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Elephants Never Forget: Relationships Between Birth Parents and Adoptees. Kay Coleman & Eileen Jenkins. 1998. 148p. Signature Publications (UK).
This book addresses the processes, problems, sorrows and joys of reunions between birth parents and adopted people.

The End Is the Beginning. Armond DeGasperis. 2010. 58p. CreateSpace.
A memoir of survival by a 13-year-old who was ultimately adopted after being removed from the custody of his abusive birth parents.

Eternal Inspirations: A True Story on Adoption. E Lynn Giddens. 1983. 120p. Amberly Publications.

Eugène de Beauharnais: The Adopted Son of Napoleon. Violette M Montagu. 1913. 383p. John Long, Ltd (UK).
Biography of Napoleon’s adoptive son (the son of Josephine by her first marriage).

Eva and Me. Eva MacIntyre & John MacIntyre. 2014. 72p. MacIntyre Purcell Publishing, Inc.
How radically lives can be altered by sudden twists of fate ... by luck ... by backroom politics in a darkened corridor in Beijing. From an orphanage in Guongdong, South China and the 13,000 kilometer (8,000 mile) journey to a fishing village on Nova Scotia’s south shore, this is just one story in what was the largest exodus of children from a single country in the history of mankind. This is the story of Eva and Me.

Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison. Deborah Jiang Stein. 2011. 188p. Cell 7 Media.
From the Back Cover: Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison is the story of a woman whose gift for finding purpose in life drives her to help others change their lives even as she struggles to accept and overcome her own past, born heroin addicted to a mother in prison. Her story proves we’re more than the sum of our parts, and there’s always a chance for redemption. Sometimes, it takes a dive over the edge to find your center. Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus is about the courage and curiosity to create an authentic life with purpose and resilience, and what it takes to hold onto this courage. Today Deborah tours women’s prisons to plant seeds of possibility and hope for others, and little by little, fulfilling her mission to change attitudes of secrecy and shame.

About the Author: Deborah Jiang Stein is a writer and public speaker who devotes her work to women, men, and children in the margins of society. She founded the nonprofit, The unPrison Project (www.theunprisonproject.org) to serve women in prisons. Deborah is at work on another memoir, a YA novel, and a collection of short stories. She’s also compiling a collection of prison writing and interviews from women’s prisons. www.deborahstein.com.


By the Same Author: Prison Baby: A Memoir (2014, Beacon Press).


Every Child. Ruby Diana. 2011. 196p. PublishAmerica.
Every Child is a fascinating account of endurance, struggle, romance and love lost, existing after seventy-two years of contemplation. It is written from the memories of the author Ruby Diana—who became a Ward of the State as an infant and placed in Foster Care. She remained in the State System until she turned eighteen. Every U.S. state, every Social Worker, every Child Care provider, every parent, should find Every Child not only fascinating, but useful as a guideline for caring for all children who do not have a voice. Every child must, and should be, protected at all times. Divorce or separation can no longer be an excuse for not loving, caring, and providing for a child. Parents have an obligation to support, love, and genuinely care for the children they produce. When they cannot do this, then their children have the right to be adopted after a certain amount of time passes; not sent from foster home to foster home. A truly remarkable, engaging story, Every Child keeps the reader wanting to know what happens to this child along the way.

Expecting the Broken Brain to Do Mental Pushups: A Personal Journey to Understand Schizophrenia and Depression. Dave Elder. 2012. 122p. CreateSpace.
At the age of three and a half, my mother disappeared. The woman who took her place looked the same and had the same name, but was a very different person. When my mother came home after the birth of my younger brother, she had a broken brain. Everyone in the family knew something was wrong with Mom by the way she acted, but none of us came close to understanding it. At some point during my teenage years I learned the word schizophrenia, but knowing the word and its dictionary definition did not help me to better understand my mother. In fact, at the time it seemed to be a term without a clear meaning—it described something real, but that real thing did not have a clear shape. It was a shadowy ghost in the night, and every time I tried to reach out and touch it, it changed form, slipped from my grasp and faded into the darkness with a mocking laugh at my simple and vain attempt to understand.

