Family & Childhood Books - Page 2

The Privilege of Youth : A Teenager's Story of Longing for Acceptance and Friendship

Dave Pelzer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

More than six million readers can attest to the heartbreak and courage of Dave Pelzer’s story of growing up in an abusive home. His inspirational books have helped countless others triumph over hardship and misfortune.

Now this former lost boy who defeated insurmountable odds to emerge whole and happy at last takes us on his incredible odyssey toward healing and forgiveness. In The Privilege of Youth, Pelzer supplies the missing chapter of his life: as a boy on the threshold of adulthood. With his usual sensitivity and insight, he recounts the relentless taunting he endured from bullies; but he also describes the joys of learning and the thrill of making his first real friends - some of whom he still shares close relationships with today. He writes about the simple pleasures of exploring a neighborhood he was just beginning to get to know while trying to forget the hell he had endured as a child.

From high school to a world beyond the four walls that were his prison for so many years, The Privilege of Youth charts this crucial turning point in Dave Pelzer’s life. This brave and compassionate memoir from the man who has journeyed far will inspire a whole new generation of readers.

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Today Show Book Club #3)

Haven Kimmel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 200 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Really well written 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Well written memoir. I think most people who read this book get the fact that though she was loved by her parents, her childhood was far less than perfect. I for one did not read this book and think "wow, what a refreshing a wonderful memoir of a lovely and decent childhood". It was cleverly written from a child's perspective so that we adult readers would read enough into what she was writing to understand that though her childhood was, in many ways, quite dysfunctional and disturbing at times, the author herself saw life from a different perspective. This could have easily been written as a 'woe is me' kind of memoir but it would have been far less interesting and real. I appreciate her humor and positive light. There were many times when I related entirely to what she was writing (I too grew up in a dysfunctional family in a very small town in Indiana) and many times I laughed right out loud. I really enjoyed this book.

Editorial Review:

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period–people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.

Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Dylan Thomas, Trina Schart Hyman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The voice 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

If you have read A Child's Christmas in Wales, you know that it has to be a classic. But you can't fully appreciate it until you have heard Dylan Thomas read it. What a deep, expressive, poetic voice. For years, I have listened to the recording on a Caedman record. It is wonderful to have it on a CD.

from a little bit of Wales comes universally human warmth... 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I love this story, as do all my children, who, from their earliest years, have not much struggled with the density of the language nor the scatteredness of the story. 5 of my 8 great-grandparents are from Wales, and the remaining 3 have the blood in them as well, so maybe it is like drinking water for us.:-D Our minds are all scattered, and words, even English words ;-D, fall on us in clumps....which makes it doubly hard to keep a clean house. LOL

The sort of prose-poetry imaginative way of seeing and describing the world unique to Welshwomen and Welshmen and Welshchildren, which does not seek to keep up the pretense that history can be separated from myth, story and desire, and which requires loving with eyes wide open to [and eventually embracing] one's own and others' bumps, bruises and idiosyncracies included, is extraordinarily well represented here. So, by the way, is speaking and listening to the close and Holy darkness!

My favorite version isthe one illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. To me she has captured the complexity of the Welsh personality best, though i have nothing to say against the other illustrators praised in these reviews. I DO have a warning for you: there are some skinny versions flying about which do not have the poem-story complete and correct. This sort of work cannot suffer removal or modification, IMHO.

gbg

Editorial Review:

Christmas treasure.

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited

Paula Bernstein, Elyse Schein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 68 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn’t until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What’s more, after being separated as infants, she and her sister had been, for a time, part of a secret study on separated twins.
Paula Bernstein, a married writer and mother living in New York, also knew she was adopted, but had no inclination to find her birth mother. When she answered a call from her adoption agency one spring afternoon, Paula’s life suddenly divided into two starkly different periods: the time before and the time after she learned the truth.
As they reunite, taking their tentative first steps from strangers to sisters, Paula and Elyse are left with haunting questions surrounding their origins and their separation. And when they investigate their birth mother’s past, the sisters move closer toward solving the puzzle of their lives.

