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Books > Fiction > True stories > General
Mark Mathabane first came to prominence with the publication of Kaffir Boy, which became a New York Times bestseller. His story of growing up in South Africa was one of the most riveting accounts of life under apartheid. Mathabane's newest book, Miriam's Song, is the story of Mark's sister, who was left behind in South Africa. It is the gripping tale of a woman -- representative of an entire generation -- who came of age amid the violence and rebellion of the 1980s and finally saw the destruction of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic South Africa. Mathabane writes in Miriam's voice based on stories she told him, but he has re-created her unforgettable experience as only someone who also lived through it could. The immediacy of the hardships that brother and sister endured -- from daily school beatings to overwhelming poverty -- is balanced by the beauty of their childhood observations and the true affection that they have for each other.
Nominated for the 2017 Hillman Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights AwardWith this Dickensian tale from America's heartland, New York Times writer and columnist Dan Barry tells the harrowing yet uplifting story of the exploitation and abuse of a resilient group of men with intellectual disability, and the heroic efforts of those who helped them to find justice and reclaim their lives.In the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa, dozens of men, all with intellectual disability and all from Texas, lived in an old schoolhouse. Before dawn each morning, they were bussed to a nearby processing plant, where they eviscerated turkeys in return for food, lodging, and $65 a month. They lived in near servitude for more than thirty years, enduring increasing neglect, exploitation, and physical and emotional abuse--until state social workers, local journalists, and one tenacious labor lawyer helped these men achieve freedom.Drawing on exhaustive interviews, Dan Barry dives deeply into the lives of the men, recording their memories of suffering, loneliness and fleeting joy, as well as the undying hope they maintained despite their traumatic circumstances. Barry explores how a small Iowa town remained oblivious to the plight of these men, analyzes the many causes for such profound and chronic negligence, and lays out the impact of the men's dramatic court case, which has spurred advocates--including President Obama--to push for just pay and improved working conditions for people living with disabilities.A luminous work of social justice, told with compassion and compelling detail, The Boys in the Bunkhouse is more than just inspired storytelling. It is a clarion call for a vigilance that ensures inclusion and dignity for all.
Strung together like a handful of Mardi Gras beads thrown from a passing float, Labordeis tales reveal the bright and beautiful as well as the dim and gaudy sides of the city. Southern Living.Offering innovative insights into such New Orleans mainstays as Carnival, Sports, and The Quarter, Laborde provides a look at aspects of Crescent City living usually reserved for residents. These essays include an Orleanian ode entitled, In Praise of the Potato Poor Boy and several explorations and explanations of Mr. Bingle, the only symbol of Christmas that is unique to New Orleans. These eighty-one vignettes originally appeared in Labordeis Streetcar column, which currently runs in New Orleans Magazine, a publication that the author also edits.
A Doctor, A Lawyer, and an Accountant tell You Everything You Need To Know About What Men Want.If you're like most women, you're in the dark about what men really think about love. This enormously helpful book takes you into the heart and mind of the single professional male to show you not only what but how he thinks about dating and being in love, about what turns him on, and what sends him running in the other direction.
True stories of exciting escapes and rescues have always been popular. This encyclopaedia presents escapes and rescues from the earliest times to the late-1990s in an A-Z format. Roger Howard describes the events themselves, the reasons why they were successful, and what motivated the escapees. Some of the escapes described are simple but ingenious, such as that of Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and political philosopher. In 1619 Grotius had been condemned to life imprisonment, but he escaped in 1621 concealed in a small chest less than four feet in length. The entries relate to topics as varied as Colditz, John McVicar, the Russian Revolution, Stalin, and the Titanic. Also covered are instances of people who evaded capture altogether and escapees who, like Lord Lucan, have "disappeared".
