2010 ~ One Book One College - Glass Castle: Resources

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most. But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives--and the country that shaped and nourished them--with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic. "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy -- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling-- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors--yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

"Toni McNaron and her early encounters with racism in pre-civil rights Alabama, and her personal struggle with sexual identity. An account of one woman's emotional, psychological, & intellectual self-actualization over five decades." Memoir

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death,The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family's captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang's family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Together with her sister,Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.

Every day, newspapers and television news programs present stories on the latest controversies over healthcare and medical advances, but they do not have the space to provide detailed background on the issues. Websites and weblogs provide information from activists and partisans intent on presenting their side of a story. But where can students - or even ordinary citizens - go to obtain unbiased, detailed background on the medical issues affecting their daily lives? This volume in the Health and Medical Issues Today series provides readers and researchers a balanced, in-depth introduction to the medical, scientific, legal, and cultural issues surrounding mental health and its import in today's world of healthcare. This volume in the Health and Medical Issues Today series provides everything a student requires to understand the issues involved in mental health and provides a springboard for further research into the issue.

Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This book is about them, the so-called mole people, living alone and in communities, in subway tunnels and below subway platforms. It is about how and why people move underground, who they are, and what they have to say about their lives and the "topside” world they’ve left behind.

Soon to be a major motion picture from DreamWorks, The Soloist is a beautifully told story of friendship and the redeeming power of music.

"This is a portrait of homelessness, focusing on two women in Boston and the people Hirsch meets at the Pine Street Inn homeless shelter. Through these Hirsch begins to understand the difference between those who seek help from the shelters and soup kitchens and those who won't. She also learns how and why homelessness has grown to the extent that it has and discovers the shortcomings of subsidized housing and job training programs."
Memoir, Homeless women

In 1984, Liebow left his position as director of anthropological research at the National Institute of Mental Health to undergo treatment for cancer. He also volunteered to work at local soup kitchens and homeless shelters, where he conducted the research for this book. Here the author of Tally's Corner investigates and documents the patterns and routines of homeless women.

"Waking Up in America" is the compelling, inspirational autobiography of a man who has emerged as a pioneer in the field of caring for the growing population of impoverished and homeless Americans and as a force for social change. Dr. Pedro Jose Greer, the son of Cuban immigrants, has traveled from the trash-littered, drug-infested streets of one of America's toughest neighborhoods to the offices of corporate and political power brokers. Throughout his odyssey, he has become known for his tireless efforts to bring health care to society's "untouchables" -- homeless drug addicts, hookers, alcoholics, runaways, or people who have simply lost their way. His story is also the story of all the people whose lives he has changed forever, and it proves that hope exists for every person, no matter how dire his or her circumstances.