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"Beneath the windswept North Dakota plains, riches await... At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika's mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land--and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath...
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"Think of a secret that you're keeping from others. It shouldn't take long; behavioral scientist Michael Slepian finds that on average, we are keeping as many as thirteen secrets at any given time. His research involving more than 50,000 participants from around the globe shows that the most common secrets include: lies we've told, addiction or mental health challenges, a hidden relationship, financial struggles, and more. Our secrets can weigh heavily...
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"The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she made last year about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden the story of her own life"--
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While applying for a passport as an adult, Mary Carter Bishop made a shocking discovery: she had a secret half brother. Her mother told Mary Carter that the abandoned by was a "youthful mistake" from an encounter with a married man. Nine years later, Mary Carter tracked Ronnie down at the barbershop where he worked and found a near-broken man -- someone kind and happy to meet her, but someone deeply and irreversibly damaged by a life of neglect and...
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"Since childhood, Helene Stapinski heard lurid tales about her great-great-grandmother, Vita. In Southern Italy, she was a loose woman who had murdered someone. Immigrating to America with three children, she lost one along the way. Helene's youthful obsession with Vita deepened as she grew up, eventually propelling the journalist to Italy, where, with her own children in tow, she pursued the story, determined to set the record straight" -- provided...
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A web of family secrets unravels in this moving documentary following a family fractured by war. Two brothers, Izak and Shep, were born inside the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in 1945 and separated as babies, never told of the other’s existence. Nearly 70 years later, the discovery of family records leads the brothers to an emotional reunion with their elderly mother, Aida, who hid more from Izak and Shep than just each other. Official Selection...
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"With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his familys encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his fathers deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his...
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The acclaimed debut graphic memoir by the author of Fetch: "a beautiful and innovative portrait" of young adulthood and confronting family secrets (NPR).
When Nicole Georges was two years old, her mother told her that her father was dead. When she was twenty-three, a psychic told her he was alive. Her half-sister, saddled with guilt, admits that the psychic is right and that the whole family has conspired to keep him a secret. Sent into a tailspin...
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"Bill Griffeth, longtime genealogy buff, takes a DNA test that has an unexpected outcome: 'If the results were correct, it meant that the family I had spent years documenting was not my own.' Bill undertakes a quest to solve the mystery of his origins, a quest which will shake his sense of identity. As he takes us on his journey, we learn about choices made by his ancestors, parents, and others--and we see Bill measure and weigh his own difficult...
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"Julie is adopted. She is also a twin. Because their adoption was closed, she and her sister lack both a health history and their adoption papers--which becomes an issue for Julie when, at forty-eight years old, she finds herself facing several serious health issues. To launch the probe into her closed adoption, Julie first needs the support of her sister. The twins talk things over, and make a pact: Julie will approach their adoptive parents for...
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"'There comes a time in your life when the past decides to run you down, ' Mark Slouka writes in this heartbreaking and soul-searching memoir about one man's attempt to reckon with the past. Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them...
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"In an effort to discover the truth about his family, the author uses DNA testing and interviews to learn the real story behind his paternity and that of his eight brothers and sisters. What the DNA reveals, and how the author and siblings handle it, serves as a lesson to anyone undertaking ancestry research"--
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"Three months after Kyo Maclear's father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family? Unearthing is a captivating...
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"In [this book], with refreshing honesty and vulnerability, Janet shares the darkest moments in the aftermath of her husband's death and takes us on a journey toward healing and wholeness. She doesn't offer simple formula; instead, she shows us the reality of healing--that it can be messy and slow. But making the effort, as Janet discovered, can bring strength and purpose in amazing new ways."--Page 4 of cover.
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"Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were white; her friends were white; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina's insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who...
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"In the tradition of Slaves in the Family, the provocative true account of the hanging of four black people by a white lynch mob in 1912--written by the great-granddaughter of the sheriff charged with protecting them. Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men; all of them innocent....
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In a powerful memoir, identity theft expert Betz-Hamilton tells the shocking and unsettling story of her family, betrayal, and deceit. Convinced that the thief had to be someone they knew, Axton and her parents completely cut off the outside world, isolating themselves from friends and family.