Explication: One Adoptee’s Experience. Jen Bryan. 2001. 172p. Writers Club Press.
From the Publisher: Shocking illustration of what happens when adoption produces psychological conflict and confusion instead of a happily ever after ending. Honest and gut-wrenching. What happens to adoptees that emerge as half a person from the closed adoption system of yesteryear? Jen Bryan takes the reader along with her from the moment she remembers knowing she was adopted as a young child to her harrowing adolescence, and finally to a search for truth that leads only to more questions.

About the Author: Jen Bryan grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, living briefly in New York City while she attempted the life of a starving artist and found that she appreciated fine food far too much. Finally settling in Austin, Texas, she now lives on the outskirts in a small suburban house with her husband, son, and lots of cats.


Exploring this Wonderful World: Becoming Strong and Breaking Free. Lisa Roberts, aka Karyn Ewing. 2013. 74p. CreateSpace.
Growing up in the 20th century has been a difficult, trying process. Filled with insecurities and loneliness; childhood, adolescents, and adulthood have been proven to be times that either break or make a person. The challenges, the good and the bad, have all contributed to who one becomes. Feelings are strong and all are just trying to belong. For the adoptee being adopted has many hurdles and obstacles to overcome. The following is a collection of poems written by an adoptee expressing the emotions and feelings within. These poems follow the journey of an adoptee and her thoughts and feelings throughout 42 years of her life.

Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty. Heather M Young. 2014. 240p. CreateSpace.
Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty is the remarkable true story of a family torn apart by circumstances beyond their control. Born to mentally challenged parents, Ezra and Hadassah spend the first years of their lives in foster care while keeping ties with their biological parents. Everything changes when the children mysteriously disappear, leaving their parents with no clue as to their whereabouts. While Ezra and Hadassah fight to survive, their sibling bonds of love are tested to the breaking point. They forge ahead and in the process, find a power of healing beyond themselves.

A Face Like Mine: A Memoir. Eleanor Church. 2011. 296p. CreateSpace.
Recent celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Madonna and Sandra Bullock have thrust adoption into the news. This book is about my adoption. A Face Like Mine is about feeling unloved, rejected, abandoned and different. My older adoptive Jewish family did not understand me. I learned of my adoption at age six when my beloved dog, Tippie, died and my mom said she’d go to the pound, get another dog, and adopt it just like she adopted me. From that day on I was destined to find my birth family. A Face Like Mine begins when, at age thirty-five, my husband and I hired a detective to find them. He did. Though my Christian birth mother had passed I did meet my birth father, sister and brother. My blood siblings, along with aunts, uncles, and cousins were all blissfully unaware of my existence. I was the well-kept family secret. Ultimately, finding my birth family calmed the anxiety that had manifested itself in my life-long struggle with bulimia, anorexia and alcohol dependence. These self-destructive behaviors are chronicled throughout my memoir. Finding my roots enabled me to love myself and others. About the Author: Eleanor Church was born in Yonkers, NY. Adopted right after birth, she was raised in a middle-class, Jewish home where education was of primary importance. She is a graduate of Hunter College of the City University of New York and earned two Master’s degrees from Herbert H. Lehman College and Chapman College. She taught first grade for ten years in Westchester County, then moved to Carmel, CA, where she opened a gallery and later returned to teaching at a California men’s correctional facility. On weekends she counseled couples, families, and individuals suffering from addiction. A Face Like Mine is the product of over twenty years of writing. Eleanor, now retired, writes short stories which have garnered her awards in a local newspaper. She currently lives in the Monterey area with her devoted dogs, Frapoochino and Cassie.

Faces of Adoption. E Lynn Giddens. 1983. 106p. Amberly Publications.
Faces of Adoption attempts to examine various questions related to the adoption process through contributions from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, professionals and others, including: What motivates an adoptee to search? Is adoption a single event occurring in one’s life or an ongoing process? Have the majority of birth parents “forgotten” their relinquished children as they have often been instructed to do? Are professionals and adoptive parents now changing their views regarding openness in adoptions?

Faces of Korea: The Foreign Experience in the Land of the Morning Calm. Richard Harris. 2004. 448p. Hollym International Corporation.
The first book of its kind to document the lives of foreigners in Korea firsthand, Faces of Korea is a collection of 47 interviews with people from more than 20 countries on five continents. Set up in a narrative format, which makes reading the interviews as enthralling as it does educational, subjects in the book include working in Korea, romantic relations with Koreans, people of Korean descent, teaching in Korea, learning in Korea and people who have made Korea their adopted home.

