Search results for ""Farrar, Straus and Giroux""

Blending memoir with social history, Clair Wills movingly explores the holes in the fabric of modern Ireland, and in her own family story.Clair Wills shines a brilliant, unsparing light into the dark recesses of her family's historyand the history of Ireland. Missing Persons is a stunningly eloquent exploration of how truth-telling, secret-keeping, and outright lies are part of all family storiesindeed, the stories that unite all communitiesand how truths, secrets and lies can both protect and destroy us. Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle and Hang the MoonWhen Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a mother-and-baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet Clair was never told of Mary's existence. How could a whole familya whole countryabandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing

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A transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing. In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America.Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame itto make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spiritnot to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verveAnother Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our h

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The Dark Child is a distinct and graceful memoir of French author Camara Laye's youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea. Long regarded as Africa's preeminent Francophone novelist, Laye (1928-1980) herein marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood, which is marked by animistic beliefs and bloody rituals of primeval origin. Eventually, he must choose between this unique place and the academic success that lures him to distant cities. More than an autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a modern world. A passionate and deeply affecting record, The Dark Child is a classic of African literature.

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The Control of Nature is John McPhee''s bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strageties and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her - stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

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When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestorsColonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainlanda hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred years; the rest, including the English laird who owned Colonsay, were incomers. Donald McNeill, the crofter of the title, was working out his existence in this last domain of the feudal system; the laird, the fourth Baron Strathcona, lived in Bath, appeared on Colonsay mainly in the summer, and accepted with nonchalance the fact that he was the least popular man on the island he owned. While comparing crofter and laird, McPhee gives readers a deep and rich portrait of the terrain, the history, the legends, and the people of this fragment of the Hebrides.

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