biography

Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi. He endured a difficult childhood in the Jim Crow South.

Why would a mother ever abandon her child? And is an abandoned child destined to grow up and make the same mistake? These were some of Melissa Cistaro's questions after her mother drove off without explanation one summer. Decades later Melissa finds herself at her dying mother's bedside with six days to find answers, fearful that she could do the same to her own little girl. Then she discovers a cache of letters her mother wrote but never sent and stumbles on the answers she'd been seeking.

The extraordinary true story of the downfall of one of England's wealthiest families. The Fitzwilliam family founded a coal-mining dynasty and lived in the breathtaking Wentworth estate, the largest private home in England. When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in twentieth-century England, valued at billions of pounds. It was a lifeline to the tens of thousands of people who worked either in the family's coal mines or on their expansive estate. The earl also left behind four sons, and the family line seemed assured. But was it? As Bailey retraces the Fitzwilliam family history, she uncovers a legacy riddled with bitter feuds, scandals, (including Peter Fitzwilliam's ill-fated affair with American Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, one of President John F. Kennedy's sisters), and civil unrest as the conflict between the coal industry and its miners came to a head.

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu (the capital of Somalia), two-thirds of the city's population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother was murdered by militia and his father was somewhere in hiding. He was swept along in the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world. Betrayed by the people he thought would care for him, he lived his childhood in an adult world he was wary and skeptical of. He lived in the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi and the desert towns deep in the Ethiopian hinterland. By the time he was on the cusp of adulthood, he had a wide array of talents. At the age of seventeen, he was adept at being a street hustler, brokering relationships between hard-nosed businessmen and Somali refugees. He courted a famous beauty and married her. Buoyed by his success so far, he went to Johannesburg, South Africa. There he began an adventure in a country richer and more violent that he could possibly ever imagined.

Rafia Zakaria's Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, feeling the situation for Muslims in India was precarious and that Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time it did. Her family and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan's military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule--a campaign that particularly affected women. The political became personal for Zakaria's family when her Aunt Amina's husband did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of her family. The Upstairs Wife dissects the complex strands of Pakistani history, from the problematic legacies of colonialism to the beginnings of terrorist violence to increasing misogyny, interweaving them with the arc of Amina's life to reveal the personal costs behind ever-more restrictive religious edicts and cultural conventions.

Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson became part of history when she created a haven for civil rights leaders in her home in Selma, Alabama. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his lieutenants, needed a place to plan and re-group as they mapped out their strategy for civil rights. Richie Jean was happy to give them her home.

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young Jewish woman living in Viennna when World War II started. She was placed into a ghetto, then into a slave labor camp. Months later she escaped and knew she would be hunted so she went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as a nursing assistant, carefully hiding her past. There she met, fell in love with, and married Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member. He did not listen to her eventual confession that she was Jewish and instead worked with her to keep her identity a secret. Paralyzed with fear, she lived her life terrified that she would be found out. Edith even refused all painkillers as she gave birth to her daughter, afraid that in an altered state of mind she would reveal her secrets. When her husband was captured by the Soviets, and she was bombed out of her house, she hid as the invading Russian soldiers created mayhem in the streets. Despite the risk to her life, Edith documented her years as a survivor, keeping everything including photographs she took inside labor camps. Now part of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these form a new chapter in Holocaust history--what it was like for a Jewish survivor in Nazi Germany who was able to live and work openly.

In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu's great-great-grandfather Liu's Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed only with curiosity, moved to China to work in his uncle's semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu set out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured both China and his heritage and finally complete his family's long march back home. Provides a revealing, lively perspective on contemporary Chinese society from the point of view of a Chinese- American coming to terms with his hyphenated identity.

When actor, writer, producer Trudi-Ann Tierney first went to Kabul, with the promise of work, it was in an illicit bar. Today she is head of drama at Afghanistan's biggest TV broadcaster, Moby Media Group, where she oversees about half a dozen programs, including the country's most popular soap Raaz Hai Een Khana (The Secrets of This House). Occasionally as madcap as Catch-22 and as absurd as One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, this is a part-hilarious, part-nail-biting account of a talented TV executive working in a war zone and an environment that is dangerous to women. The author's sense of humour and her love of the Afghan people shines through.