Facing the Fears: A True Story of Self Discovery ... A Search for Identity After Adoption. Collette Glazebrook. 2007. 226p. Boolarong Press (Australia).
The life story of the author, including her personal and intellectual studies of the effects of adoption.

Faint Trails: An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Adult Adoptee-Birth Parent Reunification Searches. Hal Aigner. 1980. 104p. (Initially published in a Western States Edition) (Revised edition issued in 1987) Paradigm Press.
From the Back Cover: In a nation in which more than 25 million lives are touched by the adoption process, reunifications between adult adoptees and the birth parents who relinquished them for adoption have been on the steady increase for more than three decades.

Today, this trend is represented by hundreds of thousands of individuals engaged in what is commonly known as the search and reunification movement, a mix of more than 200 search self-help organizations providing moral support and technical assistance to adoptees, birth parents, birth siblings, and adoptive parents alike, plus countless independent searchers proceeding largely on their own efforts.

The techniques employed by this movement are those of a private investigator, with particular emphasis being placed on research in public records, a vast repository of information embodied in vital statistics indexes, court documents, professional association membership directories, and numerous other sources of the names, dates, locations and personal details needed for a search’s completion.

Faint Trails summarizes the ways and means of search activity focusing on the most frequently taken opportunities for public records research and funding in general and genealogical libraries, as well as in federal, state and county municipal archives.


About the Author: The book’s author, Hal Aigner, has also released Adoption in America Coming of Age, a history and analysis of American adoption as seen from the viewpoint of the search and reunification movement. He is an adoptee who completed his search for his birth parents more than a decade ago. He has been active with The ALMA Society, a national search self-help organization.


By the Same Author: Adoption in America Coming of Age (1986).


Faith Hill: Piece of My Heart. James L Dickerson. 2001. 157p. St Martin’s Griffin.
From the Back Cover: From humble beginnings in Star, Mississippi, Faith Hill has soared to the top of the country and pop charts, becoming one of the most successful female recording artists in history. She has had eight number-one singles and ten number-one videos, and her albums have sold millions. She is country music’s hottest star and America’s newest sweetheart. Everything she touches turns to gold.

Faith Hill: Piece of My Heart tells the inspirational story of the Grammy-winning singer’s rise to stardom. Drawing on interviews with Faith Hill, her childhood friends and teachers, music professionals, and fans, James L. Dickerson chronicles her storybook life from birth to the present.

This intimate portrait of Faith Hill examines her Huck Finn-like childhood, her first marriage and divorce, her hardscrabble years as a struggling artist in Nashville, her love affair with the man who became her husband (country superstar Tim McGraw), her thoughts on marriage and motherhood, and her heartbreaking search for her birth mother.

Complete with photographs and insider information, here at last is the whole story behind the life and music of Faith Hill—country music’s darling and pop superstar.


About the Author: James L. Dickerson, a veteran journalist and author, is the coauthor of Scotty Moore’s life story, That’s Alright, Elvis, and the author of nine other books, including biographies of the Dixie Chicks and Colonel Tom Parker. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.


Compiler’s Note: See, also, Faith Hill: A Real-Life Reader Biography (2002, Mitchell Lane Publishers); Faith Hill (2002, Chelsea House Publishers); Faith Hill (2003, ABDO & Daughters); and Faith Hill (2010, Gareth Stevens Publishers), among others.


Faith Hill and Tim McGraw: Soul2Soul. Jim Brown. 2002. 189p. Quarry Music Books (Canada).
From the Back Cover: The true heirs of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill have become the new “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music,” the royal couple of Nashville, not only topping the country charts with songs like “This Kiss,” “Breathe,” “Don’t Take the Girl,” “Everywhere,” and the duet “Let’s Make Love,” but also crossing over to pop and adult contemporary audiences, winning multiple Country Music Association, Academy of Country Music, Billboard, and Grammy Awards. The proud parents of three children, Tim was named Father of the Year by the National Fatherhood Initiative, while Faith has sponsored the Faith Hill Family Literacy Project.

