Frank Carlson Library

"Every family has a story. For some of us, our family of origin is a solid foundation that feeds our confidence and helps us navigate life's challenges. For others, it's a source of pain, hurt, and conflict that can feel like a lifelong burden. In this empowering guide, licensed therapist and bestselling relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab offers clear advice for identifying dysfunctional family patterns and choosing the best path to breaking...

"Do you have a parent who is invalidating, critical, demanding, or hateful? In this important and much-needed guide, you'll learn how to set boundaries; uncover the hidden motives behind your parent's behavior; put a stop to repetitive, hurtful interactions; and foster healthier relationships. There's no sugarcoating it--if you grew up with a parent who made you feel invalidated or unloved as a child, your pain is very real. In some cases, you may...

Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the seventeen-year-old Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from his home in Gambia and transported as a slave to colonial America. In this account Haley provides an imaginative rendering of the lives of seven generations of black men and women.

America between the Civil War and World War I serves as the background for the struggles of the Trask family.

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

"What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family--Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters--could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families...

Larry McMurtry burst onto the American literary scene with a force that would forever redefine how we perceive the American West. His first three novels― Horseman, Pass By (1961),* Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966)― all set in the north Texas town of Thalia after World War II, are collected here for the first time. In this trilogy, McMurtry writes tragically of men and women trying to carve out an existence on the plains,...

"In this memoir that spans dozens of countries worldwide, a young girl and her family adopt one new identity after another and run from both the law and the secrets that will eventually catch up to all of them"-- By the age of nine, Diamond had lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities. She didn't know that she was born into a family of outlaws fleeing from the highest international law enforcement agencies,...

In some parts of northwestern Nigeria, mothers studiously avoid making eye contact with their babies. Some Chinese parents go out of their way to seek confrontation with their toddlers. Japanese parents almost universally co-sleep with their infants, sometimes continuing to share a bed with them until age ten. Yet all these parents are as likely as Americans to have loving relationships with happy children. If these practices seem bizarre, or their...

This family success story centers on Maggie Comer, and unskilled, illiterate Black woman who rose from abject poverty in the rural South to become the mother of five college-educated children.