Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About or Written By Male Adoptees

  • Braverman (previously titled I Almost Fell Off the Top of the Empire State Building: A True Story of Trauma and Survival

    Braverman (previously titled I Almost Fell Off the Top of the Empire State Building: A True Story of Trauma and Survival

    by Joe Soll with Susan Hawvermale

    From lying on a New Jersey highway with cars speeding by his head in both directions, to being shot in the head by a manic sniper and almost falling to his death from the top of the Empire State Building, Joe Soll’s autobiography details these…

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  • Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

    Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

    Edited by Patricia Busbee and Trace A. DeMeyer

    From recent news about Baby Veronica to history like Operation Papoose, this book examines how Native American adoptees and their families experienced adoption and were exposed to the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects. The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both…

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  • Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up

    Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up

    by Nancy Newton Verrier

    Although written with adult adoptees in mind, Coming Home to Self is a book that can help anyone who has had early childhood trauma or who feels as if he or she is living an unauthentic life. From understanding basic trauma and the neurological consequences of…

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  • Crazy Bastard: A Memoir of Forced Adoption

    Crazy Bastard: A Memoir of Forced Adoption

    by Abraham Maddison

    Derek Pedley abandons his thirty-year journalism career on the brink of a breakdown, haunted by addiction, compulsion, and obsession, and carrying the heavy baggage of a boy who found his adoption papers at fifteen. When an anguished letter his mother wrote almost half a century…

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  • Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir

    Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir

    by Kevin Barhydt

    Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after…

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  • Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth

    Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth

    Edited by Diane René Christian and Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD

    A powerful book filled with thoughtful and inspiring letters. This anthology was written by a global community of adult adoptees and adults who were fostered. Each letter was penned to the upcoming generation of adopted and fostered youth. Editors: Diane René Christian, Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman Adoptee…

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  • Decoding Our Origins: The Lived Experiences of Colombian Adoptees

    Decoding Our Origins: The Lived Experiences of Colombian Adoptees

    Edited by Abby Forero-Hilty

    Decoding Our Origins: The Lived Experiences of Colombian Adoptees is written by seventeen authors who were born in Colombia and adopted internationally. Their individual stories illustrate different aspects of the transracial adoption experience. The traumatic loss of their mothers, culture and identities; racism; and severe…

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  • Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity

    Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity

    by Matthew Salesses

    In Different Racisms, Matthew Salesses explores the unique racism Asian Americans face, including the model minority myth, the impact of Jeremy Lin’s fame on Asian American representation in national media, and America’s perception of “Gangnam Style” singer and K-Pop sensation, Psy. Salesses’ essays (and his…

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  • Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear

    Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear

    by Matthew Salesses

    Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He’s estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn’t there. He is pretty sure he’s disappearing. His…

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  • Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty

    Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty

    by Christopher E. Harvey

    Infantryman Christopher Harvey’s childhood ended at twelve years old when his mom casually told him that he was adopted. Consequently, adulthood for him began when he met his birth mother after he turned fifty. And he describes the thirty-eight years in between as a purgatory…

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  • Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War

    Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War

    by Thomas Park Clement

    Autobiography of a half and half Korean boy born in the middle of the Korean War found at age 5 on the streets of Seoul, post war, adopted into the U.S. who eventually grew up to be a medical device inventor with over two dozen…

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  • Evil Exchange

    Evil Exchange

    by Lori Paris and Joe Soll

    Imagine you are adopted, and find out that as an infant, you were sold on the black market by a notorious baby seller who falsified your birth certificate. Your world is shattered. Your life has been a lie. The truth seems unattainable unless you can…

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  • Family Found: The DNA Journey

    Family Found: The DNA Journey

    by Douglas M. Dubrish

    I am grateful being adopted as a toddler and having an early life of mostly fond memories. My adoptive mother had passed, and my adoptive father remarried. I had a good career and a family of my own. But, being adopted nagged at me. I…

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  • Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others

    Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others

    by Eric Mueller

    Family Resemblance is a multiyear photo project that documents and celebrates people who are genetically related and bear a strong resemblance to each other. As an adopted person, photographer Eric Mueller always wondered how it would feel to look like someone else. At age forty-five,…

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  • Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

    Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

    by Richard Hill

    Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA is the highly suspenseful account of an adoptee trying to reclaim the biological family denied him by sealed birth records. This fascinating quest, including the author’s landmark use of DNA testing, takes readers on an…