This book traces the fairy-tale careers of these two superstars—from Faith’s childhood as an adopted daughter growing up in Star, Mississippi, and Tim’s as the illegitimate son of baseball star Tug McGraw raised in Start, Louisiana, through their hard-scrabble, lean Nashville years—culminating in their Spontaneous Combustion and Soul 2 Soul tours. Featuring full accounts of the story behind their songs and a color photo insert.


About the Author: Jim Brown is the celebrated author of the best-selling Shania Twain: Still the One, Willy Nelson: Red-Headed Stranger and George Jones: Why Baby Why. A columnist for Country Music News, he lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.


Compiler’s Note: See also, Faith Hill: A Real-Life Reader Biography (2002, Mitchell Lane Publishers); Faith Hill (2002, Chelsea House Publishers); Faith Hill (2003, ABDO & Daughters); and Faith Hill (2010, Gareth Stevens Publishers), among others.


Faith in Shawna. Shawna Garlington. 2010. 102p. PublishAmerica.
Faith In Shawna is one woman’s journey in overcoming emotional hurdles of being adopted, discovering her true self and finding spirituality. The intimate emotions wrapped around all the unanswered questions regarding her adoption that haunted her are revealed. Hope and faith are tested as nature vs. nurture, religion vs. spirituality, and conformity are explored through personal struggles. Rebellion finally gave way as her truth began to introduce itself and transform her life after being reunited with birth family. Shawna’s journey will not only touch your heart but enlighten your spirit.

Faking Crazy. Lori Carangelo. 2012. 30p. (Kindle eBook) Access Press.
The true story of Tom McGee’s perilous journey through adoption, addiction and acceptance.


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The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage. Robert Lindsey. 1979. 358p. Simon & Schuster.
From the Dust Jacket: Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee. They grew up in one of America’s most privileged communities, Palos Verdes in Southern California. Two devout Catholics who served as altar boys together. Two young men whose friendship was sealed by a passion for the strange art of falconry, they were influenced and disillusioned by the times in which they reached manhood—“an era of assassinations, an unpopular war, flower children, LSD, festering disenchantment with old standards, and Watergate.”

Boyce was bright (an IQ of 142), intense, idealistic, and religious, but he drifted about aimlessly from one college to the next, brooding about his country, and flying his falcons. ... Lee[, the adopted son of a Palos Verdes physician,] was small, incredibly ambitious, a true free enterpriser—and a highly successful drug dealer. They lived “in a social milieu where ambition was a religion and money was the ultimate laurel of success.” On the surface, “they had everything—including boredom.”

In July of 1974, Boyce’s father, a former member of the FBI, helped his son get a job through the old boy network at TRW, an aerospace company in Redondo Beach. Within five months, Boyce learned that “TRW was developing and manufacturing satellites used by the CIA to collect secret intelligence information from space.” Initially hired as a clerk, Boyce was to work in the Black Vault. He was 21 years old, earned $140 a week, and had TOP SECRET clearance....

One night, after a long session of smoking pot and snorting cocaine, Boyce suddenly confided to Lee that he had access to certain material that could be worth a lot of money to a foreign country. One week later, the two friends devised a plan....

In early April of 1975, Lee flew to Mexico City, went directly to the Soviet Embassy there and announced to the guard that he had information that might be of interest to the Russians. Within minutes, Lee and Boyce had become Russian spies.

In one sense, theirs is a spy story filled with all the stuff of old-fashioned espionage fiction—secret codes, clandestine meetings, miniature cameras, stolen documents hidden in potted plants—as well as murder plots, blackmail, and odd sexual occurrences. But as this startling book reveals, it is far more than that....

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with all the principals involved, on letters, and on materials from their trials, Robert Lindsey, the Los Angeles bureau chief of The New York Times, brilliantly re-creates the whole extraordinary tale—from its implausible beginnings to its sad and dramatic end.

The Falcon and the Snowman: a story, a tragedy—and two people you'll never forget.


About the Author: Robert Lindsey was born in 1935 in Glendale, California. He graduated from San Jose State University in 1956 and became a reporter, and later Aerospace Editor for the San Jose Mercury-News. In 1968, he joined The New York Times, and in 1977 he was appointed chief of its Los Angeles bureau, the position he now holds.

