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Books > Fiction > True stories > General
On 27 August 1979, Paul Burns's life changed for ever. Travelling through Warren Point in Northern Ireland when the IRA detonated two massive bombs, he was involved in a devastating explosion - eighteen soldiers were killed that day; Paul was one of only two who survived. Newly recruited to the Parachute Regiment, Paul was performing a tour of duty in Northern Ireland when a four-tonne truck in which he was travelling was destroyed by a massive IRA bomb. Eighteen of his friends and colleagues were killed in the Warrenpoint blast - the biggest single loss of life for the British Army during the Troubles. Paul barely survived. His body was broken. His left leg was amputated below the knee. His skin was burned down to the bone. Those who saw him wondered if it might not be kinder to let him die. At just eighteen, Paul thought his life was over. But he refused to be beaten. He had made a promise to himself that he would make up for the loss of his friends' lives by living his own life to the full. And just over five years later he was a member of the elite parachute display team, The Red Devils. In 1996 he entered the record books as a member of 'Time and Tide': the first ever disabled crew to sail around the world. Today he works as a disabled extra in tv and film - amongst his accolades he can count a role in Hollywood blockbuster Gladiator. His story is a remarkable tale of one man's determination to make the most of his life against the odds.
Those who had not discovered our truth had Satan in their hearts. We lived amongst them, but not with them, 'in the world, but not of the world'. We were special. We were the disciples of the Fellowship. When she was a child, Lindsey Rosa's every waking moment was governed by the rules of an extreme separatist sect. It controlled what she wore and what she ate; it forbade her to listen to music, to cut her hair, to watch television, to use a computer. The Fellowship said her family was special. Why would she believe otherwise? Then, when Lindsey was seven, her elder brother was caught listening to music and the family were expelled from the sect. But Lindsey's parents knew nothing but the ways of the Fellowship, so they remained in hope that they would be accepted and continued to make the family live by the sect's strict rules - cutting themselves off from their local community. But as Lindsey grew, so too did her awareness of a world outside. And, feeling increasingly isolated, she struggled with her own identity. Until finally she was faced with a devastating choice: to continue to live by the rules of the religious sect or to be brutally cast out and leave the family she loved behind forever.
When the Nazis take Rome, thousands go into hiding. One priest will risk everything to save them. September 1943: German forces occupy Rome. SS officer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. An Irish priest, Hugh O'Flaherty, dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, a neutral, independent country within Rome where the occupiers hold no sway. He gathers a team to set up an Escape Line. But Hauptmann's net begins closing in and the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical. By Christmas, it's too late to turn back. Based on a true story, My Father's House is a powerful thriller from a master of historical fiction. It is an unforgettable novel of love, sacrifice and what it means to be human in the most extreme circumstances.
In this large, full colour, hard cover book by James Court, yu can read about guitarist, drummer, bass player, pianist, keyboardist, song writer, producer, programmer, arranger, vocalist, business entrepreneur, actor, director, dancer and choreographer Prince. James Court has been an avid collector, writer and follower of Prince and his work for more than thirty years. Upon Prince's death in April 2016, James set about the colossal task of revealing every part of this fascinating ever-changing musician, leaving no stone unturned. The Biography tackles the issue's that plagued the Superstar, his fight for Musical freedom and his constant need to write record and perform without restriction or filter.Often described as the greatest Musician of his generation Prince remained at the very top of the game, a multi-instrumentalist with the ability to write cutting edge songs at will, his talent ability and influence were simply unmatched. The results make this the most comprehensive, detailed and exhaustingly accurate depiction of one of the most popular, misunderstood and illusive musicians in modern day music....
