Sociology Memoirs

A young African American millennial filmmaker's funny, sometimes painful, true-life coming-of-age story of trying to make it in New York City - a chronicle of poverty and wealth, creativity and commerce, struggle and insecurity, and the economic and cultural forces intertwined with "the serious, life-threatening process" of gentrification.

Childhood friends from Trinidad, Colin Warner and Carl King grew into men on opposite sides of prison bars after Colin was arrested for murder in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. With no evidence against him, Colin was wrongfully convicted and wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades. But time and walls could not break the friends' bond. Carl's extraordinary resolve, sacrifice, and courage were Colin's last rays of hope in a harrowing struggle for freedom and justice.

Little Baghdad is a loving, historical, and personal account of an indigenous group of people who were forced out of their ancestral home, Mesopotamia. They found refuge in the United States, specifically Sterling Heights where according to archaeologists Native Americans lived more than 11,000 years ago. Through her dreamlike poetic travels into homes, museums, and neighborhoods, Weam Namou, author, filmmaker, and journalist tells the story of how this ancient and unique group known as Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians who still speak a modern form of Aramaic) have survived decades of oppression ...

In his brilliant new memoir, Pat Nevin takes us on a journey to the less glamorous side of football. From Tranmere to Kilmarnock, he plays some of the best football he's ever played. Then, in an unprecedented twist of fate, finds himself both player and Chief Executive of Scottish First Division club Motherwell.

The college basketball scandals of 1951 were to basketball what the 1919 Black Sox scandals were to baseball - a loss of innocence, after which the game would be permanently tarnished, its relationship to power and big money firmly established. In Scandals of '51, Charley Rosen identifies all the major figures - including players, coaches, gangsters, clergymen, politicians - that made up the elaborate network that controlled the outcomes to many games or protected those who did so.

Glen Walsh and Steven Alward were childhood friends in their tight-knit working-class community in Shortland, on the outskirts of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both proud altar boys at the local Catholic church, they went on to attend the city's Catholic boys' highs schools: Glen to Marist Brothers and Steven to St Pius X. Both did well: Steven became a journalist, Glen a priest. But when Glen discovered another priest was sexually abusing boys, he reported the offending to police, breaking Canon Law and his vows to the Catholic 'brotherhood' in the process.

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.

One in 3,000 people is born with neurofibromatosis. It affects all of them in different ways. For some, neurofibromatosis is as clear as the tumors on their face. For others, it hides beneath the surface, creating tumors that destroy hearing, vision, and more. Many of them are misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and often simply missed by a world of medicine that doesn't have a full grasp on all the effects of NF.

Richard Hoffman sometimes felt as though he had two fathers: the real one who raised him and an imaginary version, one he talked to on the phone, and one he talked to in his head. Although Hoffman was always close to the man, his father remained a mystery, shrouded in a perplexing mix of tenderness and rage. When his father receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hoffman confronts the depths and limitations of their lifelong struggle to know each other.

Hockey culture: it’s a commonly used phrase inside the game, glorifying sacrifice, toughness, loyalty, and a sense of identity. Justin Davis viewed this culture as something he was lucky enough to experience. After all, he’d won a Memorial Cup after leading the tournament in scoring, and he’d been drafted by the Washington Capitals. “In my mind,” he says, “I was the normal one.” Unfortunately, after stepping outside the game, he began to recognize the racism, sexual abuse and bullying that was so deeply ingrained in the sport.

When Nina Sharma meets Quincy while hitching a ride to a friend’s Fourth of July barbecue, she spots a favorite book, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in the back seat of his cramped car, and senses a sadness from him that’s all too familiar to her. She is immediately intrigued—who is this man? In The Way You Make Me Feel, Sharma chronicles her and Quincy’s love story, and in doing so, examines how their Black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she moves through and understands the world.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

So rapid has this national transformation been that it has taken place within the lifetimes of these remarkable young sportsmen. Colombia Es Pasión! How a New Generation of Cyclists Changed a Nation explores the lives and dreams of each of Colombia's leading cyclists. Theirs are inspiring stories of overcoming poverty and violence, sickness and corruption - of the emergence of the indigenous to global sporting glory.

LOVE LETTERS, LOVE SONGS, CONFESSIONS, ADMISSIONS, REALIZATIONS, RECOGNITIONS, ACCOUNTABILITY, JOURNAL ENTRIES..This is a letter from the heart. For anyone who needs to relate to others, or anyone who needs to reach out and touch, this honest recollection of feelings and thoughts will touch your heart. Inspirational and touching, truthful and soulful, this is a great dedication to the true depiction of love, when it strikes deeply.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

Dr Jalees Ansari, a doctor from Malegaon involved in 80 blasts, including some on railway tracks, was supposed to be a quiet, peace-loving medical professional. Fahmida Ansari, a housewife and mother of two from the Jogeshwari slums of Northwest Mumbai, physically planted the bombs herself in a bus and taxis and returned home as if nothing had happened. What drove them to such violent designs? What were their compulsions?

More than 50 years ago, an assassin's bullet robbed us of one of the most eloquent voices for 20th-century human rights and justice. Drawing on a new generation of scholarship about the civil rights era, To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of King as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class, and his call for "nonviolent resistance" to all forms of oppression, including economic injustice.

In this fascinating historical adventure, broadcaster and author Selina Mills takes us on a journey through the history of blindness in Western Culture to discover that blindness is not so dark after all. Inspired by her own experience of losing her sight as she forged a successful journalistic career, Life Unseen takes us through a personal and unsentimental historical quest through the lives, stories and achievements of blind people—as well as those sighted people who sought to patronize, demonize and fix them.

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she'd died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang's father built her a coffin. Over the next 15 years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial.

An eye-opening, topical, and moving memoir of one woman’s experience of working-class poverty in America. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teenage mothers on her maternal side, Smarsh grew up in a family of labourers trapped in a cycle of poverty. She learned about hard work and also absorbed painful lessons about economic inequality, eventually coming to understand the powerful forces that have blighted the lives of poor and working-class Americans living in the heartland.