Mr. Lindsey is married, has two children, and lives near Los Angeles. The Falcon and the Snowman is his first book.


Compiler’s Note: Basis for the 1985 John Schlesinger film of the same name, starring Timothy Hutton as Christopher Boyce and Sean Penn as Andrew Daulton Lee.

Both Boyce and Lee have since been released from prison. For his part, Boyce, in collaboration with Kathleen (“Cait”) Mills, who was instrumental in securing both men’s release from prison (Lee was released on parole in 1998; and Boyce was paroled in 2003) and whom Boyce eventually married, and Vince Font, has written his own account of his story in The Falcon and the Snowman: American Sons (2013, Vince Font). Robert Lindsey is also the author of The Flight of the Falcon: The True Story of the Escape and Manhunt for America’s Most Wanted Spy (1983, Simon & Schuster), an account of Christopher Boyce’s escape from Federal prison and subsequent bank robbing spree. For now, the final word on what ever happened to Andrew Daulton Lee belongs to Cait Boyce...


Family Colors. Bobby Lee Scott. 2014. 25p. (Kindle eBook) BL Scott.
A boy is adopted at birth by a Detroit family. He excels at school and earns an Ivy League education but he’s determined to locate his biological mother and uncover the secrets behind his birth.

A Family for Every Child: Perspectives on Adoption in India. Shibani Jain, ed. 2009. 227p. (An Initiative by Catalysts for Social Change) Teal Print and Publishing (India).
This book is developed with the objective of promoting the concept of adoption in India. There are 12.4 million destitute children in India and yet only about 3,000 legal adoptions happen in a year! There are certainly many reasons for this startling fact...but is this justified? Can we as parents, as people who are mobilizing ourselves to become a super, liberalized economy really afford to close our minds to this picture? Adoption in India is mired by red tape, poor social acceptance, illegal practices and many misconceptions about the process itself. These issues and many other questions is what the book covers—right from the causes behind this dismal scenario to actual case stories of adoption and various organisations involved in this cause. This book presents a picture of the still-not-so-used word “adoption” in India. The book caters to: 1) social and child welfare workers and interested individuals; 2) the many interested but unsure couples/aspiring parents who want a baby, but are not aware of the process/implications/issues involved; 3) parents who have already adopted and are seeking some answers; 4) adoptees themselves. Adoption is one of the best forms of rehabilitating a destitute child. It is the most complete form of rehabilitation which provides a highly satisfactory solution to those seeking the experience of bringing up a child and for the child itself. Adoption is an option to many people who are unable to have a child due to medical/infertility/other problems as well as those who may not want to have biological child out of choice. The cherished hope is that many more people are made aware and are able to contribute in some way towards this very fulfilling cause. It’s a social awareness book. The articles are compiled by Catalysts for Social Action (CSA), who is producing this book. Articles are written by experts in the field, by celebrities and parents who have adopted and also by adopted children who are now adults. To find out more about CSA, please log onto www.csa.org.in. The book consists of 28 articles across five sections: 1) The first section is about the joy of adoption—first-hand accounts and interviews from adoptive parents and celebrities about their experience with adoption. Articles cover experiences around their process of assimilation, societal assimilation experiences, single parents’ experiences, parents who have brought up a biological child and have also adopted, etc. 2) This section covers the current adoption scenario in India—facts and figures, laws, organizations involved, corporate viewpoints, NGO view points and the process of adoption. 3) The third section consists of articles on adoptive parenting—the various stages of development, addressing adoption related issues, support groups, telling the child about adoption, adoption of a special needs child, the appropriate adoption language, etc. is comprehensively explained through personal and expert writings. 4) The fourth section explores the concept of closure which most adopted children seek and their deep desire to understand why they were relinquished. 5) The final section provides a comprehensive list of adoption agencies in the country. The book will carry photographs of children from various orphanages in India and also some adoptive parents. The photographs will be in black and white. The jacket will be in color with spot lamination. The book is in standard paperback size. Our objective is to give two messages—first that adoption is a life altering, win-win option that is very worth-while for both the child and parents. Second, since this is the case, why is the adoption rate so low and what can we do about it? We would like this message to go to as wide an audience as possible.

