The Cherry Picker's Daughter PDF Download

Author: Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781925893335
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Author: Kerry Reed-Gilbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781925893311
Category : Children, Aboriginal Australian
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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This second edition of The Cherry Picker's Daughter is an exquisite portrait of growing up Aboriginal on the fringes of outback towns in NSW in the mid-twentieth century. Its an important book for school libraries and classrooms, with profound insights into the extraordinary strength, resilience and ingenuity of Aboriginal families to overcome extreme poverty, persecution, racism and cultural genocide. The strength of family ties in Aboriginal communities is clearly evident when three-month-old Kerry and her brother lost both parents. Her father, Kevin Gilbert -- later to become a famous activist and artist -- killed their mother and was jailed for many years. Her father's sister, whom she always called 'Mummy', raised Kerry and her brother, along with her own children and others within the extended family. The book is a tribute to this truly remarkable woman, who not only loved them selflessly and worked tirelessly to support them, but also managed to keep them from being taken/'stolen' by the 'Welfare'. Told in the child's voice and in the vernacular of her Mob, activist, artist, poet and author, Aunty Kerry, tells her story of love and loss, of dispossession and repeated dislocation growing up in corrugated tin huts, tents and run-down train carriages, of helping her family earn 'an honest living' through fruit picking, and the impact of life as an Aboriginal state ward living under the terror of Protection Laws. 'A wonderful yarn by an Aboriginal Elder about a bygone way of life.' -- Melissa Lucashenko, author of Miles Franklin Award-winning Too Much Lip 'Australia has waited too long to read this book of courage and truth. It heralds a timely change in our thinking of Aboriginal activism.' -- Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri writer and academic 'Thank you, Kerry, for sharing your story - so much pain and hurt, but such life-affirming strength and love, too.' -- Kate Grenville, author

Author: Elisha Cooper
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1101871237
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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When Cooper discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoe's midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, life changes. Surgery, sleepless nights, treatments, a drumbeat of worry. Even as the family moves to New York and Zoe starts kindergarten, they must navigate a new normal regularly interrupted by anxious visits to the hospital. Forced to balance his desires to be a protective parent even as he encourages his girls to take risks, Cooper writes about what it took for him and his wife to preserve a sense of normalcy and joy in their daughters' lives, while being transformed by the fear and hope we feel for those we love.

Author: Stephanie Thornton Plymale
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063054353
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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The sharp and surprising true story of a woman who finally sets out to understand her past, and the mother she had one day hoped to forget. Full of unexpected twists and unbelievable revelations, American Daughter is an immersive memoir that will have you on the edge of your seat to the very last page. For years, Stephanie Plymale, successful CEO and interior designer, kept her past a fiercely guarded secret. Only her husband knew that her childhood was fraught with every imaginable hardship: neglect, hunger, poverty, homelessness, truancy, foster homes, a harrowing lack of medical care, and worse. Stephanie, in turn, knew very little about the past of her mother, who was in and out of jails and psych wards for most of Stephanie's formative years. All this changed when a series of shocking revelations forced Stephanie to revisit her tortured past and revise the meaning of every aspect of her compromised childhood. American Daughter is the extraordinary true story of a young girl growing up on the wrong side of the American Dream. Stephanie has slept in blankets on the floor of crowded apartments, lived in the back seat of a car with her siblings, and spent decades looking over her shoulder at a mother who might just as easily hug or harm her. American Daughter is at once a moving account of a troubled mother-daughter relationship and a meditation on resilience, transcendence, and ultimately, redemption.

Author: Chuck Barris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439168083
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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This surprisingly candid, often funny, and entirely moving memoir is Chuck Barris’s story about life with his only child, Della. Born on Christmas Eve in 1962, Della was a lovable charmer like her father, an adventurous and quick-witted kid. She had a carefree suburban childhood, even while her father was fast becoming an entertainment superstar, inventing, hosting, and producing his legendary game shows. When Barris and his wife eventually divorced, Della was shuttled between parents in New York and California, then moved from boarding school in Switzerland to Beverly Hills High, among other places. Bored, lonely, and often depressed, she discovered drugs and petty crime early in adolescence, and her escapades soon took on a far more alarming and dangerous aspect. She was lost, yearning for attention and guidance, and growing up in Los Angeles amid temptation everywhere. Her father felt helpless: caring for a daughter was more than Barris had bargained for. Ranging from late-night phone calls from the neighbors to emergency room visits, Della’s behavior was out of control. When Della decided at age sixteen to move out on her own, Barris didn’t object. He gave her a trust fund and let her go out into the world alone, a regret that he shares with readers here in heartbreaking and clear-eyed detail as he chronicles Della’s descent into addiction and her eventual death from an overdose at age thirty-six. But Della is not just a grief-stricken story. Filled with loving memories and spontaneous humor, it is a brave and hard-earned reflection on fatherhood and a tribute to innocence lost.

