Eleven years of events can have a profound effect on an entire lifetime. The story of Stanisawa Emilia (Emma) Krasowska Serbinski is told by her daughter, Barbara, tracing her mother's courageous and terrifying journey from the Soviet invasion of Poland, through Soviet prisons and her eventual release from a Siberian labor camp. The perilous journey continues through the deserts of the Middle East, Italy, and then eventually landing on the shores of Great Britain only to receive tragic information. The project, Letters from the Box in the Attic, a Story of Courage, Survival and Love is factually based on letters, documents and photographs discovered in her mother's attic. These letters represented the fabric and soul of a life well lived. Historical perspective is preserved when placing her mother's letters and experiences into this narrative. Barbara Serbinski Sipe is a first generation Polish American from a refugee resettlement in Great Britain. Hearing stories growing up in an immigrant family ignited Barbara's love for history. Her personal memories are recounted throughout the book sharing images of love, sacrifice, conflict and gratitude. Understanding why things happen and how they affect life are just as important as the events themselves. It is through historical accuracy and personal introspection that enable the stories to be told in this book. Survival is the human spirit which came out of some of the most tragic events of World War II. What tragedies and suffering life brings profoundly affects a life forever.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors. The community sinks into increasing poverty and crime after two race riots destroy its once vibrant business district, but Fred and Lil continue to nurture their three apartment buildings and tenants for the next twenty years in a devastated landscape—even as their own relationship cracks and withers. After her parents’ deaths, Gartz discovers long-hidden letters, diaries, documents, and photos stashed in the attic of her former home. Determined to learn what forces shattered her parents’ marriage and undermined her community, she searches through the family archives and immerses herself in books on racial change in American neighborhoods. Told through the lens of Gartz’s discoveries of the personal and political, Redlined delivers a riveting story of a community fractured by racial turmoil, an unraveling and conflicted marriage, a daughter’s fight for sexual independence, and an up-close, intimate view of the racial and social upheavals of the 1960s.

A widower now remarried, Charles Young retires from a long teaching career in Greece and returns home to Connecticut with his wife, Mary. After they move into his old family homestead, they discover a box of letters in the attic. One letter at a time, an early life is revealed.

Award-winning poet Nikki Grimes brings us a tender collection of poems about a young girl and her mother, who grew up as a child of an Air Force serviceman. Told in alternating free verse and tanka (similar to haiku) poems.

Imagine clearing out your family attic and discovering hundreds of Civil War letters, filled with depth and insight about battles and army life, but not knowing why the letters were there. Using the resources of Ancestry.com and other sources, the author discovers how two Vermont soldiers fit into his family heritage and uses their letters to weave together their war-time story along with the stories of friends and relatives who fought by their side. Voices From the Attic tells the story of two brothers who witnessed and helped to make history by fighting in the Peninsula Campaign, then at South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Cedar Creek. They then helped to preserve that history through their many detailed letters that have now been re-discovered after being stored away for one and a half centuries.