'Ground-breaking. Everyone should read this book' Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score When it comes to understanding the connection between our mental and physical health, we should be looking at the exceptions, not the rules. Dr Jeff Rediger, a world-leading Harvard psychiatrist, has spent the last fifteen years studying thousands of individuals from around the world, examining the stories behind extraordinary cases of recovery from terminal illness. Observing the common denominators of people who have beaten the odds, Dr Rediger reveals the immense power of our immune system and unlocks the secrets of the mind-body connection. In Cured, he explains the vital role that nutrition plays in boosting our immunity and fighting off disease, and he also outlines how stress, trauma and identity affect our physical health. In analysing the remarkable science of recovery, Dr Rediger reveals the power of our mind to heal our body and shows us the keys to good health. 'In an era of incurable chronic diseases causing 60% of all deaths worldwide, this book provides one potential way out' Dr Mark Hyman, author of The Blood Sugar Solution 'Seasoned with the author's penetrating insights about healing, clearly articulated science and illuminating case histories, Cured opens genuine vistas of transforming illness into health' Gabor Mate, author of When the Body Says No
The album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold over 420,000 copies in its first week, received ten Grammy nominations (winning five). Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader critically engages the work of Ms. Hill, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of the album. Beyond the album's commercial success, Ms. Hill's radical self-consciousness and exuberance for life led listeners through her Black girl journey of love, motherhood, admonition, redemption, spirituality, sexuality, politics, and nostalgia that affirmed the power of creativity, resistance, and the tradition of African storytelling. Ms. Hill's album provides inspirational energies that serve as a foundational text for Black girlhood. In many ways it is the definitive work of Black girlhood for the Hip Hop generation and beyond because it opened our eyes to a holistic narrative of woman and mother. Twenty years after the release of the album, we pay tribute to this work by adding to the quilt of Black girls' stories with the threads of feminist consciousness, which are particularly imperative in this space where we declare: Black girls matter. Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood is the first book to academically engage the work of the incomparable Ms. Hill. It intellectually wrestles with the interdisciplinary nature of Ms. Hill's album, centering the connection between the music of Ms. Hill and the lives of Black girls. The essays in this collection utilize personal narratives and professional pedagogies and invite students, scholars, and readers to reflect on how Ms. Hill's album influenced their past, present, and future.
The twins were born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1998, where their mother struggled to care for them. Ha was taken in by their biological aunt, and grew up in a rural village, going to school, and playing outside with the neighbors. They had sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons. Ha's twin sister, Loan, spent time in an orphanage before a wealthy, white American family adopted her and renamed her Isabella. Isabella grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, with a nonbiological sister, Olivia, also adopted from Vietnam. Isabella and Olivia attended a predominantly white Catholic school, played soccer, and prepared for college. But when Isabella's adoptive mother learned of Isabella's biological twin back in Vietnam, all of their lives changed forever. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls' incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life. Hayasaki contextualizes the sisters' experiences with the fascinating and often sinister history of twin studies, the nature versus nurture debate, and intercountry and transracial adoption, as well as the latest scholarship and conversation surrounding adoption today, especially among adoptees. For readers of All You Can Ever Know and American Baby, Somewhere Sisters is a richly textured, moving story of sisterhood and coming-of-age, told through the remarkable lives of young women who have redefined the meaning of family for themselves.
Now a major motion picture - starring Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci and Jamie Dornan. The book that inspired the film A Private War, based on acclaimed journalist Marie Brenner's centrepiece profile of Sunday Times Foreign Affairs correspondent Marie Colvin from this extraordinary collection. In February 2012, Marie Colvin illegally crossed into Syria on the back of a motorcycle. A veteran war correspondent known for her fearlessness, outspokenness and signature eye patch, she was defying a government decree preventing journalists from entering the country. Accompanied by French photographer Remi Ochlik, she was determined to report on the Syrian Civil War, adding to a long list of conflicts she had covered including Egypt, Chechnya, Kosovo and Libya. She had witnessed grenade attacks, saved more than one thousand women and children in an East Timor war zone when she refused to stop reporting until they were evacuated, and even interviewed Muammar Gaddafi. But she had no idea that the story she was looking for in Syria would be her last, culminating in the explosion of an improvised device that sent shockwaves across the world. In A Private War, veteran journalist Marie Brenner brilliantly re-creates the last days and hours of Colvin's life, moment-by-moment, to share the story of a remarkable life lived on the front lines. This collection also includes Brenner's classic accounts of encounters with Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, Malala Yousafzai and Richard Jewell.
In this book for young people who are struggling with substance abuse, Kyle Keegan recounts his own remarkable story of drug abuse and ruthless addiction. Keegan, now an adult who is in recovery from his addiction, discusses his experience as a well adjusted adolescent who fell victim to heroin and whose life was almost destroyed by the devastating drug. Against the backdrop of these experiences, he also provides useful information that young people struggling with substance abuse need, such as how to recognize and accept that there is a problem, how to find professional help, and how to stay happy and healthy in recovery.
