"For Julia Pandl, the rite of passage into young-adulthood included mandatory service at her family's restaurant, where she watched as her father-who was also the chef-ruled with the strictness of a drill sergeant. At age twelve, Julie was initiated into the rite of the Sunday brunch, a weekly madhouse at her father's Milwaukee-based restaurant, where she and her eight older siblings before her did service in a situation of controlled chaos, learning...

"Ilene Beckerman's first book "illuminates the experience of an entire generation of women," wrote the New York Times Book Review in a full page of praise for Love, Loss, and What I Wore. It became a bestseller and inspired the hit Off-Broadway play by the same name. Now, Gingy returns with her fifth illustrated treasure, The Smartest Woman I Know-a tribute to the insightful woman who raised her. It's been said there's nobody as smart as an old...

"In the spring of 2001, Carol Eron Rizzoli and her husband Hugo bought a dilapidated farmhouse in the tiny village of Royal Oak, Maryland, on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. They spent two years transforming it into a bed and breakfast, which took them twice as long and cost three times as much as they had originally estimated (on the back of a napkin). As they struggled to restore the house and open the B&B, Carol and Hugo were also slowly acquainting...

Loves of Yulian is the poignant conclusion to the three-part memoir recounting the author's harrowing WWII escape from occupied Poland to America. After fleeing over the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, eight-year-old Yulian and his resourceful but self-involved mother, Barbara, are on board a ship to Rio de Janeiro to await their turn for immigration to the United States. A former Warsaw socialite, Barbara has no marketable skills, only her looks,...

First published in 1957, The World Regained describes Dennis McEldowney's increasing disability caused by a congenital heart condition, the operation at Green Lane Hospital in 1950 that relieved this condition, and the mixed emotions he felt upon rediscovering the outside world. In 1958 the book won the Hubert Church Memorial Prize, the only award then given for prose. This re-issue features a new introduction and illustrations.--Provided by the publisher....

My name is Samantha and I'm an alcoholic." "At the time of writing, I've been sober for 13 years, 11 months and 16 days. And yes I still count. I promised I would never speak about it publicly until my children understood what that meant, that mommy was an alcoholic. I think they may have understood long before I did." From Whiskey to Water is the no-holds-barred memoir by one of South Africa's most loved radio talk show hosts, Sam Cowen. Having kept...

With his classic Immigrant Chronicle, Peter Skrzynecki harnessed the universal language of poetry. Now, in his powerful memoir The Sparrow Garden, he travels from the Displaced Persons camps of Germany to the suburban battlegrounds of outer Sydney and taunts of "reffo" and "dago". In unforgettable style, he leads us on a bracing rollercoaster of emotions and boyhood adventures. The Sparrow Garden is also the deeply personal story of one man's complex,...

"Beginning with the author's great-grandmother's affair with a Gypsy boy in 1869, this warmhearted memoir chronicles the Gypsy life in a very close-knit community in the UK's Black Country. From a lifetime teeming with incident, George Locke shares the best stories from the old days, including run-ins with the police, gamekeepers, and Gypsy-haters, as well as his fond memories of his grandmother, Big Louie, who smoked a pipe from the age of three...

"Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry...I Had Lost The Hearse! Funerals and the all the things that accompany them are traditionally somber, contemplative events in which the bereaved look to their undertaker to guide them through that most difficult of times. Of course, sometimes tradition gets thrown under the bus. From a dysfunctional family who turn their...

Catastrophe is the story of a Jewish mother who discovers, much to her shock and horror, that not only is her once well-grounded, beautiful, talented, and King David-educated daughter gay, but she's also a down-and-out drug addict, hopelessly hooked on highly addictive Cat, a synthetic amphetamine containing the substance methcathinone. When Anne Lapedus Brest discovers the secret life of her daughter Angela, this mother's formerly safe life of Shabbos...