Nov 8, 2013 7 min read

Reminder: The Captiva Memorial Library is closed for building renovations. The library reopening is scheduled for January of 2014. During renovation of the Captiva Memorial Library the outside book return will remain open for return of Lee County Library System materials. Visit the Lee County Library System website at leelibrary.net or call 479-4636. Details of this donor funded Captiva Island community project are at: ccacaptiva.org.

Use your Lee County Library System card to check out these and other biographies and memoirs:

My Amish Childhood: A True Story of Faith, Family, and the Simple Life by Jerry S. Eicher

(available in book and e-book)

“Bestselling fiction author Jerry S. Eicher (nearly half a million books sold) turns his pen to a moving memoir of his life growing up Amish. Jerry’s mother was nineteen years old and nine months married when he was born. She had received Grandfather Stoll’s permission for the wedding because she agreed to help out on the farm the following year. However, with Jerry on the way, those plans failed. Jerry recounts his first two years of school in the Amish community of Aylmer, Ontario and his parents’ decision to move to Honduras. Life in that beautiful Central American country is seen through an Amish boy’s eyes-and then the dark days when the community failed and the family returned to America, much to young Jerry’s regret. Jerry also tells of his struggle as a stutterer and his eventual conversion to Christ and the reasons for his departure from the childhood faith he knew. Here is a must-read for not just Jerry’s fiction fans, but also for readers curious about Amish life. Author Jerry Eicher’s bestselling Amish fiction (more than 210,000 in combined sales) includes The Adams County Trilogy, the Hannah’s Heart books, and the Little Valley Series. After a traditional Amish childhood, Jerry taught for two terms in Amish and Mennonite schools in Ohio and Illinois. Since then he’s been involved in church renewal, preaching, and teaching Bible studies. Jerry lives with his wife, Tina, and their four children in Virginia.” *

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich by Eric Metaxas

(available in book, e-book and audiobook)

“As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer-a pastor and author, known as much for such spiritual classics as The cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as for his 1945 execution in a concentration camp for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in forty years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer’s life, the theologian and the spy, to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil. In a deeply moving narrative, Metaxas uses previously unavailable documents?including personal letters, detailed journal entries, and firsthand personal accounts?to reveal dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s life and theology never before seen. In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentiel vs the Third Reich, Metaxas presents the fullest accounting of Bonhoeffer’s heart-wrenching 1939 decision to leave the safe haven of America for Hitler’s Germany, and using extended excerpts from love letters and coded messages written to and from Bonhoeffer’s Cell 92, Metaxas tells for the first time the full story of Bonhoeffer’s passionate and tragic romance. Readers will discover fresh insights and revelations about his life-changing months at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and about his radical position on why Christians are obliged to stand up for the Jews. Metaxas also sheds new light on Bonhoeffer’s reaction to Kristallnacht, his involvement in the famous Valkyrie plot and in “Operation 7,” the effort to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland. Bonhoeffer gives witness to one man’s extraordinary faith and to the tortured fate of the nation he sought to deliver from the curse of Nazism. It brings the reader face to face with a man determined to do the will of God radically, courageously, and joyfully, even to the point of death. Bonhoeffer is the story of a life framed by a passion for truth and a commitment to justice on behalf of those who face implacable evil.” *

Bermuda Shorts by James J. Patterson

(available in e book only)

“In clothing, Bermuda Shorts are a kind of casual formal wear and in this collection of essays, Bermuda Shorts is the perfect metaphor for James J. Patterson’s fundamentally serious but playful literary style. Patterson writes like the love child of Henry Miller and Mary Karr, with all the contradictions that implies – a philosopher who thinks best over a glass of fine wine; an ex-Catholic still haunted by the image of the Crucifixion; an irreverent political satirist whose patriotism flies the flag of another iconoclast, Thomas Paine. Patterson grew up with a foot planted in each of two worlds – one in Washington DC, the Capital of the Empire as he calls it, where the wheels of power spin, and one in rural Ontario, where his Canadian mother insisted the family spend their summers. His father, one of the wizards of twentieth century newspaper publishing, introduced him to the city’s wheels of money and power, which he would later navigate as an entrepreneur, starting his first business at 20. But those Canadian summers introduced him to a different world one where a cedar strip boat was better than any car, and where the ghosts of those who’d previously inhabited the family’s island house floated out over the water of Lovesick Lake. It is those two worlds that blend in this collection, in reflections both serious and playful, on what it means to be a man, an artist, an iconoclast, a patriot, a lover, as the 20th century rolls over into the 21st.” *

Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter by Melissa Francis

(available in book and e-book)

“The Glass Castle meets The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in this dazzlingly honest and provocative family memoir by former child actress and current Fox Business Network anchor Melissa Francis. When Melissa Francis was eight years old, she won the role of lifetime: playing Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the little girl who was adopted with her brother (played by young Jason Bateman) by the Ingalls family on the world’s most famous primetime soap opera, Little House on the Prairie. Despite her age, she was already a veteran actress, living a charmed life, moving from one Hollywood set to the next. But behind the scenes, her success was fueled by the pride, pressure, and sometimes grinding cruelty of her stage mother, as fame and a mother’s ambition pushed her older sister deeper into the shadows. Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter is a fascinating account of life as a child star in the 1980’s, and also a startling tale of a family under the care of a highly neurotic, dangerously competitive “tiger mother.” But perhaps most importantly, now that Melissa has two sons of her own, it’s a meditation on motherhood, and the value of pushing your children: how hard should you push a child to succeed, and at what point does your help turn into harm?”*

* Book jacket/publisher description