Showing results for "The Children" in Historical

Cornelius Vanderbilt parlayed a $100.00 investment into the largest private transportation company in the world while creating an American Dynasty in New York, Newport, Vermont, and Asheville, North Carolina. This history of his family and their lush, opulent lifestyle is filled with juicy stories and fun tidbits about their lives in the Gilded Era.

In his memoirs, Willy Beckel describes many aspects of everyday life that shaped the lives of children and young people during the German Empire in the years around 1912. They remain exciting to read, as they describe a world long gone that still has relevance today. The life of an urban extended family, usually taking centre stage, is not omitted from this homage to his parents, which recounts many major events in Leipzig during the imperial era. His memoirs are good intellectual and timeless food for thought.

Based on the true story of her mother, Mona Golabek describes the inspirational story of Lisa Jura's escape from Nazi-controlled Austria to England on the famed Kindertransport. Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura has a wonderful life in Vienna. But when the Nazis start closing in on the city, life...

This is an unconventional biography of an unconventional woman. Eglantyne Jebb moved from drawing rooms to war zones, often defying expectation and at times breaking the law. Although not fond of individual children, she founded Save the Children and originated the revolutionary concept of children's human rights. Clare Mulley brings to life the brilliant, charismatic, passionate, and compassionate woman, whose work has saved millions of lives and permanently changed the way the world treats children. Save the Children ambassador Joely Richardson narrates this extraordinary story.

In this highly personal memoir, Christopher Meyer tells the story of his father, Flight Lieutenant Reggie Meyer, an RAF pilot, who was shot down and killed over the Greek island of Ikaria. Through his mother’s diary and family papers Christopher Meyer pieces together a wartime story of love, tragedy and sacrifice.

From two-time National Book Award nominee Melissa Fay Greene comes a profound and surprising account of dogs on the front lines of rescuing both children and adults from the trenches of grief, emotional, physical, and cognitive disability, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The Underdogs tells...

In this memoir of his childhood, Harvey recreated the daily struggles of life in postwar rural Ireland and bomb-shattreed London. Ireland, just 30 years removed from 700 years of British domination, had scarcely emerged from the 19th century. London, shrouded in fog and greasy coal soot, was the epicenter of an exhausted debtor nation, still clinging to an image of British exceptionalism as a young Queen Elizabeth took the throne and the empire circled the drain.

Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all possible odds.

In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was in full swing. Her parents veered from being determined farmers to being blind drunk, whilst Alexandra and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart songs from sun bleached rocks.

It's a warm and muggy Saturday night in August of 1942. The Nazis are liquidating the ghetto of Shedlitz, an industrial town east of Warsaw, Poland. Zippa, a 27-year-old Jewish woman, finds temporary shelter in a small attic, together with her baby daughter and 100 frightened Jews. When the Nazi noose is tightened around her neck, Zippa asks her husband Jacob, a Jewish policeman in the ghetto, to save their little girl from certain death. The young father manages to smuggle his wife and daughter to the gentile part of town.

The heartbreaking story of the love affair between Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, and Olga Ivinskaya—the true tragedy behind the timeless classic. When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of...

A highly unsettling blend of true crime and coming-of-age memoir— The Stranger Beside Me meets Prep—that presents an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of girlhood within Manhattan’s exclusive prep-school scene in the early 1990s, and a thoughtful meditation on adolescent obsession...

Enid Elliot Linder was the daughter of a butler and a lady’s maid in service in some of England’s grandest country houses. Evoking the lost world of a childhood ‘below stairs’, Linder’s touching memoir describes how her life changed as Britain headed towards war. After the family moved to a Marylebone tenement, her father sought work in London restaurants whilst battling personal demons. Meanwhile Linder’s aunt was nanny to a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists as they grew in influence.

Since 1066, when William the Conqueror took the throne, English and Scottish kings have sired at least 150 children out of wedlock. Many were acknowledged at court and founded dynasties of their own. Others were only acknowledged grudgingly or not at all. In the 20th century, this trend for royals to father illegitimate children continued, but the parentage, while highly probable, has not been officially recognized. This book is a genuinely fresh approach to British kings and queens, examining their lives and times through the unfamiliar perspective of their illegitimate children.

This compelling memoir takes listeners through the eyes of a child surviving World War II in Nazi-occupied Poland. As a nine-year-old, the author witnessed his father being herded into a truck - never to be seen again. He, his mother, and sister fled to Warsaw to live in disguise as Catholics under the noses of the Nazi SS, constantly fearful of discovery and persecution. A sobering reminder of the personal toll of the Holocaust on Jews during World War II, this book is a harrowing portrait of one child’s loss of innocence.

Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in Georgia. In this remarkable book, religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story, offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations' inhabitants.

Why do people keep deep secrets about their lives and ancestry? In Family Declassified, Katherine Fennelly applies her expertise as a social science researcher to answer this question regarding her maternal grandfather, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the US one hundred years ago.

Krystyna Carmi's childhood in Obertyn was full of happy moments. Her childhood was filled with friends, both Polish and Ukrainian, and she attended a Ukrainian school. Krystyna Carmi was gifted with an extraordinary memory, and in this memoir, she vividly recounts the history of her family and her life before, during, and after World War II. But her happy childhood did not last long; World War II changed it forever. The worst was still ahead for the Jewish community in Obertyn and for Krystyna's family.

When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to pursue her career. In 1998, Helga received a letter asking her to visit Traudi, now 90-years old, before she dies. Mother and daughter have met only once after Traudi left, on a disastrous visit where Helga first learnt the...

The Education of Henry Adams is among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. Henry Adams was the grandson of a president and the great-grandson of another one. He was also the son of the American Ambassador to England, and his secretery. As such he rubbed elbows, literally, with Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and with many of the great figures of his time.