Praise for Identical Strangers:

Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award

“Remarkable . . . powerful . . . [an] extraordinary experience . . . The reader is left to marvel at the reworking of individual identities required by one discovery and then another.”
–Boston Sunday Globe

“[A] poignant memoir of twin sisters who were split up as infants, became part of a secret scientific study, then found each other as adults.”
–Reader’s Digest (Editors’ Choice)

“[A] fascinating memoir . . . Weaving studies about twin science into their personal reflections . . . Schein and Bernstein provide an intelligent exploration of how identity intersects with bloodlines. A must-read for anyone interested in what it means to be a family.”
–Bust

“Identical Strangers has all the heart-stopping drama you’d expect. But it has so much more–the authors’ emotional honesty and clear-eyed insights turn this unique story into a universal one. As you accompany the twins on their search for the truth of their birth, you witness another kind of birth–the germination and flowering of sisterly love.”
–Deborah Tannen, author of You’re Wearing That?

Falling Leaves

Adeline Yen Mah

List Price: $18.95 By: Penguin Audio Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $14.97

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 346 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Would you like some cheese.... 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 3 people found this review helpful.

...with that whine? Self serving, whiney, horrible. I just don't get it. No comparison to anything by Frank McCort, Amy Tan or anyone like them.

Falling Leaves- FANTASTIC read! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The heartbreaking story of an unwanted, abused, neglected child who never ceases to try and earn her family's affections. If you have ever experienced these feelings,no matter what your race, you will LOVE this book. It moved me to tears and I could not put it down once I started reading it.

A memorable story that haunts you long after reading. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book was beautifully written and gripping from the start. The reviewer who complained of Adeline's "whining" tone, is being unfair. I don't see her as whiny, but rather somewhat detached as she recounts the emptiness of her childhood. In fact, I want her to scream and kick and rebell, maybe even whine, yet she does none of that. Whining is even more emotion than I think she allows herself to feel. She endured a childhood with certain material wealth but vastly lacking in emotional wealth.
Adeline takes the emotional abuse because she knows nothing else. Her father is the true villain for caring more about his trophy wife than his own family's happiness. He is oblivious to his children's emotional needs. He disappoints more than the stepmom for choosing to abandon children that he chose to bring into the world. He manipulates and plays them one against the other for his own selfish desires.
After long periods of thinking about this book, I've come to my own understanding of why she managed to salvage a happy life out of such a miserable upbringing. It is the very belief, albeit blatently false, that her family would one day accept her, that makes her continue to push for their love and not give up. Children are frequently unable to find fault with their loved ones. It is that very "innocence" that protected her from worse harm, the knowledge that acceptance would never, ever, be forthcoming.

Editorial Review:

In this poignant, remarkable memoir, Adeline Yen Mah tells the haunting and beautiful story of her painful childhood. The story of one woman's search for love and acceptance in an oppressive family, "Falling Leaves" was a "New York Times" bestseller.

Fargo Rock City : A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

Chuck Klosterman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 70 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

From a grown-up, then anti-metal, punker 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

While I think that this book is deservedly the black sheep of the Klosterman books, its still enjoyable. What this book lacks is any sense of flow... I never caught a real story or any purpose. It just seemed like a series of rants on liking metal (pop/ hair metal in particular) that were taped and then transcribed. Klosterman still has that really approachable style that's fun and thoguhtful.

While I'd like to laugh at him for liking crappy bands, Klosterman's experiences are similar to most any youth who feels a strong connection to music. I know that they're not unlike my feelings as a young teen becoming obsessed with hardcore records back then... though I had one up on Chuck 'cos I was living in Philly, and not rural North Dakota, back in the day.

Typical Klosterman; funny, absurd, and thoughtful... I suppose a lot of other readers are turned away by what they see as a lack of direction or movement in the book.

Editorial Review:

Empirically proving that -- no matter where you are -- kids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman's hilrious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakotoa (population: 498). With a voice like Ace Frehley's guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock -- his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet -- but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize.

Hope's Boy: A Memoir

Andrew Bridge

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the moment he was born, Andrew Bridge and his mother Hope shared a love so deep that it felt like nothing else mattered. Trapped in desperate poverty and confronted with unthinkable tragedies, all Andrew ever wanted was to be with his mom. But as her mental health steadily declined, and with no one else left to care for him, authorities arrived and tore Andrew from his screaming mother's arms. In that moment, the life he knew came crashing down around him. He was only seven years old.

