Through the penetrating eyes of childhood, Andrea imparts an unforgettable portrait of a family terrorized by the explosive rage of one stepfather and then another. Sensitive and observant, the young girl watches the remorse, apologies, and repeated rampages of these men, yet she never gives in to despair. For even in a house where the noise of turning pages is reason enough for brutality, Andrea finds a haven in the work of great writers - Joyce, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and others - who allow her to see a world beyond her own and set her on the path toward intellectual and artistic awakening.  (A/YA)

The author describes her experiences during World War II when she and her family were sent to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.  (A/YA)

While other kids were daydreaming about dances, first kisses, and college, Jodee Blanco was just trying to figure out how to get from homeroom to study hall without being taunted or spit upon as she walked through the halls. This powerful memoir chronicles how one child was shunned — and sometimes physically abused - by her classmates from elementary school through high school. It is an unflinching look at what it means to be the outcast, how even the most loving parents can get it all wrong, why schools are often unable to prevent disaster, and how bullying has been misunderstood and mishandled by the mental health community.  (A/YA)

In relating the story of how she was misdiagnosed as retarded rather than deaf and mistreated at home and at an institution, a longtime employee of General Motors writes: "I sincerely hope that this book will help other children with as-yet undiagnosed hearing problems be spared the horrors I experienced."  (A/YA)

To escape the horror of violent abuse, the two-year-old child "went to sleep" and created the inner world of "the Troops," the 92 voices that shielded her from pain, but that she didn't know existed until adulthood. Now in paperback, this is a journey through the fragmented world of the multiple personality - told by the Troop.  (A/YA)

A collection of 14 inspirational stories, told through the words of young adults, ages 13 to 21, about facing some of life’s most difficult challenges – life-threatening illness, loss of a parent, gang involvement, sexual abuse, brain injury, and learning disability – and discovering renewed hope and new attitudes through experiences based in the wilderness.  (S)

Locked in a frightening, lonely world of silence and darkness since infancy, 7-year-old Helen Keller has never seen the sky, heard her mother's voice or expressed her innermost feelings. Then Annie Sullivan, a 20-year-old teacher from Boston, arrives. Having just recently regained her own sight, the no-nonsense Annie reaches out to Helen through the power of touch, the only tool they have in common, and leads her bold pupil on a miraculous journey from fear and isolation to happiness and light.  (A/YA)

When Lori Gottlieb was 11 years old, she did something girls that age often do: She started a diary. And like far too many other 11-year-old girls, she also began starving herself. Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self chronicles her transformation from a bright, healthy kid into a hospital patient on the verge of death, and it illustrates how a young girl can become convinced that anorexia is the answer to her preadolescent confusion.  (A/YA)

A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctor’s examining table, missing yet another day of school. Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to "get to the bottom of this." She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. This child will not ruin her plans.  (A/YA)

Jadie never spoke. She never laughed, or cried, or uttered any sound. Despite efforts to reach her, Jadie remained locked in her own troubled world - until one remarkable teacher persuaded her to break her self–imposed silence. Nothing in all of Torey Hayden's experience could have prepared her for the shock of what Jadie told her - a story too horrendous for Torey's professional colleagues to acknowledge.  (A/YA)

With stunning intelligence and insight, Hilden describes how, as an undergraduate at Harvard, she listened to her mother drifting in and out of coherence in phone conversations; why, as a student at Yale Law, she decided not to visit her mother in her nursing home; and why, as a legal intern in New York, she began the process of discarding all traces of her former life.  (A/YA)

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, and jobs, Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia - until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. An honest and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side - and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.  (A/YA)

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele - Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles - as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford it. Kaysen's perceptive memoir provides vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.  (A/YA)

They called it an honor killing, but to Elizabeth Kim, the night she watched her grandfather and uncle hang her mother from the wooden rafter in the corner of their small Korean hut, it was murder. Her Omma had committed the sin of lying with an American soldier, and producing not just a bastard, but a mixed-race child, considered worth less than nothing. Dumped bleeding and terrified at a Christian orphanage in postwar Seoul, Kim embarked on the next phase of her extraordinary life when she was adopted by a Fundamentalist pastor and his wife in the U.S.  (A/YA)

In August 1984, Michigan housewife Betty Mahmoody accompanied her husband to his native Iran for a two-week vacation. To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans are despised. Their only hope for escape lay in a dangerous underground that would not take her child.  (A/YA)

Dave Pelzer was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother, a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games – games that left one of her three sons nearly dead. She no longer considered Dave a son, but a slave; no longer a boy, but an ‘it’. His bed was an old army cot in the basement, his clothes were torn and smelly, and when he was allowed the luxury of food it was scraps from the dog’s bowl. The outside world knew nothing of the nightmare played out behind closed doors. But throughout Dave kept alive dreams of finding a family to love him.  (A/YA)

In the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Manchild in the Promised Land, this is an explosive memoir of hopelessness and resurrection that vividly portrays the brutality of barrio gang life.  (A/YA)

It's the mid-1980s, and Julia and her adopted brother David have just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees and trailer parks - and a racism neither of them is prepared for. While Julia is white, her close relationship with David, who's black, makes them both outcasts. At home, a distant mother and a violent father only compound their problems. When the day comes that high-school hormones, racist brutality, and a deep-seated restlessness prove too much to bear, their parents' solution is reform school - in the Dominican Republic.  (A/YA)

In this powerful memoir, Wayne Theodore recalls a long history of childhood abuse and neglect, of dropping out of high school, dabbling in drugs, drifting from one low-skill job to another, and suffering violent tendencies of his own. A brother's inquiries prompt Wayne's memories, and he goes in search of documents to substantiate what he remembers. Reading his family's case files sets him on a recovery course that ends with a nationally televised confrontation with his parents.  (A/YA)

One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.  (A/YA)

Labeled deaf, retarded, disturbed and insane, Donna Williams lived in a world of her own. Alternating between rigid hostility and extroversion, she waged what she termed her "war against the world." She existed in a dreamlike state, parroting the voices of those around her in the hope that they would leave her alone. Few people understood her, least of all Donna herself. It was not until the age of twenty-five that Donna discovered the word- autism- that would at last give her the opportunity to understand herself and begin to build a bridge to join the world as most know it.  (A/YA)

Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of a generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. A memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation still manages to be a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era.  (A/YA)

Elizabeth Wurtzel published her memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, to astonishing literary acclaim. A cultural phenomenon by age twenty-six, she had fame, money, respecteverything she had always wanted except that one, true thing: happiness. For all of her professional success, Wurtzel felt like a failure. She had lost friends and lovers, every magazine job she'd held, and way too much weight. She couldn't write, and her second book was past due. But when her doctor prescribed Ritalin to help her focus - and boost the effects of her antidepressants - Wurtzel was spared. The Ritalin worked. And worked. The pills became her sugar...the sweetness in the days that have none. Soon she began grinding up the Ritalin and snorting it. Then came the cocaine, then more Ritalin, then more cocaine.  (A/YA)