Memoirs – Bickerstaff Booksellers

Shattered Dreams

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:35 +0000

Irene Spencer did as she felt God commanded in marrying her brother-in-law Verlan LeBaron, becoming his second wife at age 16. When the government raided the fundamentalist, polygamous Mormon village of Short Creek, Arizona, Irene and her family fled to Verlan’s brothers’ Mexican ranch. They lived in squalor and desolate conditions in the Mexican desert with Verlan’s four brothers, one mentally ill sister, and numerous wives and children–Irene herself bore thirteen. The dramatic story of her life, and her escape to an outside world for which she was little prepared, reveals how far religion can be stretched and abused and how one woman and her children found their way to truth and redemption.

Growing Up

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:28 +0000

Russell Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography about growing up in America during the Great Depression. “Magical….He has taken such raw, potentially wrenching material and made of it a story so warm, so likable, and so disarmingly funny…a work of original biographical art.”–The New York Times In this heartfelt memoir, groundbreaking Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist Russell Baker traces his youth from the backwoods mountains of Virginia to a New Jersey commuter town to the Depression-shadowed landscape of Baltimore. His is a story of adversity and courage, the poignancy of love and the awkwardness of sex, of family bonds and family tensions. We meet the people who influenced Baker’s early life: his strong and loving mother, his bold little sister Doris, the awesome matriarch Ida Rebecca and her twelve sons. Here, too, are schoolyard bullies, great teachers, and the everyday heroes and heroines of the Depression who faced disaster with good cheer as they tried to muddle through. A modern day classic filled with perfect turns of phrase and traces of quiet wisdom, Growing Up is a coming of age story that is “the stuff of American legend” (The Washington Post Book World).

The Horse Boy

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:19 +0000

When his son Rowan was diagnosed with autism, Rupert Isaacson was devastated, afraid he might never be able to communicate with his child. But when Isaacson, a lifelong horseman, rode their neighbor’s horse with Rowan, Rowan improved immeasurably. He was struck with a crazy idea: why not take Rowan to Mongolia, the one place in the world where horses and shamanic healing intersected? THE HORSE BOY is the dramatic and heartwarming story of that impossible adventure. In Mongolia, the family found undreamed of landscapes and people, unbearable setbacks, and advances beyond their wildest dreams. This is a deeply moving, truly one-of-a-kind story–of a family willing to go to the ends of the earth to help their son, and of a boy learning to connect with the world for the first time.