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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > General
Reporter is an account of John McBeth's 50-year journey through Asia, more than half of that time as a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the venerable magazine long regarded as the region's English-language Bible on political and economic affairs. While necessarily a memoir, the book is more a reflection of the lives of a small group of foreign journalists who came to Asia on a wing and a prayer - and in McBeth's case by ship - and stayed on as fascinated witnesses to a region going through turbulent times and historic change. Part-history, part-analysis, part story-telling and, in a smaller way, part-commentary on the salad days of print journalism and its steady decline under the onslaught of television and the Internet, Reporter introduces us to a diverse cast of journalists, diplomats, officials, politicians and generals McBeth meets and befriends along the way. New in paperback to make 50 years reporting in Asia, the original book has been complemented with a new introduction and a new chapter "The Defining Years" which bring McBeth's story up to date.
Twihi, “kind van die winde” is oud genoeg om ’n man te kry. Haar pa Xameb wil haar spore vir die jagters van die woestynland gaan wys. Want by die Boesmans “sien jy ’n vrou mooiste aan haar spore”. Wat gebeur wanneer Twihi nie tussen twee mans kan kies nie? Die twee jagters dans die dans van die dood. In Jagters Van Die Woestynland is Twihi en Xameb die mondstukke van die swerwers van die woestynland. Xameb vertel van die wette van die Heikum-Boesmanstam. Hy vertel van die wette van die grafte, en van die wet dat ’n Boesmanseun eendag ’n vader moet word. Twihi vertel stories met onveranderlike waarhede oor die dogters van die aarde. Maar selfs haar stories is nie altyd genoeg om die sluier te lig oor die hart van ’n vrou nie. Is daar ’n man wat kan sê watter winde daar saans deur die hart van ’n vrou waai?
'Leon's elegant, witty prose . . . is a joy. One of the best European novelists around' Amanda Craig In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned. From a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather's farm and its beloved animals and summers spent selling homegrown tomatoes by the roadside, Leon has long been open to adventure. In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before finding herself swept up in the early days of the 1979 Revolution. After teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia, she finally landed in Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, from her first magical dinner when serving as a "chaperone" to a friend, to the hunt for the perfect cappuccino, to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market. Some things remain constant throughout the decades: her adoration of opera, especially Handel's vocal music, her advocacy for the environment, embodied in her passion for bees - which informs the surprising crux of the Brunetti mystery in Earthly Remains - and her eager imagination for crime as she watches unsuspecting travelers on trains. Yet as Leon inspects the cracks in the wall of a friend's bedroom, caused by the seven-story cruise ships making their way down Venice's canals, she admits regretfully that the thrill may be gone as mass tourism renders the city less and less appealing to its longtime chronicler. Having recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, Leon now confronts the dual challenges and pleasures of aging. Complete with a brief letter dissuading those hoping to meet Guido Brunetti at the Questura, and always suffused with music, food, and her fierce sense of humor, Wandering Through Life offers Donna Leon at her most personal. 'Few detective writers create so vivid, inclusive and convincing a narrative as Donna Leon, the expatriate American with the Venetian heart' Washington Post
The CEO of Disney, one of Time’s most influential people of 2019, shares the ideas and values he embraced to reinvent one of the most beloved companies in the world and inspire the people who bring the magic to life. Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Morale had deteriorated, competition was intense, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger—think global—and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets. Fourteen years later, Disney is the largest, most respected media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and he is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our era. In The Ride Of A Lifetime, Robert Iger shares the lessons he’s learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership, including:
This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as the lowliest studio grunt at ABC. It’s also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the Star Wars mythology.
The New York Times" bestseller--a harrowing and hysterical memoir
by the two-time Emmy Award-winning actress from the hit television
show 3rd Rock from the Sun."
A major biography of one of literature's most romantic and enigmatic figures, published in hardback to great acclaim: 'one of the great biographies of recent times' (Sunday Telegraph). Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is indisputably Russia's greatest poet - the nearest Russian equivalent to Shakespeare - and his brief life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work. T.J Binyon's biography of this brilliant and rebellious figure is 'a remarkable achievement' and its publication 'a real event' (Catriona Kelly, Guardian). 'No other work on Pushkin on the same scale, and with the same grasp of atmosphere and detail, exists in English... And Pushkin is well worth writing about... he was a remarkable man, a man of action as well as a poet, and he lived a remarkable life, dying in a duel at the age of thirty-seven.' (John Bayley, Literary Review) Among the delights of this beautifully illustrated and lavishly produced book are the 'caricatures of venal old men with popping eyes and side-whiskers, society beauties with long necks and empire curls and, most touchingly, images of his "cross-eyed madonna" Natalya' (Rachel Polonsky, Evening Standard). Binyon 'knows almost everything there is to know about Pushkin. He scrupulously chronicles his life in all its disorder, from his years at the Lycee through exile in the Crimea, Bessarabia and Odessa, for writing liberal verses, and on to the publication of Eugene Onegin and, eventually, after much wrangling with the censor, Boris Godunov' (Julian Evans, New Statesman) and in this, 'Binyon is unbeatable'(Clive James, TLS).
