She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, Thailand, Vietnam, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, started schools, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, and Laos. A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated to the Somaly Mam Foundation.
A riveting, and beautiful memoir of tragedy and hopeBorn in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, raw, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia.
Emboldened by her newfound freedom, and security, education, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind. Written in exquisite, unflinching prose, spare, the road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls.
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When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge
In a mesmerizing story, Chanrithy Him vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields. She gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists.
Bastards: A Memoir
After her father leaves the family, she is raised among a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. Explores how identity forms love, and love, identity. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Then, mary's mother sends mary away to oklahoma to live with her maternal grandparents, who have also been raising her younger sister, no longer able to care for the only daughter she has left at home, Rebecca.
But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she’s sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Searing. Because mary was adopted by her grandparents, Mary’s mother, Peggy, while her brother, Jacob, is legally her sister, is legally her nephew.
Living in oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. When mary is legally adopted by her grandparents, the result is a family story like no other.
Redemption: A Story of Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Freedom Behind Bars
And, courage, it is a story of sisterhood, and justice finally served. Redemption is the story of how Stacey learned to be free while living behind bars. It is also an extraordinary portrait of what happened after she found herself in prison and how she grew determined to live positively, even triumphantly, despite her circumstances.
Missouri state law, a disbelieving prosecutor, and Stacey’s own fragile psyche conspired against her: She was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Redemption is stacey’s candid memoir of her harrowing childhood and the pain and protective love of her sister that led her to that horrifying night.
Ultimately, and most profoundly, she learned the healing power of forgiveness. After spending as many years in prison as she had out of it, on January 10, 2009, outgoing Missouri governor Matt Blunt commuted Stacey’s life sentence. It is a coming-of-age story set in a parallel universe of a maximum-security prison.
Season In Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda
For decades, Robert R. Fowler was a dominant force in Canadian foreign affairs. In one heart-stopping minute, all of that changed. Fowler’s capture, release and subsequent media appearances have helped shed new light on foreign policy and security issues as we enter the second decade of the “War on Terror.
A season in hell is fowler’s compelling story of his captivity, told in his own words, but it is also a startlingly frank discussion about the state of a world redefined by clashing civilizations.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of society. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling. Lynsey addario was just finding her way as a young photographer when September 11 changed the world.
What she does, is to document, and candor, often in their most extreme moments, with clarity, beauty, the complex lives of others. It’s what i do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and tells the riveting story of her headline-making kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war.
Addario takes bravery for granted but she is not fearless. A brutally real and unrelentingly raw memoir. Kirkus starred reviewwar photographer lynsey addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.
She makes a decision she would often find herself making—not to stay home, face the chaos of crisis, but to set out across the world, not to lead a quiet or predictable life, and make a name for herself.
Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir
Gripping, and triumphant, heartbreaking, this family memoir will resonate throughout the ages. Within weeks chipo, the girl-child whose name means gift, would come to mean everything to them. One afternoon, a critically ill infant was brought to the orphanage from a village outside the city. Against a background of war, disease, and unbearable uncertainty about the future, terrorism, Chipo’s story emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love—and dogged determination—can sometimes achieve.
For tucker, the only full-time american correspondent in Zimbabwe, the declaration was a direct threat to his life and his wife’s safety, and an ultimatum to their decision to adopt the child who had already become their only daughter. His wife, a savvy black woman whose father escaped the Jim Crow South for a new life in the industrial North, would not be deterred in her resolve to welcome Chipo into their loving family.
Soon she and tucker decided to alter their lives forever—they would adopt Chipo. Foreign correspondent neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe in 1997. Raised in rural mississippi in the sixties and seventies, Tucker was familiar with the mores associated with and dictated by race.
Hazard: A Sister's Flight from Family and a Broken Boy
His behavior was erratic, noisy, and sometimes self-harming. It was this heartfelt conflict that drove Margaret to succeed in order to make up for her family’s sorrow. Hazard is an “achingly honest, courageous memoir” of an indelible bonds between siblings: the one between Combs and her sister, and the deep and remorseful one she has with her disabled brother.
When she and roddy were reunited years later, the tenuous connection they once had was frayed—but it was soon strengthened with a renewed love and affection borne from Margaret’s own emotional and psychological growth. But margaret loved her brother Roddy even as she resented him. Defending him from bullies, she tried to balance her desire to help him with the pursuit of her own dreams.
Growing up, margaret Combs knew her brother was different from everyone else. A touching, family, highly poignant portrait” of love, and a woman’s journey of growing up with a severely autistic sibling Kirkus Reviews.
Something for the Pain: One Doctor's Account of Life and Death in the ER
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The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan
The underground girls of kabul charts their dramatic life cycles, while examining our own history and the parallels to subversive actions of people who live under oppression everywhere. At the heart of this emotional narrative is a new perspective on the extreme sacrifices of Afghan women and girls against the violent backdrop of America’s longest war.
. The underground girls of kabul is anchored by vivid characters who bring this remarkable story to life: azita, who prays with Shahed, a female parliamentarian who sees no other choice but to turn her fourth daughter Mehran into a boy; Zahra, the undercover female police officer, the tomboy teenager who struggles with puberty and refuses her parents’ attempts to turn her back into a girl; Shukria, now a married mother of three after living for twenty years as a man; and Nader, as they both remain in male disguise as adults.
Jenny nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom. An investigative journalist uncovers a hidden custom in Afghanistan that will transform your understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl.
In afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune.
Wave
. She has written an engrossing, to the year she met her english husband at cambridge, to her childhood in colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, to the birth of her children, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, from her family’s home in London, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, unsentimental, as she emerges reluctantly, somehow, over the ensuing years, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, still alive within her.
From the Hardcover edition.