People are constantly asking two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry where she gets her ideas. In this fascinating memoir, Lowry answers this question, through recollections of childhood friends and pictures and memories that explore her rich family history. She recounts the pivotal moments that inspired her writing, describing how they magically turned into fiction along the complicated passageway called life. Lowry fans, as well as anyone interested in understanding the process of writing fiction, will benefit from this poignant trip through the past and the present of a remarkable writer.

A memoir of what it was like to be a teenager in a tumultuous era, from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Best of Us. Joyce Maynard was eighteen years old when her 1972 New York Times Magazine cover story catapulted her to national prominence. Published one year later, Looking Back is her remarkable follow-up—part memoir, part cultural history, and part social critique. She wrote about diving under her desk for air-raid practice during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and catching the first glimpse (on the cover of Life magazine) of a human fetus in utero. Extraordinarily frank, sincere, and opinionated, Maynard seemed unafraid to take on any subject—including herself. But as she reveals in a poignant and candid new foreword, she carefully kept her inner life off the page. She didn’t write about her difficult relationship with her mother, or her father’s alcoholism, or the fact that her best friend at college had struggled with the knowledge that he was gay. And she did not mention the most important part of her life at the time she was writing this book: her relationship with reclusive author J. D. Salinger, who read and corrected every page, even as he condemned her for writing it. In this special anniversary edition, Maynard’s candid introductory reflections on the girl behind the girl who wrote Looking Back lend a new dimension to this iconic analysis of a generation. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joyce Maynard including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1887. According to Erich Fromm, Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America".

Mania Salinger was born in Radom, Poland and enjoyed a childhood blessed with love, friends, and good luck until horrors unleashed by Nazi invasion changed her life forever. Many of her friends and family perished during the Holocaust, but Mania survived those horrific years working in multiple Nazi camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. Her optimistic spirit, shrewd instincts, and fierce determination to believe that life, and humanity, must prevail over evil helped her to endure.

Twenty-two-year-old Shivani had thrown a party one evening-and awoken the next morning in hospital, her spine and her dreams shattered by a car crash. Paralysed and then wheelchair-bound, it took Shivani years of pain, struggle and determination to regain control of her life and her body; to demand and receive respect from the world; to gain acceptance from within and without; to find love and happiness. Then tragedy struck again. As the newly married Shivani drove to Manali with her family, an oil tanker collided head-on with the car; bedridden once again, she watched helplessly as first her father-in-law and then Vikas, her husband, succumbed to their injuries. And, yet, Shivani refused to surrender-she would not let her inability to walk keep her from achieving her ambitions. No Looking Back is a deeply moving and inspiring narrative about surviving the challenges of disability in a country that takes little account of the daily difficulties and indignities faced by approximately fifteen per cent of the world's population, whether in terms of infrastructure, legislation or awareness-a country that appears to believe that disability equals invisibility from the public discourse. Undeterred by the hand fate had dealt her, Shivani Gupta has chosen to champion the cause of the disabled everywhere and is today one of India's best-known accessibility consultants. Her life is an extraordinary testament to true courage and the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds.

Born in 1905, Webb began keeping a journal in 1946, the same year he moved to New York and took up photography in earnest. These memoirs document not only Webb's struggles as a young photographer, but also the heady atmosphere of New York in the forties and fifties. The many photographs, all in bandw, are simply magnificent. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

What will we leave behind in this new digital age? As digital technology takes an ever-increasing role in our lives, one question is how we'll manage our collections after we're gone. What takes the place of shoeboxes full of pictures and dog-eared record albums? Get an inside look at Microsoft researcher Richard Banks's thinking about how we might manage the digital artifacts and content we're creating now--and how we might pass on or inherit these kinds of items in the future. About the Microsoft Research Series At Microsoft Research, we're driven to imagine and to invent. Our desire is to create technology that helps people realize their full potential, and to advance the state of the art in computer science. The Microsoft Research series shares the insights of Microsoft researchers as they explore the new and the transformative.