Showing results for "Youth" in Historical

This classic memoir of the First World War is now a major motion picture starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington. In 1914 Vera Brittain was 20, and as war was declared she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the lives of her whole generation - had changed in a way that would have been unimaginable in the tranquil prewar era.

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

Bert Trautmann is famed as the goalkeeper who broke his neck in an FA Cup final and played on. But his early life is no less extraordinary: he grew up in Nazi Germany and fought for the Germans in World War Two. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he saw a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long became an England football hero. This is his extraordinary story.

Norman Kamelgard's somber account of Nazi-occupied Poland, transformed from a cultural Mecca to desolate slave-labor ghettos, traces his family's fate from prewar prosperity to death in the concentration camps. His miraculous survival and emigration to Israel encountered further resistance from British authorities, who imprisoned him for bypassing entry procedures and thinking he was a terrorist. Kamelgard's poignant story captures the profound tragedies forever imprinted in Shoa survivors.

In her extraordinary follow-up memoir, The Arrogant Years, Lagnado revisits her first years in America, and describes a difficult coming-of-age tragically interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. At once a poignant mother and daughter story and a magnificent snapshot of the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, The Arrogant Years is a stunning work of memory and resilience that ranges from Cairo to Brooklyn and beyond - the unforgettable true story of a remarkable young woman’s determination to push past the boundaries of her life and make her way in the wider world.

John Mack was a leader and a passionate civil rights icon in Los Angeles, California. He was an ardent advocate for African Americans and others whose rights as Americans were being denied in this nation. His ability to affect change on the civil rights and rights of human beings will go into the annals of history. Devoted to the urban community, John Mack will always be known for his immutable integrity and being a consummate role model for inspiring the masses.