When Catherine Raven finished her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana. She was as emotionally isolated as she was physically, but she viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society. In the meantime, she taught remotely and led field classes in nearby Yellowstone...

"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

Hillbilly Elegy shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author who is a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.

In alternating chapters Stan and Jan Berenstain, creators of the Berenstain Bears, tell their own stories from early childhood until their marriage, then continue the tale together to the present day.