In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own. His father, “Syl” Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for more than a year before marrying and having two boys. Eventually they split in a bitter divorce that was followed by decades of unhappiness as his mother coped with self-recrimination and depression while trying to raise her sons by herself, and his father spiraled into an alcoholic descent that destroyed his once meteoric career. Based on extensive interviews and documentary research as well as his own personal recollections and insights, My Long Trip Home is a reporter’s search for the factual and emotional truth about a complicated and compelling family, a successful adult’s exploration of how he rose from a turbulent childhood to a groundbreaking career, and, ultimately, a son’s haunting meditation on the nature of love, loss, identity, and forgiveness.

Meet the Grogans Before there was Marley, there was a gleefully mischievous boy navigating his way through the seismic social upheaval of the 1960s. On the one side were his loving but comically traditional parents, whose expectations were clear. On the other were his neighborhood pals and all the misdeeds that followed. The more young John tried to straddle these two worlds, the more spectacularly, and hilariously, he failed. Told with Grogan's trademark humor and affection, The Longest Trip Home is the story of one son's journey into adulthood to claim his place in the world. It is a story of faith and reconciliation, breaking away and finding the way home again, and learning in the end that a family's love will triumph over its differences.

Offers information on planning a trip - along with advice on topics including: Determining your budget and where the money will come from; how to garner the support of your friends and family; what to do with your house, cars and other lifestyle entrapments; and, how to pay your bills and keep track of your investments.

The story of a son in the making--a universal journey of love, faith, and family that explores what it means to break away and find the way home once again.

Author's memoirs from 1938 - 2008. Includes Hartford childhood and arrival of grandchildren.

Open your minds; my adventurous readers, to the world of the count family of warriors. Their story begins in 1900, within a remote town; Known as abandoned town, in Transylvania. Their lives engage as a result of all the children of the village being abandoned abruptly and mysteriously by their parents, which eventually leads to every child living within the local orphanage being ran by three evil guardian nuns name Angeline, Victoria and Magdalene, living within the orphanage among the children were two evil twins by the names of Allison and Amanda. These sisters Were evil, deceptive and manipulative so they got along very well with the three evil nuns because they lived to taunt and sabotage their peers. All The other children; who added up to eighteen, minus the evil twins suffered much mental and physical abuse at the hands Of these three evil nuns. The only support the rest of the children had within the orphanage was a good nun named Sister Kathleen; she also was despised and tormented By the three evil nuns oftentimes Sister Kathleen would risk her own safety to protect the safety of the children in the orphanage. In many ways she felt Responsible for their immense suffering, yet eventually throughout their menacing trials things began to look in favor for Sister Kathleen and the defenseless Children of the abandoned town orphanage. A mere bite; on the neck of the oldest child Shartise, before she and her siblings were captured and forced into Living at the orphanage would later be revealed as the bite that could end all their misery as well as offer them eternal freedom, But at what cost? From this point the mystery unravels; count Zairian surfaces to claim his bride and avenge his maker as the Demeaned count Carrion lay in wait to avenge his son and claim his Countess and entire entourage. The plot thickens as the revelations Take place of whom and what each child represents as a part of an immortal bloodline of vampires and vampire tresses. Their new Identity waits to be discovered inside.

Born and Raised in Sawdust: My Journey Around the World in Eighty Years is the deeply moving autobiography of Lewis Thigpen as a black boy growing up in a loving family in a small, tight knit community in the deep South during the extremely segregated Jim Crow era. It captures his life on the farm and in school in a revealing, instructive, yet colorful way despite the discrimination he encountered. Fearful of being a farm worker or common laborer for the rest of his life, he joined the U.S. Army, where racism persisted even though President Truman had ordered desegregation of the entire military in 1948. He served for three years. Against the odds, Thigpen persevered. Despite adversity and lack of money, he attended college, earned the Ph.D. degree, and became a renowned engineer, research scientist, and scholar. He rose to become chair of mechanical engineering at a distinguished university. The book is an easy read, designed for those who choose to pick it up at a bookstore, order it online, check it out at their public library, or download it to Kindle or other apps. It is a valuable addition to the canon of biographies, histories, literary works and cultural studies of the South. It captures the mood of Southern writers such as Flannery O’Conner, Pearl Cleage, William Faulkner, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Readers interested in family history and ancestry will love tracing through Dr. Thigpen’s family tree, photographs and drawings. One photo shows him holding a silver salmon, the outcome of one of his favorite hobbies—fishing. In his autobiography, Dr. Thigpen brings the clarity and conciseness of an engineer and research scientist who has written and published numerous articles in refereed journals.

Seeing Things is collection of lyrical narratives that focus on joy, grief, courage, fear, love. The twenty-three visions in this collection wrestle with the universal verities of our lives. Each chapter of the volume is a stand-alone vision, yet the chapters work together to create a single voice, building and spotlighting the strength we all must find as we move through our lives. The book focuses on the drawing-in of family, friends, and nature in those moments that shape us in the crucible.