Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors--some eminent, some less well known--who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist. All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity--a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope.

The entire Macleod clan is haunted by secrets--and young "Bud" Macleod doesn't realize he carries the biggest secret of all.

Roger Atwood knows more about the market for ancient objects than almost anyone. He knows where priceless antiquities are buried, who is digging them up, and who is fencing and buying them. In this fascinating book, Atwood takes readers on a journey through Iraq, Peru, Hong Kong, and across America, showing how the worldwide antiquities trade is destroying what's left of the ancient sites before archaeologists can reach them, and thus erasing their historical significance. And it is getting worse. The discovery of the legendary Royal Tombs of Sipan in Peru started an epidemic. Grave robbers scouring the courntryside for tombs--and finding them. Atwood recounts the incredible story of the biggest piece of gold ever found in the Americas, a 2,000-year-old, three-pound masterpiece that cost one looter his life, sent two smugglers to jail, and wrecked lives from Panama to Pennsylvainia. Packed with true stories, this book not only reveals what has been found, but at what cost to both human life and history.

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

Rosie Kelvey is a spirited and willful prairie woman of the early twentieth century whose ache to pursue her own desires goes against the harsh and limiting moral landscape of her time. She has what the neighbours teasingly call “two men on her hook”: an older, passive husband and a virile, young lover. But life is perilous for those who are poor and female and, undeterred by the misfortunes that befall her wayward sisters, Rosie is inexorably drawn to an all-consuming flame. Through Rosie’s eyes and in her fresh, lusty voice, Fisher Lavell explores themes of poverty, loss, and upheaval. Based closely on the hardscrabble lives of the author’s errant aunties, A Seven Year Ache paints their tragedies, heartaches, and passions on a large and vibrant Prairie canvas.

The T&T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul gathers leading voices on various aspects of Paul's biography into a thorough reconsideration of him as a historical figure. The contributors show how recent trends in Pauline scholarship have invited new questions about a variety of topics, including his social location, his mode of subsistence, his cultural formation, his place within Judaism, his religious experience and practice, and his affinities with other religious actors of the Roman world. Through careful attention to biographical detail, social context, and historical method, it seeks to describe him as a contextually plausible social actor. The volume is structured in three parts. Part One introduces sources, methods, and historiographical approaches, surveying the foundational texts for Paul and the early Pauline tradition. Part Two examines key biographical questions pertaining to Paul's bodily comportment, the material aspects of his career, and his religious activities. Part Three reconstructs the biographical portraits of Paul that emerge from the letters associated with him, presenting a series of “micro-biographies” pieced together by leading Pauline scholars.

Ten years after the Civil War's end, abandoned Addy is taken from the horrid town of No-Bob by schoolteacher Frank Russell and his bride, but when her father returns to claim her she must find another way to leave her past behind.

“All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, where revelers dance and sing the dead person’s praises. In that same style, the book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”—The New York Times Book Review A 25th anniversary edition of the National Bestselling memoir, with a new afterword from Michael Patrick MacDonald, takes us deep into the South Boston housing projects during one of the city's most tumultuous times in history and tells the story of his family struggling the overcome the poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration that overtook the neighborhood. A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger’s crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald’s Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters. We meet Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. And there are Michael’s older siblings Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”

For Dennis Covington, what began as a journalistic assignment - covering the trial of an Alabama preacher convicted of attempting to murder his wife with poisonous snakes - would evolve into a headlong plunge into a bizarre, mysterious, and ultimately irresistible world of unshakable faith: the world of holiness snake handling, where people drink strychnine, speak in tongues, lay hands on the sick, and, some claim, raise the dead. Set in the heart of Appalachia, Salvation on Sand Mountain is Covington's unsurpassed and chillingly captivating exploration of the nature, power, and extremity of faith - an exploration that gradually turns inward, until Covington finds himself taking up the snakes. University.

*Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly* An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.* Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country. Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. “Heartland is one of a growing number of important works—including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville—that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra” *(The New York Times Book Review).