Hope was institutionalized, and Andrew was placed in what would be his devastating reality for the next eleven years--foster care. After surviving one of our country's most notorious children's facilities, Andrew was thrust into a savagely loveless foster family that refused to accept him as one of their own. Deprived of the nurturing he needed, Andrew clung to academics and the kindness of teachers. All the while, he refused to surrender the love he held for his mother in his heart. Ultimately, Andrew earned a scholarship to Wesleyan, went on to Harvard Law School, and became a Fulbright Scholar.

Andrew has dedicated his life's work to helping children living in poverty and in the foster care system. He defied the staggering odds set against him, and here in this heartwrenching, brutally honest, and inspirational memoir, he reveals who Hope's boy really is.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Superior Autobiography 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This memoir by the Israeli novelist Amoz Oz is a fascinating depiction of both European and Israeli Jews. Although the author was born in Israel, his parents and relatives were all European Jews displaced by the events leading up to World War II.The graphic depiction of what anti-semitism does to an individual explains the need for a Jewish state more fully than any essay could, and the history of the first war against the Jews by the Arabs, aided openly by the British army which then controlled Palestine, and which started the very evening in November, 1947 of the U.N. vote to establish a Jewish homeland, not, as I previously thought, in May, 1948, when the state of Israel was officially declared, lends credence to the unfortunate belief that the Arabs will never accept the state of Israel. This makes the book sound incredibly sad, and of course it is in one sense. But in another, by creating the milieu of these early settlers in Jerusalem and their intellectual strengths and interests, and also the new Jew of the kibbutz, to which Oz went after the death of his mother and his father's remarriage, and where he lived and wrote for 30 years, the book turns out to be the best one I have read about this frantic period of Jewish history.

Editorial Review:

Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this bestselling and critically acclaimed new work by "one of Israel's most gifted and prolific authors" (Helen Epstein, The Forward) is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.

It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.

(12/27/2005)

A Brother's Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse

Richard B. Pelzer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

good book! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 5 people found this review helpful.

good book! i like the part where richard's mom makes him eat garbage, and tabasco sauce! read it if you like richard pelzer as much as me!

Great Service! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Thanks for the fast delivery and great book - it was in excellent condition. I will definitely purchase from you again. Thanks.

Editorial Review:

In A Child Called It, Dave Pelzer shocked the world with the horrifying tale of the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of his mother and his brother, Richard. Fortunately for Dave, he was removed from the household at 12. Richard was not so lucky. Needing a new scapegoat for her alcoholic rages, Richard became Mrs. Pelzers new It. He began receiving nocturnal beatings and the denial of clothing and food. He had Tabasco sauce poured down his throat, and was kicked, slapped, and punched to the point of hospitalization. By now shed learned how to hit so his wounds didnt showshe wasnt about to let Richard leave, too. This is the story of how one little boy found the courage to survive years of physical abuseand how the human spirit can triumph over even the most severe circumstances.

My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King

Reymundo Sanchez

Amazon Price: $20.48 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Chicago Review Press Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $12.88

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Total reviews: 90 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

You Must Be Joking! 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I was definitely interested in reading this book, but the fact that the "spanish" written in the book was more like spanglish, incorrect grammar, with spanish definitions completely inaccurate made me believe that this was not truly an autobiographical memoir. But when the author proceeds to state that Puerto Ricans were being deported back the island during this time of his life in the book. That is when I finally said ENOUGH!!! Puerto Ricans are AMERICAN CITIZENS BORN TO A COMMOM WEALTH NATION THAT BELONGS TO THE USA!! Before an author begins to write a "true autobiographical/memoir" get your facts straight! A proud Puerto Rican knows his/her facts! Interesting book to read, but please, take it with a grain of salt, and remember; all that you read is not always true!

Editorial Review:

Looking for an escape from childhood abuse, Reymundo Sanchez turned away from school and baseball to drugs, alcohol, and then sex, and was left to fend for himself before age 14. The Latin Kings, one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in America, became his refuge and his world, but its violence cost him friends, freedom, self-respect, and nearly his life. This is a raw and powerful odyssey through the ranks of the new mafia, where the only people more dangerous than rival gangs are members of your own gang, who in one breath will say they’ll die for you and in the next will order your assassination.