8 results for "Autobiography"

Undaunted: surviving Jonestown, summoning courage, and fighting back

Speier, Jackie
An inspiring and powerful memoir of surviving the Jonestown massacre and becoming a fearless voice against injustice and inequality by California congresswoman Jackie Speier. Jackie Speier was twenty-eight when she joined Congressman Leo Ryan's delegation to rescue defectors from cult leader Jim Jones's Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Ryan was killed on the airstrip tarmac. Jackie was shot five times at point-blank range. While recovering from what would become one of the most harrowing tragedies in recent history, Jackie had to choose: Would she become a victim or a fighter? The choice to survive against unfathomable odds empowered her with a resolve to become a vocal proponent for human rights. From the formative nightmare that radically molded her perspective and instincts to the devastating personal and professional challenges that would follow, Undaunted reveals the perseverance of a determined force in American politics. Deeply rooted in Jackie's experiences as a widow, a mother, a congresswoman, and a fighter, hers is a story of true resilience, one that will inspire other women to draw strength from adversity in order to do what is right--no matter the challenges ahead.
Little A 2018 198 pages

Vision on fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish revolution

Goldman, Emma
� Vision on Fire is a historical treasure.��Howard Zinn This carefully chosen collection features the most important writings from the turbulent last four years of Emma Goldman�s life. This incredible follow-up her popular autobiography, Living My Life , reveals her struggles with the contradictions of the Spanish Revolution and her efforts to maintain integrity and vision in the heat of political activism. An influential and well-known anarchist, Emma Goldman was an early advocate of free speech, birth control, feminism, and workers� rights. David Porter received his PhD from Columbia University. He has taught for two decades at Empire State College.
AK Press 2006 347 pages

All rivers run to the sea: memoirs

Wiesel, Elie
In this first volume of his two-volume autobiography, Wiesel takes us from his childhood memories of a traditional and loving Jewish family in the Romanian village of Sighet through the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the years of spiritual struggle, to his emergence as a witness for the Holocaust's martyrs and survivors and for the State of Israel, and as a spokesman for humanity. With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.
A.A. Knopf 1995 432 pages

Hitler, Stalin and I: an oral history

Kovály, Heda,Třeštíková, Helena
The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street --based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression--was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.
DoppelHouse Press 2018 160 pages

Dual allegiance: an autobiography

Dunkelman, Ben
Ben Dunkelman grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Toronto. Kicked out of several schools for being a hell-raiser, he was sent off to Europe and the Middle East in the 1930s, gaining hard experience that would serve him well in the years to come. On his return he worked for the family business, but when World War Two came he lost no time in enlisting. Dunkelman describes the war from the ordinary soldier's viewpoint, without embellishment or glorification. Yet he was a hero to his men--and to his country. After the war Dunkelman returned to Canada, but in 1948 he went to war again--this time to fight for the young nation of Israel in the struggle to establish a Jewish state. Dual Allegiance is the exciting, fast-paced story a man and the passions he was willing to fight for--and if necessary, die for.
Crown Publishers 1976 336 pages

Light from the ashes: social science careers of young Holocaust refugees and survivors

Peter Suedfeld
How did Nazi persecution affect the later lives of children and young adolescents? In Light from the Ashes, eighteen eminent social scientists trace the connection between their early wartime experiences and their adult research careers, personality, and values. Autobiographical essays describe their trauma of fleeing from or surviving the Holocaust during childhood or adolescence, and how this influenced their eventual choice of work and general outlook on life. The introductory and closing chapters set these narratives in historical and theoretical context and discuss their broader psychological and social implications. A unique feature of the book is that its contributors were children or adolescents when they became targets of Nazi persecution. Each chapter covers the contributor's experiences during and after the war, his or her professional education, development, and activities, and the perceived connection between those factors. The wider impact of the early years on adult attitudes, political orientation, ethics, religion, family life, important values, and personality characteristics is also discussed. The book will be of primary interest to psychologists and to literary scholars interested in narrative and autobiography. It will be relevant to historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, especially social science; and to scholars and researchers of all disciplines interested in the impact of traumatic violence, dislocation, war, persecution, and emigration (particularly, but not only, related to the Holocaust) on the subsequent lives of children and adolescents. It will also be valuable to psychologists, psychiatrists, and other scientists working in the field of stress and coping .For the general reader, the book offers the reminiscences of articulate and introspective people who as children experienced a wide variety of adverse circumstances and responded to them--then and later--in a wide variety of mostly adaptive ways. Readers intrigued by first-person narratives of war, persecution, and resilience will find the book of great interest. Peter Suedfeld is Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia.
University of Michigan Press 2000 446 pages

I light a candle

Turgel, Gena
Out of the ashes of the Nazi concentration camps came an extraordinary love story which caught the public's imagination at the end of World War II. This autobiography tells how the author survived the camps and met her husband, a sergeant working for British intelligence, when he arrived to round up the SS guards for interrogation. Norman Turgel, then a young man, was among the first to enter the camp on April 15, 1945, and like so many battle-hardened soldiers, was deeply shocked and angered by the human suffering and degradation he witnessed. Yet it was here, in the midst of the living evidence of the most terrible suffering that man has ever inflicted on his fellow human beings, that he fell in love at first sight. Gena, a young Polish Jewish inmate of the camp, who had experienced indescribable loss, hardship, and deprivation, was to survive and find happiness against all odds. This is Gena's story: the autobiography of a woman whose strength of spirit enabled her to keep her mother alive and thereby save herself. When Gena married Norman in Germany in October 1945 in a wedding dress made of British parachute silk, the British Army Rabbi proclaimed their love a symbol of hope after so much death. But, Gena still lights a candle in memory of her three brothers and two sisters who died in the Holocaust. And, while her own story has a happy ending, she can never forget.
V. Mitchell 1995-03-30 160 pages