An absorbing, original, and ambitious work of reportage from the acclaimed New Yorker correspondent During the past decade, Peter Hessler has persistently illuminated worlds both foreign and familiar--ranging from China, where he served as The New Yorker's correspondent from 2000 to 2007, to southwestern Colorado, where he lived for four years. Strange Stones is an engaging, thought-provoking collection of Hessler's best pieces, showcasing his range as a storyteller and his gift for writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider. From a taste test between two rat restaurants in South China to a profile of Yao Ming to the moving story of a small-town pharmacist, these pieces are bound by subtle but meaningful ideas: the strength of local traditions, the surprising overlap between cultures, and the powerful lessons drawn from individuals who straddle different worlds. Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of Peter Hessler's work.
Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attache to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.
FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF NEGROLAND Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 'This is one of the most imaginative - and therefore moving - memoirs I have ever read' - Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments Margo Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art. Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self. 'Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System is as electric as its title suggests. It takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of "imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you' - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'If you want to know who we are and where we've been, read Margo Jefferson' - Edmund White, author of A Previous Life 'This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman's mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many' - Darryl Pinckney, author of Sold and Gone
A heartfelt hymn to the sea and an unforgettable introduction to one of the most gifted nature writers of the new generation The seas cover over two thirds of our planet and yet most of us live our lives on land, creatures of a different element, at once fascinated and terrified by the beauty and power of these great bodies of water. There are some, though, who go to sea, who get to know its many moods -- the tranquil and mirror-like, the raging and ripple-swept -- and who bring back with them their stories of wonder and warning. Hannah Stowe is one such sea-goer and one such storyteller. Drawing on her expertise as a marine biologist and sailor, and her experiences in the North Sea, the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean, Move Like Water is an exploration of the human relationship with the sea, the powerful impression it has made on our culture, and the terrible damage we have inflicted upon its ecosystems. In shimmering, fluid prose, Stowe introduces us to five keystone marine creatures - the sperm whale, the humpback whale, the orca, the albatross and the firecrow - encouraging us to fall in love with the seas as she has, to appreciate their majesty and their vulnerability.
The emotion and trauma of the Partition are buried deep, but Aanchal Malhotra has found a way to recover them. Through the possessions saved by her own great-grandparents as they fled their homes, she discovers the unique power of such objects: to unlock the secrets of a colossal human migration, and a life that once was. Remnants of Partition is a remarkable alternative history, telling the family stories hidden within items carried between the new India and Pakistan, amid chaos and violence. They uncover a rich tapestry of pain and rupture, but also of hope and connection - in belonging through belongings, and identities reforged. From a string of pearls to a young woman's poetry, this extraordinary book gives voice to the voiceless, restoring the everyday to a great drama of the twentieth century. Its power and poignancy will haunt the reader. Shortlisted for the British Academy's 2019 Al-Rodhan Prize A Hindustan Times 'India @ 70' book Shortlisted for the Hindu Lit for Life Non-Fiction Prize Shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize
Selected by the "New York Times "as a Notable Cookbook of 2011, by
USA Today as a Best Holiday Gift "For the Foodie," and by More.com
as one of their Best Cookbooks of the Year.
ELSIE is a riveting story told with gut-wrenching reality of a woman's courage set against a torrid period in South African and world history. Growing up in a small diamond-mining village near Pretoria, South Africa, her secure, sheltered environment is shaken with the return of the two men in her life from fighting in German East Africa during the first World War ...a changed shell-shocked boyfriend who commits suicide and an unemployed brother who becomes involved in illicit diamond dealing with dire consequences. Rather than indulge in self-pity she puts her strong pacifist feelings to work by volunteering as a nurse at a military field hospital in Belgium where she meets her husband to be and where exposure to the horrors and futility of industrial warfare changes her worldview and she joins with other women calling for universal suffrage. After the war she is thrown into further conflict when her husband is involved in the bloody confrontations of the 1922 miners' strike in South Africa and she opens a care centre for abused women and single pregnant mothers, giving them protection and hope of a better future.
