom of the girls to the test.  After being unceremoniously dumped by the girl he was certain was “the one,” Charlie realized his neighbors’ conversations were not only amusing, but also offered him access to a completely uncensored woman’s perspective on the world. From the importance of effectively Facebook-stalking potential girlfriends and effortlessly pulling off pastel, to learning when in the early stages of dating is too presumptuous to bring a condom and how to turn food poisoning into a dieting advantage, the girls get Charlie into trouble, but they also get him out of it—without ever having a clue of their impact on him.

Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus


Sandi Toksvig - 2019
    It's about a bus trip really, because it's my view from the Number 12 bus (mostly top deck, the seat at the front on the right), a double-decker that plies its way from Dulwich, in South East London, where I was living, to where I sometimes work - at the BBC, in the heart of the capital. It's not a sensible way to write a memoir at all, probably, but it's the way things pop into your head as you travel, so it's my way'.From London facts including where to find the blue plaque for Una Marson, 'The first black woman programme maker at the BBC', to discovering the best Spanish coffee under Southwark's railway arches; from a brief history of lady gangsters at Elephant and Castle to memories of climbing Mount Sinai and, at the request of a fellow traveller, reading aloud the Ten Commandments; from the story behind Pissarro's painting of Dulwich Station to performing in Footlights with Emma Thompson; from painful memoires of being sent to Coventry while at a British boarding school to thinking about how Wombells Travelling Circus of 1864 haunts Peckham Rye;from anecdotes about meeting Prince Charles, Monica Lewinsky and Grayson Perry to Bake-Off antics; from stories of a real and lasting friendship with John McCarthy to the importance of family and the daunting navigation of the Zambezi River in her father's canoe, this Sandi Toksvig-style memoir is, as one would expect and hope, packed full of surprises. A funny and moving trip through memories, musings and the many delights on the Number 12 route, Between the Stops is also an inspiration to us all to get off our phones, look up and to talk to each other because as Sandi says: 'some of the greatest trips lie on our own doorstep'.

Face It


Debbie Harry - 2019
    I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up, yet I was very serious.’ BRAVE, BEAUTIFUL AND BORN TO BE PUNK DEBBIE HARRY is a musician, actor, activist and the iconic face of New York City cool. As the front-woman of Blondie, she and the band forged a new sound that brought together the worlds of rock, punk, disco, reggae and hip-hop to create some of the most beloved pop songs of all time. As a muse, she collaborated with some of the boldest artists of the past four decades. The scope of Debbie Harry’s impact on our culture has been matched only by her reticence to reveal her rich inner life – until now.In an arresting mix of visceral, soulful storytelling and stunning visuals that includes never-before-seen photographs, bespoke illustrations and fan art installations, Face It upends the standard music memoir while delivering a truly prismatic portrait. With all the grit, grime, and glory recounted in intimate detail, Face It recreates the downtown scene of 1970s New York City, where Blondie played alongside the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie.Following her path from glorious commercial success to heroin addiction, the near-death of partner Chris Stein, a heart-wrenching bankruptcy, and Blondie’s break-up as a band to her multifaceted acting career in more than thirty films, a stunning solo career and the triumphant return of her band, and her tireless advocacy for the environment and LGBTQ rights, Face It is a cinematic story of a woman who made her own path, and set the standard for a generation of artists who followed in her footsteps – a memoir as dynamic as its subject.

Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet


Heather Poole - 2012
    Cruising Attitude is a Coffee, Tea, or Me? for the 21st century, as the author parlays her fifteen years of flight experience into a delightful account of crazy airline passengers and crew drama, of overcrowded crashpads in “Crew Gardens” Queens and finding love at 35,000 feet. The popular author of Galley Gossip, a weekly column for AOL’s award-winning travel website Gadling.com, Poole not only shares great stories, but also explains the ins and outs of flying, as seen from the flight attendant’s jump seat.

Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills


Charles Henderson - 1986
    He lies in one position for days, barely twitching a muscle, able to control his heartbeat and breathing. His record has never been matched: 93 confirmed kills. This is the story of Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, Marine sniper, legend of military lore.

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi


Mitchell Zuckoff - 2014
    13 Hours presents, for the first time ever, the true account of the events of September 11, 2012, when terrorists attacked the US State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya. A team of six American security operators fought to repel the attackers and protect the Americans stationed there. Those men went beyond the call of duty, performing extraordinary acts of courage and heroism, to avert tragedy on a much larger scale. This is their personal account, never before told, of what happened during the thirteen hours of that now-infamous attack. 13 Hours sets the record straight on what happened during a night that has been shrouded in mystery and controversy. Written by New York Times bestselling author Mitchell Zuckoff, this riveting book takes readers into the action-packed story of heroes who laid their lives on the line for one another, for their countrymen, and for their country. 13 Hours is a stunning, eye-opening, and intense book--but most importantly, it is the truth. The story of what happened to these men--and what they accomplished--is unforgettable.