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Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother, Urrea moved to San Diego at age three. In this memoir of his childhood, Urrea describes his experiences growing up in the barrio and his search for cultural identity.
Semaj Matthews is a private detective whose life revolves around helping people locate their lost loved ones. The one person he's been unsuccessful in finding is his own birth father, but the reason is that he never wanted to find him. He often tells himself that he doesn't care. He's become a successful man in spite of the fact that his only male role models were the great dads he watched on television each week. In the midst of planning his wedding to the love of his life, Semaj receives an anonymous tip that turns everything he's ever believed upside down. The caller tells him the name of his father, and he's shocked to learn that it's a man he's admired his entire life—America's favorite TV Dad, Wayne James. Frustrated, Semaj lashes out at the world and finds himself on the wrong side of the law, where only the Heavenly Father can save him and his earthly father.
"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.
Born in a prison and removed from his drug-dependent mother, rejection is all that 7-year-old Alex knows.
Even though Mariam, her siblings, and their friend Kevork become orphans after the 1909 massacre of Armenians in Turkey's Adana Province, their sustaining hope, as six years later in 1915 they face "deportation," is to be reunited with the remaining members of their family.
The orphan trains stopped running in 1929 and the foster care system began. Hollywood relieved Depression era problems on the subject with films starring Shirley Temple. "Room for One More" with Cary Grant depicted the need for foster families. "Blossoms In the Dust" starring Greer Garson dealt with the social stigma faced by both the parents and the children. Having immigrant parents in the mix added more problems. This was my family. We were a family torn apart as our parents fought to regain their children while the system held them hostage to the moral tenor of the times. Once the State took us a promise was made, a promise believed. Why, in the end, did we then feel twice abandoned, twice betrayed?
When Laura Page returns to the remote Holderness village of Welwick, it is to try and discover the mystery of her mother Susannah's early life. Now a prosperous businesswoman in Hull, Susannah never speaks of her childhood, when she was brought up with the terrible stigma of bastardy - of being nobody's child. Susannah's own mother, Mary-Ellen, born into poverty and living in a labourer's cottage, had the misfortune to fall in love with a local landowner's son. She was his one and only great love, but was unable to acknowledge their child and had to watch her growing up in hardship. As the years passed and Laura began to be curious about her mother's past, so too did she become aware of the mystery about her own father.
John Robinson had the worst possible start in life. Taken into care at four months old, he was left in abusive foster homes for most of his childhood. At fourteen he was sent to a detention centre for arson. Gravitating towards a life of crime, he moved from borstal to the streets to psychiatric hospital, a scarred, tattooed, broken and angry young man. Yet God had plans for John. He would go on to run the Eden bus ministry: frontline youth buses which travel the toughest parts of Manchester with the gospel. The teams befriend young people and sometimes accompany them to court. 'My passion is, and I pray always will be, for those who feel downtrodden, hurt and rejected,' says John Robinson. 'They feel like scum, and wake up each day with nothing and no one. I know exactly what that feels like.'
