The Last Heir A Memoir

Laurie Shoemaker traces six generations of her family who lived in the same South Carolina plantation house built in the 1850s in this memoir chronicling life from the Civil War to the Great Depression and beyond. An Excerpt: ÒHey, guys, yÕall need to come out here on the porch. ItÕs cooler and there are a million stars.Ó Before I finish the sentence, bodies start drifting out. Some lounge on the enormous stone steps, others fill up wicker and rocking chairs. For a moment, no one speaks. They are drinking it all in, the perfumed night, the cloudless firmament, a symphony of pastoral sounds both near this place we call home and far away down the roads and in the fields. Sons and daughters of Liz and Joe, of the Browns and Sloans and Chalmers, relax on the sturdy, broad-beamed porch our ancestors built. There is tranquility in the fresh country air, our individual, unspoken pain salved by the velvet night. Brown eyed Joseph, his grandfatherÕs namesake asks, ÒWhat will become of all this?Ó

A prize-winning Dutch journalist's unsparing memoir of growing up amid the excesses, triumphs, and devastation of post-World War II Europe. What can a son say upon discovering that his father wore a Nazi uniform? Reporter Alexander Münninghoff was only four when he found this mortifying relic from his father's recent past in his attic. This shameful memento came to symbolize not only his father's tragically misguided allegiance but also a shattered marriage and ultimately the unconscionable separation of a mother and son. In this revelatory memoir, the author confronts his parents' complex past as he reconstructs the fortunes and disillusions of an entire family upheaved during the changes of twentieth-century Europe. The Münninghoffs were driven by greed, rebellion, and rage. An embattled dynasty, they were torn between the right and the wrong side of history. Their saga haunted Alexander's life for the next seventy years. Only in reconciling with them can this man find the courage to move forward as son and heir to the startling legacy of a flawed yet grand tradition.

The author confronts his parents' complex past as he reconstructs the fortunes and disillusions of an entire family upheaved during the changes of twentieth-century Europe

Genealogical memoirs of the extinct family of Chester of Chicheley.

"From age five, Sufiya Abdur-Rahman, the daughter of two Black Power-era converts to Islam, feels drawn to the faith even as her father, a devoted Muslim, introduces her to and, at the same time, distances her from it. He and her mother abandoned their Harlem mosque before she was born and divorced when she was twelve. Forced apart from her father--her portal into Islam--she yearns to reconnect with the religion and, through it, him. In Heir to the Crescent Moon, Abdur-Rahman's longing to comprehend her father's complicated relationship with Islam leads her first to recount her own history with it. Later, as she seeks to discover what both pulled her father to and pushed him from the mosque and her mother, Abdur-Rahman delves into the past. She journeys from the Christian righteousness of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s 1950s Harlem, through the Malcolm X-inspired college activism of the late 1960s, to the unfulfilled potential of the early-'70s' black American Muslim movement. When a painful reminder of the reason for her father's inconsistent ties to his former mosque appears to threaten his life, Abdur-Rahman's search nearly ends. She's forced to come to terms with her Muslim identity, and learns how events from generations past can reverberate through the present. Told, at times, with lighthearted humor or heartbreaking candor, Abdur-Rahman's story of adolescent Arabic lessons, fasting, and Muslim mosque, funeral, and eid services speaks to the challenges of bridging generational and cultural divides and what it takes to maintain family amidst personal and societal upheaval. Writing with quiet beauty but intellectual force about identity, community, violence, hope, despair, and faith, Abdur-Rahman weaves a vital tale about a family: black, Muslim, and distinctly American"--