For author Renee Carter Tench, April 17, 2008, was the first day of the rest of her life. It was the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Tench spent more and more time reflecting on her past experiences and examining her life. In Memoirs of a Bootleggers Daughter, she tries to understand the reason and purpose behind all of the chaos in growing up the child of alcoholic parents. The lone survivor of the Carter family who lived at the end of the dirt road in Hickory, North Carolina, Tench shares the stories of her tumultuous childhood. She tells how, by the grace of God and taking advantage of the opportunities He provided, she broke the cycle of alcoholism in her family, a cycle that began even before her grandfather and father became bootleggers. She often felt looked down on because of the spectacle she and her family often made. Memoirs of a Bootleggers Daughter narrates how Tench started out at the end of one dirt road and ended up at the end of another and the wild journey in between, a journey she would be happy to take again.

This smart, sassy series introduces Deborah Knott, candidate for district judge--and daughter of an infamous bootlegger. Deborah's campaigning is interrupted when disturbing new evidence surrrounding a murder that has never been solved surfaces and she is implored to investigate.

The thoughts,history,and descriptions are mixed seamlessly to create a perfect flow.These are vivid recollections of the Great Depression looking back.

The generation that toiled through the Great Depression and won the Second World War has become known as -the greatest generation.- But not all of them qualified for that exaggerated epithet in the eyes of their own children. In this tender but unsparing memoir, Mary Cimarolli remembers a world in which the family home was lost to foreclosure, her father made his way by bootlegging, and school was a haven to hide from her brother's teasing. Her stories are about struggle and survival, making do and overcoming, and, ultimately, reconciliation. From her perspective as a child, she describes the cotton stamps and other programs of the New Deal, the yellow-dog Democrat politics and racism of East Texas, and the religious revivals and Old Settlers reunions that gave a break from working in the cotton patch. The colorful colloquialisms of rural East Texas that dot the manuscript help express both the traditionalism of the region and its changes under the impact of modernization, electrification, and the coming of war. Along with these regional and national trends, Cimarolli skillfully interweaves the personal: conflict between her parents, the death of her brother a few days before his sixteenth birthday, and her own inner tensions.

In rural Georgia of the 1950s, Haley, a bootleggers daughter, begins her journey. Raised by two uneducated parents and working in cotton fields, Haley endures abuse, alcoholism, ridicule, and most glaringly, an environment where little love is ever shown. She is introduced to a former slave, Aunt Matilda, a woman with no children of her own, who raises Haley to love the Lord in spite of their present circumstances. In the 1960s, as a seventeen-year-old with two children out of wedlock, Haley attempts to escape the harsh realities of her past, only to have them follow her to New Hampshire. Drinking and partying to ease the pain becomes a way of life for her. Haley is finally forced to begin facing her inner demons and perceiving the call of God on her life. Witness the extraordinary journey of the girl from Rat Row in this harrowing tale of overcoming the worst of ones past to get to the best of ones future.

I was raised in a café my first years of living. My father’s brother and his wife raised me on their own. There was bootlegging, gambling, police raids, and people put in jail. I didn’t get to church very much, but there were older women around who looked out for me the best they could. I was molested, burned with a cig, and drunk by the time I was eight. I picked a little cotton as time went on. I became a businesswoman, and an addict of crack cocaine and drank heavily. I had a child at fourteen, she had one at thirteen, and so I was a grandmother at twenty-eight. But I loved learning. God and books turned my life around. To me, no matter what you go through, you can overcome it. Don’t let your pride hold you back. There is a power greater than all of us, who is willing and will to help you. Keep the faith; if I did it, so can you. In reading this book, it will show you that we all go through something. Most importantly, love yourself. My title is a very true story. I hope that by reading this book, it will help you. Now we have drug dealers, then, in my day, we had booze.