Autobiography of an American Orphan

Autobiography of an American Orphan PDF Author: Walter James
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 1606939114
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
in a confrontation with his past, the author reveals this heart-wrenching depiction of childhood in a New York City multicultural orphanage during the nineteen fifties.Funds were scarce and discipline severe.He describes the relationships between the orphans, the counselors, the nuns, and the priests, with an emphasis on how it shaped his life.As he grows and moves through various houses into his teenage years, the orphanage is faced with a surge of gang members.He befriends a Puerto Rican his own age, which ultimately leads them both to follow his friend’s brother, a heroin pusher and addict, into Spanish Harlem just at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His account entails descriptions of ghetto life there and in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district as well, underlining the devastating effects from the separation of his Irish-American family and siblings.While awaiting his next group of students in an empty classroom in South Korea, Walter James attempted to remember his past in an orphanage. The experiences that surfaced put him in a rage.He knew then that he had to confront his past and exorcize his demons.his book, which began as a psychological self-study, became the emotional account of his story, and took him to places he never thought he would visit again.

Autobiography of an American Orphan

Autobiography of an American Orphan PDF Author: Walter James
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 1606939114
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
in a confrontation with his past, the author reveals this heart-wrenching depiction of childhood in a New York City multicultural orphanage during the nineteen fifties.Funds were scarce and discipline severe.He describes the relationships between the orphans, the counselors, the nuns, and the priests, with an emphasis on how it shaped his life.As he grows and moves through various houses into his teenage years, the orphanage is faced with a surge of gang members.He befriends a Puerto Rican his own age, which ultimately leads them both to follow his friend’s brother, a heroin pusher and addict, into Spanish Harlem just at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His account entails descriptions of ghetto life there and in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district as well, underlining the devastating effects from the separation of his Irish-American family and siblings.While awaiting his next group of students in an empty classroom in South Korea, Walter James attempted to remember his past in an orphanage. The experiences that surfaced put him in a rage.He knew then that he had to confront his past and exorcize his demons.his book, which began as a psychological self-study, became the emotional account of his story, and took him to places he never thought he would visit again.

Street Smart

Street Smart PDF Author: Jim River
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942549376
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
A place of no mercy, no coddling, and no emotion, the streets of New York don't waiver in their inability to care for anyone. In order to survive, you have to take the lessons that are given to you by them and use them to your advantage. After being orphaned not once, but twice, raised by nuns, foster parents, and passed between the homes of his grandmother and father, Jim River learned how to survive and thrive after being tossed aside. His experiences led him to where he is now and helped give him wisdom that can only be gained from the university of the streets. Based on the life of Jim River, the experiences from his childhood, adolescence, and a once-in-a-lifetime road trip down Route 66 are recounted in order to teach the one kind of lesson that can never be learned in a classroom...how to be street smart.

American Orphan

American Orphan PDF Author: Jimmy Santiago Baca
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781558859128
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
This picaresque novel by acclaimed writer Jimmy Santiago Baca follows Orlando Lucero after he is released from a lifetime of imprisonment, first in an orphanage and then in prison, and learns to live on the outside, ultimately finding his way as a writer and artist.

A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains

A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains PDF Author: Victoria Golden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999768501
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
Homeless at age four, he found an extraordinary path through nine decades of U.S. history.

The Orphans' Nine Commandments

The Orphans' Nine Commandments PDF Author: William Roger Holman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 0875654665
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Roger Bechan was six, his mother packed his suitcase and took him to the Oklahoma Society for the Friendless. He never saw her again. No wonder he and his orphan friends omit the tenth commandment—to "honor your father and mother." His long journey through three orphanages and several foster homes is recalled with surprising humor and insight. Eventually, the boy finds a home in a small Oklahoma oil town, obtains degrees from two universities, marries and raises three sons, and becomes the youngest director of the San Francisco Public Library and an award-winning book designer. The book is an unsentimental look at Bechan’s life in the child welfare system of Depression-era Oklahoma.

