Longing for a home in big, wild country that would keep them passionate and young, Jonathan Johnson and his wife, Amy, set out to build a log cabin on his family s land in a remote and beautiful corner of Idaho. But what began as a doable dream for the two of them suddenly looks quite different when, on their first morning in the cabin without electricity, a telephone, running water, or real windows the couple learn that Amy is pregnant.In this lyrical and intimate chronicle of making a home the hard way, Johnson describes the competing joys and anxieties of preparing for fatherhood in a...

Nelson Gross led an outsized life one in which he played many roles: father, brother, husband, politician, entrepreneur. When he was killed by a couple of teenagers in a botched abduction and robbery, the murder shook his family in predictable and terrible ways. For his daughter, Dinah Lenney, the parent of her own young children, the loss sparked a self-reckoning that led to this book, which is both a meditation on grief and a coming of age story. By turns funny and sad, frustrating and fulfilling, her candid memoir conducts readers through marriage and divorce, blended and broken families...

Farmers and pragmatists, hardworking people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin s ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from the birth certificates and gravestones that marked their comings and goings, they left little written record of their lives. So when Lee, the last living Martin, inherited his great-grandfather s eighty acres and needed to know what had brought his family to this pass and this point, he had only the barest of public records and the stirrings of his imagination to connect him...

Day after day, night after night, desperate men come to sit in the black chair next to Charles Barber's desk in a basement office at Bellevue and tell of their travails, of prison and disease, of violence and the voices that plague them. Between the stories, amid the peeling paint, musty odor, and flickering fluorescent light of his office, Barber observes that this isn't really where he is supposed to be and reveals his privileged youth in contrast to his own nightmare of mental illness. By relating these troubled lives to his own, Barber illuminates some of the most disturbing and enduring...

She begins, in the morning, by casing her joints: Can her ankles take the stairs? Will her fingers open a jar? Peel an orange? But it was not always this way for Mary Felstiner, who went to bed one night an active professional and healthy young mother, and woke the next morning literally out of joint. With wrists and elbows no longer working right, she d discovered one of the first signs of rheumatoid arthritis, the most virulent form of a common disease. Out of Joint is her account of living through arthritis, a distinction she shares with seventy million Americans.While arthritis...

Coming of age poor in spirit in the America of plenty is an old story that is yet endlessly new, beginning afresh every time a confused teenager tries to make sense of his privileged place in the world. Eli Hastings got a head start on this when his idealistic, permissive parents divorced, and he sought answers by sneaking out at night to play chicken with freight trains, write graffiti, and get high with friends. This youthful rebellion included an arrest and weekend in jail for drug possession and later jail for an act of civil disobedience during the World Trade Organization...

In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, and learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author's skills as a poet and...

In 1966 twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily intoChina s Cultural Revolution. Disillusion soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he d helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen s Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man s harrowing experience during a time of terror. It is also, in spite of circumstances of remarkable grimness and injustice, an unlikely...

In this compelling memoir, John Skoyles guides us through 1960s New York. Caught between his uncle Fred, a mob associate and man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures on Times Square, the sixteen-year-old finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street. Secret Frequencies spins in graceful turns from deadpan hilarity to unflinching bleakness as Skoyles encounters New York's most comic, absurd, and sometimes dangerous seductions. John Skoyles is the author of a...

It had come to this: breastfeeding her screaming three-month-old while sitting on the cigarette-scarred floor of a union hall, lying to her husband so she could attend yet another activist meeting, and otherwise actively self-destructing. Then Sonya Huber turned to her long-dead grandfather, the family "nobody," for help. Huber's search for meaning and resonance in the life of her grandfather Heina Buschman was unusual insofar as she knew him only through dismissive family stories: He let his wife die of neglect . . . he used his infant son as a decoy when transporting anti-Nazi literature in...