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No child should grow up like Sandi Smith. At age three, she was locked in a closet. By age eight, she was behind the wheel of a car, and by age nine, she was forced to hunt deer for food. She was bartered as a child laborer to pick pinto beans and forced to clean motel rooms by her beautiful, schizophrenic mother and perpetually angry, inventor father. For six months, she lived alone in a trailer, stealing from the local grocery store to eat. In the rich tradition of The Glass Castle and Educate
"In the humid dark of a eucalyptus-scented room, a woman named Hui lies on a mattress telling stories about herself to her listener, a little girl. She talks about her identity as the child of an immigrant, her feelings about being in a mixed-race marriage, her opinions on mental health. But as her stories progress, it becomes clear a volatile secret lurks beneath their surface. There are events in Hui's past that have great significance for the person she's become, but that have gone missing fr
"George Templeton Strong (1820-1875) was perhaps the most trenchant civilian observer of the experience of the Civil War in the North. His diary, alternating between despair and exultation and punctuated by crises and explosive episodes, unfolds like a brilliant historical novel. Strong was particularly attuned to the shifting moods in the North, to what he called 'the great mass of selfishness, frivolity, invincible prejudice and indifference to national life' that hampered the Union war effort
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