Invisible Child

Invisible Child PDF Author: Andrea Elliott
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812986962
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Get Book Here

Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “vivid and devastating” (The New York Times) portrait of an indomitable girl—from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott “From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for reimmersion in its Dickensian depths.”—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Library Journal In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter “to protect those who I love.” When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself? A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality—told through the crucible of one remarkable girl. Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the Bernstein Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award

Orphan Bachelors

Orphan Bachelors PDF Author: Fae Myenne Ng
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802162223
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng’s father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger’s son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America’s two slamming doors. As Ng’s father said, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born.” Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors--men without wives or children, Exclusion’s living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng’s family grocery store their haven. Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion’s legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the 60s, to Manhattan in the 80s, to the high desert of California in the 90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. A a child, Ng believed her father’s lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.

Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child PDF Author: Lydia Moland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022671585X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now in paperback, a compelling biography of Lydia Maria Child, one of nineteenth-century America’s most courageous abolitionists. By 1830, Lydia Maria Child had established herself as something almost unheard of in the American nineteenth century: a beloved and self-sufficient female author. Best known today for the immortal poem “Over the River and through the Wood,” Child had become famous at an early age for spunky self-help books and charming children’s stories. But in 1833, Child shocked her readers by publishing a scathing book-length argument against slavery in the United States—a book so radical in its commitment to abolition that friends abandoned her, patrons ostracized her, and her book sales plummeted. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the abolitionist cause, becoming one of the foremost authors and activists of her generation. Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life tells the story of what brought Child to this moment and the extraordinary life she lived in response. Through Child’s example, philosopher Lydia Moland asks questions as pressing and personal in our time as they were in Child’s: What does it mean to change your life when the moral future of your country is at stake? When confronted by sanctioned evil and systematic injustice, how should a citizen live? Child’s lifetime of bravery, conviction, humility, and determination provides a wealth of spirited guidance for political engagement today.

It Takes a Town to Raise an Orphan

It Takes a Town to Raise an Orphan PDF Author: James Brown
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
Life is most definitely what you make of it. Jimmy Brown didn't have a head start or any say on where his life began. He had only two and one-half years with a caring mother before she disappeared from his life. This was due to her inheritance of chromosomes that slowly took over her nervous system-known today as Huntington's Chorea-before she died. Jimmy Brown's story tells how the residents of a small town in the Midwest embraced him in his growing-up years as an orphan. They showed compassion and built unbreakable bonds as Jimmy struggled to leave his only friends at the orphanage and identify with a family after the loss of his mother. His story touches the heart and reminds the reader that love and sharing can make a huge difference in a person's life. Finding the lost child inside all of us and our desires to know we belong and are loved are important elements in any relationship, but especially for an orphan boy. Jimmy wrote this book with the intent to explain the importance of where he came from, who he is, where he'll go, and how every orphaned child can experience a fulfilling journey with a love-filled life, even from strangers. This is an easy read for boys aged 11-17 and for their caregivers. No matter how far Jimmy Brown travels, a little piece of home will always follow. It Takes A Town to Raise an Orphan Boy is Jimmy's second book in a three-book series. Follow him to learn when his third book is available.

The Waiting Child

The Waiting Child PDF Author: Cindy Champnella
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 146685006X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
The inspiring true story of a four-year-old Chinese orphan who convinces her adoptive American family to return to China to rescue the little boy she couldn't forget Adopted by an American family at age four, Jaclyn traveled to her new home with a great burden. Her new family had to leave behind a little boy who had been under her charge at the Chinese orphanage where Jaclyn fought the odds against abandonment, institutionalization, and hunger---not for herself, but on behalf of this even smaller child, whom she regarded as her responsibility. Jaclyn's saga spans oceans and cultures. The Waiting Child is an extraordinary story of human resilience in the face of profound loss and suffering---and a testament to the ability of a loving heart to prevail over great adversity. Jaclyn's unshakable determination to bring to her new life the child she had cared for in the institution, the one she believed with all her heart was "her baby," will change all assumptions made about the human spirit. In the end, this moving story affirms everything that is good and hopeful in life, when, after a two-year effort, the little boy is brought to this country as the adopted son of Jaclyn's American aunt and uncle.