A Family from Barra: An Adoption Story. Beryl Martin. 1998. 199p. Auckland University Press (New Zealand).
From the Publisher: Beryl Martin grew up as Pat Ridge, daughter of Nellie and George. George worked at the Municipal Milk Department; Nellie fostered children, to whom she was mostly cruel. Roaming Wellington as a child and schoolgirl, Pat started work at the Zig Zag factory at 14; she ran away from home at 21, never to see Nellie again. In 1985, the Adult Adoption Information Act was passed and Pat Hawthorne (now with a name bestowed by marriage) set off to find the family she learned about only in her 50s—the “family from Barra.” Her natural mother had died only a few years before she met her two brothers, and discovered a family ready to claim her. Barra, the smallest island in the Hebrides, was the original home of the Martin family, to which Beryl Martin, in her 60s, returns, locating Scottish cousins and reclaiming her own history.

Family Medical History: Unknown/Adopted: How a Routine Inquiry Led to Unexpected Answers for an Adopted Woman. Nancy Kacirek Feldman & Rebecca Crofoot. 2014. 170p. Becknan Publishing.
From the Back Cover: Knowing where you came from often determines who you are...

At the age of 45, Nancy Feldman knew how her doctor appointment would go. They would ask her about her family’s health history, and she would hear the doctor’s familiar sigh after she answered, “I don’t know, I’m adopted.”

Being perfectly happy with the loving family she had, Feldman never took an interest in finding her biological parents until diagnosed with a disease that she passed on to her son. Suddenly, Nancy’s lack of family history was affecting someone else.

Nancy wrote a letter to the Nebraska Children’s Home Society for help, and the adoption agency assigned her case to Rebecca Crofoot. This began a 17-year journey between the two women who were determined to find information about a family that might not know, or want to know, Nancy existed.

Family Medical History: Unknown/Adopted is a heart-warming story of personal, medical, genealogical, and emotional discovery.


About the Author: Nancy Kacirek Feldman was raised in Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, and California. Now she lives in Oregon under magnificent trees with her husband and several pets. She will always be indebted to her adoring parents for the wonderful family life they provided, and she hopes her story will be helpful to others.

Rebecca Crofoot retired in 2012 after 42 years as a caseworker with the Nebraska Children’s Home Society. Rebecca and her husband enjoy an active life on a farm and in community service. They have a daughter and a son and two grandchildren.


Family Romance. Catherine M Crane. 1992. 130p. (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Thesis, Dartmouth College) Unpublished.

Family Secrets. David Leitch. 1984. 288p. William Heinemann, Ltd (UK).
From the Dust Jacket (U.S. Edition): One of Britain’s most highly acclaimed journalists has written a remarkable domestic detective story about his quartet of parents—the couple who adopted him and the birth parents he has been looking for all his life. In its dramatic and emotional rendering of difficult family truths, Family Secrets calls to mind Lance Morrow’s The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons and Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception.

In 1973 David Leitch began a book called God Stand tp for Bastards as follows: “This title might seem like a calculated insult to my mother Truda. In a way it is. But I have a sneaking hunch—and hope—that hard words may entice her out of the shadows where she has been lurking, crafty as a trout, for about thirty-four years. She may even bring a father and siblings with her. Mother, where are you?”

Family Secrets is the fascinating story of how this gamble paid off. David Leitch, adopted when eight days old by a couple responding to an ad in the Daily Express, follows a path in his search for his natural parents that takes turns so strange and bizarre that it seems to spring from the pages of a Dickens novel.

We watch with voyeuristic fascination as a man raised by a self-pitying, unloving woman meets the mother he has spent a lifetime imagining. We listen with joy as he tries out the word “sister” on a sibling whose existence their mother had tried to keep secret. But always we read with empathy as Leitch struggles with emotions deep in all of us: the sometimes disappointing reactions from our parents, the discovery of skeletons in the family closet, the realization that childhood fantasies do not always come true.

For a journalist who has spent the better part of his working days crossing the globe, this journey turns out to be the most far-reaching he has ever taken.


About the Author: David Leitch was a founding member of The Sunday Times Insight Team and has since covered a wide range of domestic and international news for The Guardian and The New Statesman. He is also the author (with Bruce Page and Phillip Knightley) of Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation and of The Discriminating Thief, an investigation of art robberies in France. Mr. Leitch now makes his home in London.


