Showing results by narrator "Tom Pile" in Biographies & Memoirs

It is likely not terribly surprising that surfers like to party. The 1960-'70s image, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Big Wednesday, was one of mild outlaws. Tanned boys who refused to grow up, spending their days drinking beer and smoking joints on the beach in between mindless hours in the water. As the surf brands accidentally morphed into a multimillion- then multibillion-dollar industry beginning in the 1980s, however, the derelict portrait began to harm business.

Within These Walls is the powerful memoir of Rev. Carroll Pickett, who spent fifteen years as the death house chaplain at "The Walls," the Huntsville unit of the Texas prison system. In that capacity, Reverend Pickett ministered to ninety-five men before they were put to death by lethal injection. They came with sinister nicknames like "The Candy Man" and "The Good Samaritan Killer," some contrite, some angry -- a few who might even have been innocent.

For nine-year-old Mickey, the early '50s were not the Ozzie and Harriet fantasy of love and security. Instead, they were years of abandonment, unimaginable cruelty, and virtual slavery. This memoir reveals Mickey's devastating experiences of being handed off from one abusive person to another...all in the name of survival.

Music in the Halls reveals the inner workings of a high-poverty District of Columbia Public School. In it, Jankowski brings to light the visceral and emotional nature of childhood poverty and trauma and how it not only impacts a student’s ability to learn but also how it restricts their ability to live a full life.