Frank Carlson Library

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You destroys our complacency about who among us can commit unspeakable atrocities, who is subjected to them, and who can stop them. From age four to eighteen, Sue William Silverman was repeatedly sexually abused by her father, an influential government official and successful banker. Through her eyes, we see an outwardly normal family built on a foundation of horrifying secrets that long went unreported,...

Mort Zachter's childhood revolved around a small shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side known in the neighborhood as "the day-old bread store." It was a bakery where nothing was baked, owned by his two eccentric uncles who referred to their goods as "the merchandise." Zachter grew up sleeping in the dinette of a leaking Brooklyn tenement. He lived a classic immigrant story-one of a close-knit, working-class family struggling to make it in America. Only...

Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen's artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender. In "Aperture," she considers how she has contributed to her autistic brother's isolation from family and from the world. "Theft" investigates her mother's romantic stories about...

New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home. In one section...

In The Small Heart of Things, Julian Hoffman intimately examines the myriad ways in which connections to the natural world can be deepened through an equality of perception, whether it's a caterpillar carrying its house of leaves, transhumant shepherds ranging high mountain pastures, a quail taking cover on an empty steppe, or a Turkmen family emigrating from Afghanistan to Istanbul. The narrative spans the common-and often contested-ground that supports...

The recollections and yarns, historical meditations and reportage brought together in Mountain Blood display a sensibility formed by the harsh, outlandishly beautiful terrain of the American West. Will Baker's tales range from Nebraska to Peru and tell of a boy's first trout, a bar brawl over a woman, and the vise-like grip of gold over all of the Americas. They spring from an imagination shaped by wild, circuitous mealtime stories of prospectors...

Increase is Lia Purpura's chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet, from the moment she confirms her pregnancy as "A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test," through "the X of his crossed feet in sleep" as her child's world begins. Purpura's...

In Niger, where access to rail and air travel requires overcoming many obstacles, roads are the nation's lifeline. For a year in the early 1990s, Peter Chilson traveled this desert country by automobile to experience West African road culture. He crisscrossed the same roads again and again with bush taxi driver Issoufou Garba in order to learn one driver's story inside and out. He hitchhiked, riding in cotton trucks, and traveled with other bush taxi...

There are only two ways to live our life, according to Albert Einstein: one is as if nothing is a miracle; the other, as if everything is a miracle. Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is a book about how the impossible became possible-about things that happened in China and America to the people Wang Ping grew up with, met, and befriended along her journeys between these two distant rivers. This is also a story about water, alive...