By the Same Author: God Stand Up for Bastards (1973).


Family Secrets: Letters to My Granddaughters. Grace Ann Neuharth & Wanda Winters-Gutierrez. 2010. 232p. Tate Publishing & Enterprises, LLC.
In Family Secrets: Letters to My Granddaughters, four-year-old Grace loses her memory and is plunged into an ever-widening circle of lies, suppression, and denial. The next thirty years are shrouded in family secrets that eventually pull every aspect of her life into darkness. Though the twists and turns she faced should have destroyed her, Grace Ann Neuharth lived to tell the tale through the unforgettable narrative style of inspirational author Wanda Winters-Gutierrez. Family Secrets will leave you intrigued, stunned, and ultimately inspired as you discover the kind of faith that enables a person to live through the unthinkable and move past survival to victory.

Family Wanted: Adoption Stories. Sara Holloway, ed. 2005. 273p. Granta Books (UK).
From the Dust Jacket: Family has always been fertile ground for writers. To the usual familial themes, adoption adds its own potent elements: mystery, luck, the questing for origins, the yearning for a child, the importance {or not) of blood ties, and fundamental questions about what it is to become a parent and a family.

This riveting anthology of mainly autobiographical pieces covers the gamut of the adoption experience. A.M. Homes tells of being relentlessly tracked down by her birth mother, and Bernard Cornwell about being adopted by members of a repressive religious sect; Tama Janowitz comically describes meeting her Chinese daughter for the first time, and Martin Rowson reflects on encountering his surprisingly numerous long-lost siblings; Matthew Engel wrestles with international red tape and social workers in his bid to adopt a child, and Emily Prager writes movingly about how her young daughter came to terms with being adopted; Jonathan Rendall falls for his birth mother, and Paula Fox writes about the joy of being reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption decades before.

The fierce love and tenaciousness of the adoptive parents is as moving as the confusion and vulnerability of the adoptees and the bitter regret of the birth mothers. Full of drama and irony, heartbreak and humour, the pieces in Family Wanted reveal profound truths about identity, family, love and belonging.


About the Author: Sara Holloway is a Senior Editor at Granta Books.

Contributors include: Meg Bortin, Sarah Cameron, Dan Chaon, Dominic Collier, Bernard Cornwell, Robert Dessaix, Matthew Engel, Paula Fox, A.M. Homes, Tama Janowitz, Lynn Lauber, Carol Lefevre, Daniel Menaker, Hannah wa Muigai, Priscilla T. Nagle, Sandra Newman, Mirabel Osler, Emily Prager, Jonathan Rendall, Martin Rowson, Lise Saffran, Jeanette Winterson, Mark Wormald.


Compiler's Note: The U.S. edition is subtitled “True Stories of Adoption” and includes two additional contributors: Abigail Rubin and Lindsay Sagnette, which increased the total page count to 302.


Fanchon’s Daughter: A Memoir. Faye Hueston. 2014. 320p. F Hueston.
From the Publisher: Faye Hueston was born in a Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Los Angeles, California. Adopted at eighteen months, she was raised in a home of affluence as the daughter of Fanchon of Fanchon and Marco, the foremost producers of musical revues in the ’20s and ’30s. Bing Crosby, Myrna Loy and Judy Garland were some of the performers who got their start in a Fanchon & Marco revue. Fanchon also became the first woman film producer in Hollywood in the 1930s.

Faye grew up in the Hollywood of the ’30s, becoming a film actress herself in the 1940s. However, she was always more interested in writing and books. In her forties, while living in England, Faye embarked on a search for her birth parents, whose names she had discovered on her original birth certificate.

Since the relationship with her adoptive father had been difficult, it was her birth father she most wanted to find. A friend sent her to the foremost medium in England, who told her that her father was dead, that he had been an alcoholic, and that he was filled with remorse for what he had done to Sarah.

Three years later she found her birth mother through clues that came from the same medium. “Sarah” was the name of her birth mother, whom her father had abandoned when she became pregnant. None of this did Faye want to be true. Months later, her private investigator’s report confirmed the medium’s clairvoyance. How the meeting with Sarah ended forms part of Faye’s story, which has many twists and turns along the way.


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