The award-winning actress and best-selling author of Down Came the Rain explores her relationship with her tough single mom, detailing her role in shaping Shields' career, her fierce protectiveness and her struggles with alcohol.

In a world where it was commonplace to see signs that read "whites only" or "Jews not allowed," William Cohen was born in Bangor, Maine, the eldest son of a Jewish father and a Protestant Irish mother. Janet Langhart, an African-American, was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana by her single parent mother, a Southern Baptist. These two people, from different regions, races, and religions, are both witnesses to and targets of the social tensions of the...

"The life story of Coretta Scott King--wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist--as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising black parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. One of the first black scholarship students...

"From Academy Award nominee, Emmy nominee, and Golden Globe winner Taraji P. Henson comes an inspiring book about family, friends, the hustle required to make it from DC to Hollywood, and the joy of living in your own truth. With a sensibility that recalls her beloved screen characters, including Yvette, Queenie, Shug, and the iconic Cookie from Empire, yet is all Taraji, the screen actress writes of her families, the one she was born into and the...

An acclaimed novelist's memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family. Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a 22-year-old single woman having an affair with a much older married man. Thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and intensity of her storytelling, tells how they made contact with...

"An urgent call to free those buried alive by America's legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity-from a gifted young lawyer and important new voice in the movement to transform the system. Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever-that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim...

One Sunday morning before church, when Welles Crowther was a young boy, his father gave him a red handkerchief for his back pocket. Welles kept it with him that day, and just about every day to come; it became a fixture and his signature. Welles became a volunteer with the local fire department in New York. When the Twin Towers fell, Welles's parents had no idea what happened to him. In the unbearable days that followed, they came to accept that he...

"Everything seemed set against Chaunte Lowe. Growing up with a single mother in Paso Robles, California, where she experienced food insecurity, homelessness, and domestic abuse, Chaunte couldn't imagine a future that offered a different sort of life. But then, one day, she turned on the TV and there was Flo Jo, competing in the Olympics and shattering records in track and field. Almost immediately, Chaunte knew what she wanted to do. She started running....

In Dream New Dreams, Jai Pausch shares her own story for the first time: her emotional journey from wife and mother to full-time caregiver, shuttling between her three young children and Randy's bedside as he sought treatment far from home; and then to widow and single parent, fighting to preserve a sense of stability for her family, while coping with her own grief and the challenges of running a household without a partner. Jai paints a vivid, honest...