'Nobody knew the truth. For all those years while people judged me, I protected those closest to me. Now it's time for the real story to be told. It's time for healing and forgiveness.' Tressa Middleton made UK history when she became Britain's youngest mum in 2006 aged just 12 years and 8 months. Her case provoked shock and outrage - but the truth behind the headlines was far sadder than anyone could ever have imagined. Born into a life of poverty and neglect, Tressa was forced to grow up fast when she taken into care at just four years old. She was returned to her mother's chaotic world but by the age of seven, she was being abused by her own brother and at 11 years old she fell pregnant with his child. For years she kept his dark secret in an attempt to hold her family together until the truth threatened to destroy her completely. In the years since the birth, Tressa has gone through more pain and turmoil than most adults experience in a lifetime - yet today she survives a brave, strong and compassionate young woman. Now, for the first time, Tressa Middleton tells her own harrowing yet poignant story - a story of hope, forgiveness and above all, love.
From storytelling phenomenon The Moth: a collection about risk, courage, and facing the unknown, drawn from the best stories ever told on their stages. All These Wonders features voices both familiar and new. Storytellers include writer Jung Chang and comedian Louis C.K, as well as a hip hop 'one hit wonder', an astronomer gazing at the surface of Pluto for the first time, and a young female spy risking everything as part of Churchill's secret army during World War II. They share their ventures into uncharted territory - and how their lives were changed forever by what they found there. These true stories have been carefully selected and adapted to the page by the creative minds at The Moth, and encompass the very best of the 17,000+ stories performed in live Moth shows around the world. It is filled with a variety of humourous, moving, and gripping tales from all walks of life that will leave you speechless.
'There's a lot of stigma attached to sex. Particularly with women, you have a big dichotomy between: Do you have sex? Do you not? Do you be a slut? Do you be a virgin? Do you be a prude? Do you be a man-whore? You can't really win.' Women are always being told how to be sexy, but are rarely asked what actually turns them on. Wendy Jones wanted to find out, so she interviewed twenty-four women from all walks of life, including a burlesque dancer, a girl guide leader, a shop assistant, a ninety-four year old who remembers the sexual freedom of the war, a transexual, a nun, a feminist into BDSM, a covered Muslim, a mother, a student, a polyamorist, and a sexual healer. The women talked about their lives, bodies, sexual fantasies and relationships, about what they've learned, how they have been hurt, what they enjoy and what they long for. The interviews are frank, engaging, and surprising. Each woman is unique but together they speak for a majority, and it's time we listened. This honest and inspiring exploration of female desire will change the way we think and talk about sex forever. 'English women have a reputation for being reserved and uptight; actually behind closed doors we're outrageous.'
Berkeley linguistics professor John McWhorter, born at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, spent years trying to make sense of this question. Now he dares to say the unsayable: racism's ugliest legacy is the disease of defeatism that has infected black America. Losing the Race explores the three main components of this cultural virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and antiintellectualism that are making blacks their own worst enemies in the struggle for success. More angry than Stephen Carter, more pragmatic and compassionate than Shelby Steele, more forward-looking than Stanley Crouch, McWhorter represents an original and provocative point of view. With Losing the Race, a bold new voice rises among black intellectuals.
How many times have you seen a woman artist solely referred to as the wife, girlfriend, muse, or 'mistress' of a man in the public eye? Throughout history, the achievements of women working across artistic disciplines - from visual artists to writers to filmmakers - have been largely undervalued, with the title of 'genius' reserved mainly for men. More than a Muse unpacks the complex romantic relationships that left women overshadowed, anonymous or underestimated in their work. Katie McCabe shines a light on the stories of talents like photographer Dora Maar, pioneering film editor and Hitchcock-collaborator Alma Reville, jazz pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong and many more. Exploring a broad scope of art movements and moments from Surrealism to early British silent film, Katie reexamines the contributions of women that have too often been ignored. More than a Muse views our history through the lens of artistic partnership, and positions women solidly in the foreground.
The true story of Melody, aged 8, the last of five siblings to be taken from her drug dependent single mother and brought into care. When Cathy is told about Melody's terrible childhood, she is sure she's heard it all before. But it isn't long before she feels there is more going on than she or the social services are aware of. Although Melody is angry at having to leave her mother, as many children coming into care are, she also worries about her obsessively - far more than is usual. Amanda, Melody's mother, is also angry and takes it out on Cathy at contact, which again is something Cathy has experienced before. Yet there is a lost and vulnerable look about Amanda, and Cathy starts to see why Melody worries about her and feels she needs looking after. When Amanda misses contact, it is assumed she has forgotten, but nothing could have been further from the truth...
