As one of the first post-WWII Baby Boomers, Jim Chambers' childhood and early teenage years were in the 1950s, a remarkable decade for the United States that saw enormous political, technological, and cultural changes. Although many books have covered the headline-making events of the era in great detail, few of these books give the reader a real feel for what daily life was like for Americans living in that decade, especially for kids growing up then. The author remembers the little nuts and bolts things of daily life for families during the fascinating decade known as the Fabulous Fifties. "Recollections" perfectly blends paying homage to the little day-to-day rituals with a larger scale examination of social issues and mores of the times, and it's equally entertaining on either level. "Recollections" is a warm, lovingly honest, and fascinating portrait of America in the mid-20th Century.

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

Stereotypical descriptions showcase West Germany as an "economic miracle" or cast it in the narrow terms of Cold War politics. Such depictions neglect how material hardship preceded success and how a fascist past and communist sibling complicated the country's image as a bastion of democracy. Even more disappointing, they brush over a rich and variegated cultural history. That history is told here by leading scholars of German history, literature, and film in what is destined to become the volume on postwar West German culture and society. In it, we read about the lives of real people--from German children fathered by black Occupation soldiers to communist activists, from surviving Jews to Turkish "guest" workers, from young hoodlums to middle-class mothers. We learn how they experienced and represented the institutions and social forces that shaped their lives and defined the wider culture. We see how two generations of West Germans came to terms not only with war guilt, division from East Germany, and the Angst of nuclear threat, but also with changing gender relations, the Americanization of popular culture, and the rise of conspicuous consumption. Individually, these essays peer into fascinating, overlooked corners of German life. Together, they tell what it really meant to live in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Volker R. Berghahn, Frank Biess, Heide Fehrenbach, Michael Geyer, Elizabeth Heineman, Ulrich Herbert, Maria Höhn, Karin Hunn, Kaspar Maase, Richard McCormick, Robert G. Moeller, Lutz Niethammer, Uta G. Poiger, Diethelm Prowe, Frank Stern, Arnold Sywottek, Frank Trommler, Eric D. Weitz, Juliane Wetzel, and Dorothee Wierling.

Martin H. Levinson lived in Brooklyn from his birth in 1946 to 1962, the height of the baby boom following World War II. He grew up two blocks from Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and attended Erasmus Hall High School, which boasts alums such as Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, and chess-wiz Bobby Fischer. The author's personal recollections of his middle-class childhood in Brooklyn during the 1950s alternate with chapters detailing seminal cultural events of that era including the advent of television, fast-food restaurants, big cars with fins; desegregation and the white flight to the suburbs; rock and roll, beatniks, hula hoops, The Kinsey Reports, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Playboy, and much more. Part memoir, part social history, Brooklyn Boomer offers a captivating portrait of Brooklyn and America in the mid-twentieth Century.

The narrative approach is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing, and interpreting the meaning of experience. This collection explores the challenges of performing narrative work in an academic setting, writing about it in an ethical and revealing fashion, and drawing meaningful conclusions. This stellar collection of scholars examine such topics as how the larger construct of "personality" can be read out of life story; life narratives of reform, i.e., the transition away from delinquent behavior; the importance of cultural continuity for understanding loneliness in elderly refugees; race relations and how it relates to the meaning of the decade in which the interviewees came of age; the experience and meaning of resilience among survivors of childhood sexual abuse; and the use of narrative work as an additional approach within a larger quantitative research project. Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson provide insight into how the narrative appraoch enriches the study of the rare, the unusual, the common, and the prevalent, always searching for meaning in peopleÆs lives.