In 1961 Paige was put up for adoption, a more taboo and secretive topic than it is today. Paige's adoptive family chose not to focus on the adoption, but instead function as a regular family with natural children. However, being adopted made her feel vulnerable and unreal. She longed to know more about her true self. In Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of Adoption and Identity, Paige tells stories from the perspective of a child and adolescent, growing up with a closely guarded secret. Through vignettes, Paige relates feelings about her adoption to forming and maintaining relationships, caring for...

A Fiddler's Journey is an epistolary memoir, told through letters written by Judy Justice to her family. With a scholarship to study "avant-garde music," Cincinnatian Judy Justice sailed to Germany in May 1960 to break traditions and taste new personal and professional freedoms in a country that was experiencing a rebirth of freedom of its own. Even more significant; however, Judy's trip took place a mere fifteen years after the United States and Germany had been at war. World War II ended in the European theater in 1945, leaving much of Germany destroyed and its people trying to rebuild...