Set against the backdrop of rural Ohio, Just Some Girl lyrically unpacks what it means to become a woman. While the author is initially nurtured by loving parents and strong sibling bonds, adolescence finds Schwanke lacking a sense of identity and feeling deeply insecure, like so many other teenage girls. To cope, she simultaneously reaches toward—and eventually fights against—disordered eating, alcohol abuse, painful relationships with men, and self-sabotage.

“Dick, remember this admonition: to whom much is given, much is expected.” As the eldest child in his Italian American family, Richard F. Celeste frequently heard his maternal grandmother repeat this aphorism. His paternal grandmother’s advice was, “Bresta your cards.” This divergent advice reverberated within him for years to come, informing Celeste’s approach to what has become a life of serving others.

More than just a memoir, Brady’s book is an important document from one of the last of his generation, reminding us of the pivotal moments that should not be lost to history. Witnessing the American Century is Captain Brady’s firsthand account of his incredible life, and his memories elucidate America’s role in the most significant world events from the previous century.

In An Integrated Boyhood, Richards candidly describes how this exemplary middle-class Cleveland sojourn left him hopelessly confused and dislocated at the very moment of his parents’ triumph. His narrative of success provides the background to a more private turmoil: Richards’s struggle to read the shifting meanings of his privileged experience amid the city’s shifting racial lines, the fringe on the Left, the tumult of rising black consciousness, and the fears of nervous white suburban neighbors. This coming-of-age story sings the undersong of an older generation’s hard-won success. Like all black Clevelanders, Richards was forced to struggle for his understanding of the city’s—and his own—endless racial confusion in the midst of frightening historical change. It is this reality that recurs throughout Richards’s memoir: the early encounters of a scared, bookish African American boy from Mt. Pleasant with what can only be described as the real world.

In Those Days is the candid, often funny, autobiography of a twentieth-century American diplomat who spent most of his life in high-level diplomacy in Asia and Africa. The story takes James Spain form an Irish Catholic childhood in gangster-era Chicago through military service as Douglas MacArthur’s photographer in occupied Japan and university life at Chicago and a Ph.D. from Columbia. His Foreign Service career brought postings in Islamabad, Istanbul, and Ankara and four ambassadorships—in Tanzania, Turkey, the United Nations (as deputy permanent representative), and Sri Lanka.

“Born in 1927, Schumann scrupulously relates and analyzes his life in Nazi Germany and his post-1945 experiences that finally brought him to the U.S. Eschewing self-pity, he successfully demonstrates how and why he was an ardent supporter of the Nazi regime to its end and describes its values, inculcated by Hitler Youth meetings and newspaper and radio propaganda, and undergirded by an adventurousness of youth….The chapters of life after 1945 show how some Germans were gradually transformed into supporters of democracy.”—Choice

Growing Up With Clemente is a personal history of the hardscrabble life of Pittsburgh’s South Side during the city’s post–World War II renaissance. It is also the intimate story of an American boy who played baseball on the city’s dilapidated playgrounds and rooted for his beloved sports teams while growing up and struggling in Pittsburgh’s blue-collar neighborhoods. Though among the worst professional teams in the 1950s, the Pirates and Steelers still inspired the working-class dream of a life beyond the steel mills. And in the midst of it all was the towering, isolated figure of Roberto Clemente. Clemente would eventually become a symbol of pride, loyalty, courage, and sacrifice for a city that had initially rejected him and for a young boy who spent his youth looking for a hero but had to grow up before understanding Clemente’s greatness.

Prior to World War II, women were a rarity in the newsrooms of daily papers throughout the country. The assignments given to those few who graced the profession reflected the newspaper culture of the time—society, fashion, and school news. Doris O’Donnell proved the exception. While she began her journalism career with those routine tasks, in short order she broke those barriers and assumed more challenging duties of investigative reporting and covering the crime beat.

Guerrilla Daughter is a memoir of this family’s extraordinary struggle to survive the Japanese occupation of Mindanao from the spring of 1942 until the end of the war in September 1945. The men in the family fought as guerrilla soldiers in the island’s resistance movement, while Holmes, her mother, and her older sister were left to their own resources to evade the Japanese, who had been given orders to execute Americans. The Hansen women, faced with immediate death if found and suffering from hunger, disease, and barely tolerable living conditions, hid out in the Philippine jungle and remote villages to remain just ahead of the growing Japanese presence and avoid capture.

Pattern of Circles is a success story, for its author and his country. John E. Dolibois was born December 4, 1918, in Luxembourg. His mother died weeks later, and he was raised by an older sister until she left for Akron, Ohio, with her American husband. In 1931, John came to Akron with his father and thus began a fascinating life journey.