‘It is the godly feeling of dancing like a goddess and snapping on a beat with sheer joy that makes all the trouble life demands worthwhile. In these moments, of intensive freedom from pain, of joy that knows no bound and peace that passeth all understanding, I become that kid again, dancing with my mother.’ Welcome Mandla Lishivha’s exquisitely crafted memoir is unlike anything you’ve ever read. Boy On The Run is a staggeringly beautiful and honest exploration of identity through grief, love and friendship, giving us, the readers, a glorious song of self-expression. This book will change your life.
The remarkable story of Dr Shirley Sherwood, scientist, author, travel writer, gardener as well as mother and grandmother. Following the tragic death of her brilliant scientist husband, Michael Cross, in a freak air crash in 1964, she was left as a 30-year-old widow with two young boys aged four and three. For the next twelve years she worked as a key member of the Nobel Prize-winning team which developed Tagamet, the first blockbuster drug (sales of over $1 billion a year). After her marriage to Jim Sherwood in 1977, she left science to concentrate full-time on the huge task of restoring the fabled Orient-Express train, probably the most luxurious and exotic form of travel ever devised. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, running between London and Venice, was relaunched in 1982, ninety-nine years after its first journey. Sherwood's history of the project sold more than 400,000 copies. The Orient-Express train was just the beginning. The Sherwoods went on to create the five-star Orient-Express Hotels company (now Belmond), which owned some of the finest hotels in the world, including the Cipriani in Venice, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town and the Copacabana Palace in Rio. They pioneered new train routes across the Alps, started the Eastern & Oriental Express running between Singapore and Bangkok- crossing over the Bridge on the River Kwai- opened up tourism in Myanmar with the first cruise ship to operate on the Irrawaddy, and took over the railways of Peru, which run all the way to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca. Her most lasting achievement, the one of which she is proudest, is the Shirley Sherwood Collection of contemporary botanical art, which she started in 1990 and now includes over 1,000 paintings and drawings representing the work of more than 300 contemporary botanical artists from 36 countries. She has mounted exhibitions in many prestigious locations including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Kirstenbosch in Cape Town and the Real Jardin Botanico, Madrid. The Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens is the first museum to be dedicated to modern botanical art and her books, which often accompanied her exhibitions, have been largely responsible for re-establishing botanical art in its rightful place as an important art form. These are just some of the many achievements in a long and rich life, vividly described in this book.
When Jennifer Gilbert was twenty-two years old, someone tried to cut her life short in the most violent way. Not wanting this traumatic encounter to define her life, she buried it within and bravely launched a fabulous career in New York as an event planner. Always the calm in the storm--from fixing a ripped dress to relocating a lavish party on two days' notice--she was convinced she'd never again feel joy herself. Yet these weddings, anniversaries, and holiday parties slowly brought her back to life. No one's entitled to an easy road, Gilbert learned, but instead of anticipating our present in a goodie bag, it's our presence that is the real gift.
Dr Joan Louwrens was always drawn to wild places, which were balm to her soul. When her husband died, leaving her alone with two small daughters to raise, she threw herself wholeheartedly into ‘adventure medicine’, seeking out the world’s most remote corners – on land and at sea – to practise her healing, both her own and others. Working in wild places from the Kruger Park to the Australian Outback, the Atlantic Ocean islands, and both the south and north poles, ‘Doctor Joan’ dealt with a vast range of medical issues, from rabies to deep-vein thrombosis, childbirth to wisdom-tooth extraction, catatonia to depression. Showing an eagerness to learn and a humility that isn’t always a given in her profession, and with a wry eye and a sympathetic outlook, Joan Louwrens has written a memoir that’s a poignant and often funny story of a life lived to the full
'Powerful, humane and wise' JULIA SAMUEL 'Everyone should read it' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Beautiful ... This is a book for everyone. You feel held by it' PHILIPPA PERRY Most of us have a conversation we're avoiding. From the bestselling author of With the End in Mind, this is a book about the conversations that matter and how to have them better - more honestly, more confidently and without regret. A child coming out to their parent. A family losing someone to terminal illness. A friend noticing the first signs of someone's dementia. A careers advisor and a teenager with radically different perspectives. There are moments when we must talk, listen and be there for one another. Why do we so often come away from those times feeling like we could have done more, or should have been braver in the face of discomfort? Why do we skirt the conversations that might matter most? By bringing together stories with a lifetime's experience working in medicine and the newest psychology, Mannix offers lessons for how we can better speak our mind and help when others need to. Kathryn Mannix's 'With the End in Mind' was a Sunday Times bestseller the weeks ending 6 January 2018, 13 January 2018 and 3 February 2018. |
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