Orem Library

Born into the middle of World War II, Gary Paulsen's turbulent childhood provided plenty of subject matter for his bestselling novels, and the librarians in his life gave him the inspiration and support to explore the world through books. As a soldier himself, his storytelling technique developed, and for the first time he shares his own.

"Mildred Armstrong Kalish grew up on her grandparents' Iowa farm during the Great Depression. Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring gradparents who possessed the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She, her siblings and their cousins worked hard and played hard"--Back cover.

"Tove Ditlevsen's autobiographical trilogy about her troubled life in Copenhagen"-- Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet. Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband....

In 1977, twenty-seven-year-old Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. A life of almost constant traveling followed. From the deserts of Australia, to Sydney's underworld; from Sixties street life, to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in Tibet, to 'marrying' an Indian prince, Davidson's quest was motivated by an unquenchable curiosity about other ways of seeing and...

"Kathryn Harrison always understood that her family was beyond eccentric -- they'd breached the bounds of the unconventional. She was largely raised by her grandparents in an outsized Tudor confection of a house on the periphery of Bel Air, which she thought of as "Sunset," her kingdom of the imagination, inhabited by the past and its numberless artifacts. True wandering Jews, her grandparents had arrived in Los Angeles in the forties after dramatic,...

Poppies of Iraq is Brigitte Findakly's nuanced tender chronicle of her relationship with her homeland Iraq, co-written and drawn by her husband, the acclaimed cartoonist Lewis Trondheim. In spare and elegant detail, they share memories of her middle class childhood touching on cultural practices, the education system, Saddam Hussein's state control, and her family's history as Orthodox Christians in the Arab world.