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Gal: A True Life by Ruthie Bolton
BIOGRAPHY BOLTON
Born in 1961 to a thirteen-year-old mother in South Carolina, Ruthie Bolton endured abandonment, abuse, and loss-and grew into a hardened, troubled young woman. Then she met a man who offered her something she'd never known, something she thought was a dirty word: love. The only challenge left was to accept it.

All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg
BIOGRAPHY BRAGG
When childhood is complicated by poverty and an abusive, alcoholic father, it becomes focused on survival. Were it not for the dedication and strength of his mother, Rick Bragg may have never left northeast Alabama and become a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
BIOGRAPHY BROWN
This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
BIOGRAPHY KAYSEN
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele - Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles - as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Smashed: Story Of A Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas
BIOGRAPHY ZAILCKAS
From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual."

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz
305.23 K
The story of two boys struggling to survive in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime & neglect.