Violence Memoir

Lisa Carlson once embraced a life of passion and adventure. Her days were filled with helping others, exploring far-off places, and savoring the freedom she held dear. Yet, deep down, she longed for a love that would make her feel complete. When she met Dameon, she was certain she had found that missing piece. But her dream of a perfect life unraveled into a chilling nightmare. Soon after their wedding, Dameon revealed a darker side—one that trapped Lisa in a rigid religious cult and an abusive, suffocating marriage. When she became pregnant with their second child, his threats to harm ...

As Rwanda was thrown into chaos during the 1994 genocide, Rusesabagina, a hotel manager, turned the luxurious Hotel Milles Collines into a refuge for more than 1,200 Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees, while fending off their would-be killers with a combination of diplomacy and deception. In An Ordinary Man, he tells the story of his childhood, retraces his accidental path to heroism, revisits the 100 days in which he was the only thing standing between his “guests” and a hideous death, and recounts his subsequent life as a refugee and activist.

What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life - one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Walk Away is the unflinching and inspiring story of how author Michele Leavitt lived through the violence of her adolescence, how that violence haunted her through her escape to college and law school, and how she ultimately came to rise out of it to a place of possibility. It begins with lessons in self-defense from convicted killers, as well as a piece of advice: Do whatever it takes to be the one who walks away. Hard-edged but motivating, this is a story about overcoming the bleakest of obstacles. Michele Leavitt, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, ...

The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable. He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray haired man. He will not be his first victim.

Irene Gut was just 17 in 1939, when the Germans and Russians devoured her native Poland. Just a girl, really. But a girl who saw evil and chose to defy it.

Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. With Popular Crime, James takes listeners on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries—even if we haven’t always taken notice.

The inspiring story of a Black doctor who was deeply affected by the violence that plagued his Brooklyn childhood and later dedicated himself to addressing trauma and violence as public health issues....

Pure Land is the story of the most brutal murder in the history of the Grand Canyon and how McGivney's quest to investigate the victim's life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis. On this journey stretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior, Pure Land offers proof of the healing power of nature and of the resiliency of the human spirit.

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

From teenage gang member to $40 million star of the New England Patriots, from All-American college player to drug addict, murderer, dead by suicide in his jail cell at age 27...you think you know the Aaron Hernandez story? You don’t.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

The Shot Caller is both a never-to-be-forgotten insider’s look at the violent world of gangs and prison life and a powerful, modern demonstration of how God will go to the most miraculous extremes to reach even the worst sinners. Casey Diaz came to this country when he was just two years old, the oldest son of El Salvadorian immigrants who settled in the barrios near downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s. An abusive family life propelled Casey into street gangs at the age of eleven and he rose quickly within the ranks of the Rockwood Street Locos to become their leader.

The author shares her story of childhood incest, abuse , rape, and domestic violence. She tells of her ability to overcome these events. Adult content.

An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.

Growing up in rural Oregon, Brandon Wolf grappled with the devastating loss of his supportive mother and with the embedded racism and homophobia of a community that made him feel like an unwelcome stranger. After the lack of connection and role models led him down a spiral of risky behavior, Wolf escaped to survive. In Orlando, he found what he’d been searching for: belonging—in a community that was a safe space with people he’d come to call his chosen family.

Kelly Sundberg’s husband, Caleb, was a funny, warm, supportive man and a wonderful father to their little boy Reed. He was also vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know that when she fell in love, and for years told herself he would get better. It took a decade for her to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book, she offers an intimate record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her long, difficult awakening, and presents a haunting, heartbreaking glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous relationships.

Ruth M. Glenn wasn’t surprised the first time her husband beat her. She was hurt and disappointed but after a childhood in a broken and violent home, she was not surprised. After all, this was just the way things were, right? It was only after she lay bleeding in a carwash parking lot, after being shot three times by him, that Glenn resolved—if she managed to survive—to spend the rest of her life standing up to domestic violence.

An eyewitness account to an event that changed history Nerdy innocent Patty is desperate to escape the confines of a conservative upbringing, but when she enrolls at Kent State University can she survive the upheaval of the Seventies Vietnam War era? When she narrowly escapes the bullets fired at students on May 4, 1970, she resolves to dedicate her life to her new husband and her unborn child. Is it too late when she realizes she’s put herself in even greater danger? In a stunning parallel to our own times, Surviving: A Kent State Memoir, explores the coming of age of a young adult. In ...

Aged 15, Lorna was living on the streets of Soho, trying to avoid abuse and rape whilst battling an addiction to heroin. She worked as an escort and a stripper, lost custody of her daughter, and relapsed multiple times. But, somehow, and unlike most of the people imprisoned by the streets, Lorna didn't just survive but she flew.