personal narratives

"In this searing memoir, Iran-born author Rahimeh Andalibian tells the story of her family: their struggle to survive the 1979 revolution, their move to California, and their attempts to acculturate in the face of teenage rebellion, murder, addiction, and new traditions. Andalibian struggles to make sense of two brutal crimes: a rape, solved by her father, and a murder, of which her beloved oldest brother stands accused. She takes us first into her family's tranquil, jasmine-scented days of prosperity in their luxury hotel in Mashhad, Iran. Their life is ruptured by the 1979 revolution as they flee: first to the safety of a mansion in Tehran, next to a squalid one-room flat in London, and finally to California, where they suffer a different kind of revolution. Struggling to adjust to a new host culture, they soon discover that although they escaped Iran, they are not free from their own lies and hidden truths. As the family comes to grips with their new home, the strength of their bonds are tested by love, loyalty, compassion, hate, pain, loss--and the will to survive. Heartbreaking and intimately told, this is a universal story of healing, rebirth after tragedy, and hard-won redemption"--.

Chronicles the life of Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author, and recounts his experiences of Nigeria's birth as a nation, his own upbringing as a man and a writer and his time as an ambassador during the Biafran War.

A young woman's eyewitness account of China's Cultural Revolution and its lasting effects on Chinese society and personal lives.

A collection of writings in which African-American men and women share their impressions and experiences from the Civil War.

The author describes his privileged life in Havana before he was sent at the age of eleven to the U.S. in 1962, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution.

"The Times" reporter Janine di Giovanni offers a firsthand chronicle of the ordeal of the Balkan people during the continuing breakup of Yugoslavia.

Profiles more than three hundred watercolors, sketches, maps, and diagrams which Robert Knox Sneden created during the Civil War.

A biography of Hideko Tamura Snider, discussing her life before, during, and after the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.