To Jeanne de Ferranti's business-minded parents, it was dismissed as an irresponsible waste of time, and it quickly became 'the journey that never was'. It didn't enter the record books, and it was never reported in the press. But to Jeanne and her friend and co-driver Jane, it was rather a big adventure. Back in the early 1960s, as two young women in their twenties, they drove one of the first Minis right round the world, and made it home in one piece. The pair survived endless mechanical breakdowns and a major road accident, enduring hunger, thirst, poverty, bureaucratic red tape and food which ranged from the delightful to the disgusting. They frequently had to fight off the attentions of amorous men, even, at one point, escaping from an attempted rape at knifepoint. But along the way they experienced the kindness of many strangers and saw some of the greatest sights the world has to offer, finally making it safely home two years after they had set out. This, half a century on, is Jeanne's enthralling account of the round-the world adventure which at the time was simply swept under the carpet.
Max Edelman was just 17 when the Nazis took him to the first of five work camps, where his only hope of survival was to keep quiet and raise an emotional shield. After witnessing a German Shepherd kill a fellow prisoner, he developed a lifelong fear of dogs. Beaten into blindness by two bored guards, Max survived, buried the past, and moved on. But when he retired, he needed help. After a month of training, he received Calvin, a devoted chocolate Labrador retriever. Calvin guided Max safely through life, but he sensed Max's distance and reserve. Calvin grew listless and lost weight. Trainers intervened-but to no avail. A few days before Calvin's inevitable reassignment, Max went for a walk. A car cut into the crosswalk, and Calvin leapt forward, saving Max's life. Max's emotional shield dissolved. Calvin sensed the change and immediately improved, guiding Max to greater openness, trust, and engagement with the world. Here is the remarkable, touching story of a man who survived history and the dog that unlocked his heart.
In 1973 Sophie Neville was cast as Titty alongside Virginia McKenna, Ronald Fraser and Suzanna Hamilton in the film Swallows & Amazons. Made before the advent of digital technology, the child stars lived out Arthur Ransome's epic adventure in the great outdoors without ever seeing a script. Encouraged by her mother, Sophie Neville kept a diary about her time filming on location in the lakes and mountains of Cumbria. Bouncy and effervescent, extracts from her childhood diary are interspersed among her memories of the cast and crew as well as photographs, maps and newspaper articles, offering a child's eye view of the making of the film from development to premiere - and the aftermath.
In Through Her Eyes Australian women correspondents tell their own stories from the frontline - covering the breaking news, the issues and the events that are changing the world. They tell of Russian tanks and Ukrainian mothers fleeing with their children, vicious Afghan warlords, anti-government rebels in Central Africa, terrorist attacks in the United States, and the chaos faced by ordinary people caught up in disasters and political upheaval. While a woman strapping on a reporters' flak jacket is now a common sight, there was a time when they were locked out of the big stories because of their gender. Unlike their male counterparts, they needed single-minded determination to score a plum assignment or win a posting to a foreign bureau. Through Her Eyes tells of the exhilaration that comes with a big story but also the dangers, the risks, the struggle and the big issues women still face, from vicious media trolling to threats of sexual violence. Through Her Eyes includes well-known women correspondents for major media organisations inside and outside Australia including the ABC, BBC, SBS, CNN, The Associated Press of America, UPI, Reuters, The Times of London, Al Jazeera, China Global Television Network, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Australian Financial Review.
Parental love was in short supply when Aura Angel was growing up, in a household where there was so little money that her parents would burn the floorboards of their council house to keep warm in winter. Her father would beat her at the slightest excuse, and when he left home her mother took over, using brooms and kitchen implements to make sure the blows hurt. Her mother's conflicts with authority led Aura (not her real name) to eight schools and more than 20 homes before finally, at 12 years old, she marched into the local Social Services offices and asked them to take care of her. Her troubles were far from over; an abortion at 16 followed and two children by fathers who badly let her down. Yet now, in her forties, she is at peace with herself. She has written A Normal Life as "a counselling tool for myself". It is an extraordinary and moving story, candidly and sensitively written.
'Full of fun facts and trivia nuggets, perfect for lovers of all things quintessentially British' My Weekly A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories Did you know that Hitler wanted to change the rules of cricket? Or that a 61-year-old retiree once stole a million-pound portrait from the National Gallery in protest at his TV licence? Have you heard about the baron framed for a bank robbery by the South African secret police who was spared jail because of a truanting schoolboy? Or that the world's first cash machine had a small man hidden inside on its launch day in case of a breakdown? All this, and much, much more in this entertaining must-have collection of amazing facts and strange-but-true stories that will fascinate the whole family. Based on true stories featured on The One Show. |
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