"A searing and deeply personal memoir that explores the institutions -- family, society, country -- that defined a Puerto Rican woman and what she unlearned to rediscover herself. Growing up in the Midwest, raised by a Puerto Rican mother who was abandoned by her family, Jamie Figueroa and her sisters were estranged from their culture, consumed by the whiteness that surrounded them. In Mother Island, Figueroa traces her search for identity as shaped...

The author's grandfather, Sam Stone, placed an ad in the Canton, OH, newspaper shortly before Christmas in 1933, offering cash gifts to seventy-five families in distress. Readers were asked to send letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdot. The author investigates a suitcase full of letters responding to these ads as he learns more about his grandfather's hidden past as well as the suffering and triumphs of strangers...

"In the tradition of An Invisible Thread and Same Kind of Different as Me, Angel in Aisle 3 is the heartwarming true story of an unlikely friendship that began with a chance meeting in a grocery store between a bank executive bound for prison and an elderly stranger. When Kevin West resigned from his job as vice president of a bank in 1998 after making fraudulent loans, he spent the time before his trial managing a family-owned, small grocery store...

Describes an incident in the life of John Parker, an ex-slave who became a successful businessman in Ripley, Ohio, and who repeatedly risked his life to help other slaves escape to freedom.