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  • Finding Our Place: 100 Memorable Adoptees, Fostered Persons, and Orphanage Alumni

    Finding Our Place: 100 Memorable Adoptees, Fostered Persons, and Orphanage Alumni

    by Nikki McCaslin with Richard Uhrlaub and Marilyn Grotsky

    This unique one-volume reference guide provides positive and empowering biographical sketches of 100 famous and well-known adoptees throughout time, serving to counter the many negative stereotypes that exist that exist about people who were adopted, fostered, or lived in orphanages. This work looks at the…

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  • Fitting Ends

    Fitting Ends

    by Dan Chaon

    Fitting Ends is the first collection of fiction by the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist Among the Missing and now appears in this newly revised edition with two never before collected stories. Written before Among the Missing and originally published by Northwestern University…

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  • Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology

    Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Diane René Christian, Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, and Rosita González

    Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology is a dynamic artistic exploration of adoptee expression and experience. This anthology offers readers a diverse compilation of literature and artistry from a global community of adoptees. From playwrights to poets, filmmakers to photographers, essay writers to lyricists—all have…

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  • Forbidden Love

    Forbidden Love

    by Lisa Jones Gentry as told by Joe Steele

    Forbidden Love is the true story of Father William Grau, a black Catholic priest, and Sister Sophie Legocki, a white Polish-American nun who, in the segregated fifties, defied the church and society with their passionate secret love affair that lasted for nearly a decade and…

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  • Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures

    Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures

    by Craig Hickman

    Craig Hickman had had enough of the secrets and cover-ups and lies and was determined to solve the mystery of his roots. An estimated 7 million Americans are adopted. Depending on their age, many were adopted under the secrecy and shame of the closed adoption…

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  • Gardening Secrets of the Dead

    Gardening Secrets of the Dead

    by Lee Herrick

    Memory, history, family, the future: these are the preoccupations of Lee Herrick’s Gardening Secrets of the Dead. Adoptee Author: Lee Herrick Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to…

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  • Ghost Face

    Ghost Face

    by Greg Santos

    In his third DC Books title, Ghost Face, Greg Santos explores what it means to have been a Cambodian infant adopted by a Canadian family. Through a uniquely playful and self-reflective series of poems that pay moving homage to his adoptive parents, and explore the fantasies…

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  • Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems

    Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems

    by Lemn Sissay

    Lemn Sissay was seventeen when he wrote his first poetry book, which he hand-sold to the miners and millworkers of Wigan. Since then his poems have become landmarks, sculpted in granite and built from concrete, recorded on era-defining albums and declaimed in over thirty countries.…

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  • Guide to DNA Testing: How to Identify Ancestors, Confirm Relationships, and Measure Ethnic Ancestry through DNA Testing

    Guide to DNA Testing: How to Identify Ancestors, Confirm Relationships, and Measure Ethnic Ancestry through DNA Testing

    by Richard Hill

    The price of some powerful new genetic genealogy tests has dropped below $100. Genealogists and adoptees are using them and other DNA tests to identify ancestors, confirm relationships, and measure their ethnicity. Unfortunately, there are many similar sounding tests and some of them have different…

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  • Hey, Kiddo

    Hey, Kiddo

    by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

    In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka’s teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett’s family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett’s life. His father…

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  • How to Greet the Mother Who Bore You (A Short Story)

    How to Greet the Mother Who Bore You (A Short Story)

    by Matthew Salesses

    Before Teddy and his parents moved to Korea, the adopted nine-year-old knew almost nothing about his birth mother. But once they arrive in Seoul, the boy begins to scan the face of every passing woman, wondering if she might be the one who gave him…

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  • Hunting Shadows: An Adoptee’s Journey

    Hunting Shadows: An Adoptee’s Journey

    by Dan Sandifer

    “Today class, we are going to talk a little about genetics” With these words, Hunter begins a journey to reveal what it means to be adopted. As he sets out to discover all the branches of his family tree, he finds obstacles at every turn.…

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  • I Didn’t Know I Was Black Until You Told Me

    I Didn’t Know I Was Black Until You Told Me

    by Thomas Kirst

    An inspirational book detailing the profound changes in the life of a black child being left at a hospital after birth. Thirteen months into his life being adopted by a white couple that migrated from Europe before World War II, who would later adopt over…

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