Author: Beverly Cleary
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061756725
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Told in her own words, A Girl from Yamhill is Newbery Medal–winning author Beverly Cleary’s heartfelt and relatable memoir—now with a beautifully redesigned cover! Generations of children have read Beverly Cleary’s books. From Ramona Quimby to Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Mouse to Ellen Tebbits, she has created an evergreen body of work based on the humorous tales and heartfelt anxieties of middle graders. But in A Girl from Yamhill, Beverly Cleary tells a more personal story—her story—of what adolescence was like. In warm but honest detail, Beverly describes life in Oregon during the Great Depression, including her difficulties in learning to read, and offers a slew of anecdotes that were, perhaps, the inspiration for some of her beloved stories. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary’s books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.

Author: AUNTY KERRY. REED-GILBERT
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780369349767
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1358

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Author: Barbara Robinette Moss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743219503
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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A haunting and triumphant story of a difficult and keenly felt life, Change Me into Zeus's Daughter is a remarkable literary memoir of resilience, redemption, and growing up in the South. Barbara Robinette Moss was the fourth in a family of eight children raised in the red-clay hills of Alabama. Their wild-eyed, alcoholic father was a charismatic and irrationally proud man who, when sober, captured his children's timid awe, but when (more often) drunk, roused them from bed for severe punishment or bizarre all-night poker games. Their mother was their angel: erudite and stalwart -- her only sin her inability to leave her husband for the sake of the children. Unlike the rest of her family, Barbara bore the scars of this abuse and neglect on the outside as well as the inside. As a result of childhood malnutrition and a complete lack of medical and dental care, the bones in her face grew abnormally ("like a thin pine tree"), and she ended up with what she calls "a twisted, mummy face." Barbara's memoir brings us deep into not only the world of Southern poverty and alcoholic child abuse but also the consciousness of one who is physically frail and awkward, relating how one girl's debilitating sense of her own physical appearance is ultimately saved by her faith in the transformative powers of artistic beauty: painting and writing. From early on and with little encouragement from the world, Barbara embodied the fiery determination to change her fate and achieve a life defined by beauty. At age seven, she announced to the world that she would become an artist -- and so she did. Nightly, she prayed to become attractive, to be changed into "Zeus's daughter," the goddess of beauty, and when her prayers weren't answered, she did it herself, raising the money for years of braces followed by facial surgery. Growing up "so ugly," she felt the family's disgrace all the more acutely, but the result has been a keenly developed appreciation for beauty -- physical and artistic -- the evidence of which can be seen in her writing. Despite the deprivation, the lingering image from this memoir is not of self-pity but of the incredible bond between these eight siblings: the raucous, childish fun they had together, the making-do, and the total devotion to their desperate mother, who absorbed most of the father's blows for them and who plied them with art and poetry in place of balanced meals. Gracefully and intelligently woven in layers of flashback, the persistent strength of Barbara Moss's memoir is itself a testament to the nearly lifesaving appreciation for literature that was her mother's greatest gift to her children.

Author: Clara Petty
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781452070384
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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The author presents a powerful story of courage throughout her early life as the daughter of a poor sharecropper in the Arkansas Delta in the nineteen forties and fifties. She describes a heartbreakingly difficult childhood and adolescence which produced in her a deep well of steadfast grit while sharing in the hot, backbreaking work of harvesting a yearly cotton crop to supply food and clothing for the family. Throughout it all, her silent struggle to obtain an education is Herculean. You will laugh at the ironies of her daily life on the farm, then cry as challenges are presented that no child should ever endure. Her story also details the history of a chilling murder of a family member that resulted in a tragic massacre of black sharecroppers during her parents' generation. Later, as a naïve young wife and mother, she describes her 37-year marriage and subsequent divorce. Looking back at her life's early circumstances, the author thankfully credits them as having instilled the survival skills she later used to build a successful life out of a tenuous beginning.