Heard the one about the airline that has introduced 'corpse cupboards' on new planes to cope with the number of people who die in the air? Heard the story about the First Class air hostess who got fired for sitting on the face of a passenger during a long haul flight? Heard about the amount of knickers and false teeth that are left behind in the body of the plane? Heard how pissed-off stewards put laxatives in your drinks? Heard about the pilot who ran out of runway? Heard of the disabled passengers who miraculously walk again? No? Then you haven't read Air Babylon. Do you know the best place to have sex on a plane? Do you know how to dress for an upgrade? Do you know that one drink in the air equals three on the ground? Do you know who is checking you in? Who is checking you out? Do you know exactly what happens to your luggage once it leaves your sight? Is it secure? Are you safe? Do you really know anything about the business that you entrust your life to several times a year? Air Babylon is a trawl through the highs, the lows, and the rapid descents of the travel industry. It catalogues the births, the deaths, the drunken brawls, the sexual antics, and the debauchery behind the scenes of the ultimate service industry - where the world is divided into those who wear the uniform and those who don't...
An assemblage of the lives and stories of several homeless people. There's Valentine from Cameroon whose grandfather taught him how to catch mermaids; Pinky who was eight in the 1976 riots; Gert the horse thief who never attends a meeting but whose stories make a big impression on the group; Virginia the actress with the narrow bed; Patrick the cartoonist who is forced to eat live birds; Fresew the Ethiopian chemist; Steven the ex-boxer who can change the colour of a cow; Robert who explains how to remove tattoos with condensed milk; and Sipho the much-loved poet who lives in a drain under the city and who goes missing. This title is full of stories of struggle and triumph.
In this landmark guide to the spiritual journey, respected Zen teacher and psychotherapist John Tarrant brings together ancient Eastern traditions and the Western passion for the soul. Using real-life stories, Zen tales, and Greek myths, The Light Inside the Dark shows how our darkest experiences can be the gates to wisdom and joy. Tarrant leads us through the inevitable descents of our journey--from the everyday world of work and family into the treasure cave of the interior life--from which we return with greater love of life's vivid, common gifts. Written with empathy and a poet's skill, The Light Inside the Dark is the freshest and most challenging work on the soul to he published in years.
I opened my mouth and it came. It wasn't a cry, or even a sob. It came from deep in my soul... It was the sound of a mother helpless to save her child from danger. I asked the same unanswered questions over and again. Where was he? Where was my Damien? On 2 November 1996, sixteen-year-old Damien Nettles went out for the evening in his home town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight. CCTV recorded him in a chip shop at 23:40 and on the High Street just after midnight. He has never been seen since. His mother, Valerie, has spent over two decades desperately trying to find out what happened to her son. Arrests have been made, and suspects released without charge. Despite years of research by journalists and a private investigator, Damien's vanishing remains a mystery. In this hugely moving and compelling account, Valerie Nettles tells the full, perplexing story of her son's disappearance. Someone must know what happened to Damien. Will the truth ever emerge from the shadows?
As an adult, National Public Radio foreign correspondent Jacki Lyden has spent her life on the front lines of some of the world?s most dangerous war zones. As a child, she lived in a war zone of a different kind. Her mother, Dolores, suffered from what is now called manic depression; but when Jacki was growing up in a small Midwestern town, Dolores was simply called crazy. In her manic phases, Dolores became Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba, exotically delusional and frightening, yet to young Jacki also transcendent, even inspiring. In time, Jacki grew to accept, even relish, Dolores?s bizarre episodes, marveling at her mother?s creative energy and using it to fuel her own. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and lyrical, this memoir of a mother-daughter relationship is a testimony to obstinate devotion in the face of bewildering illness.
Lyddy: A Tale of the Old South is a fictional reconstruction of antebellum life in the historic Midway community of Liberty County, Georgia, home of some of the Old South's wealthiest planters. Originally published in 1898, this blend of fiction and memoir looks through the eyes of a white plantation mistress at her family plantation, her marriage, slave life, and the destruction of the plantation economy that took place when Sherman's army arrived in December 1864. Writing in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eugenia J. Bacon sought to represent plantation life as she had experienced it. Bacon's story provides a window on slave marriages, the retention of African folklore among coastal Georgia slaves, and the change in relations between masters and slaves after the Civil War. Lucinda H. MacKethan's extensive introduction explores the interwoven contexts of race, class, and gender that make this novel an interesting lens through which to view the complex human relationships that constituted plantation society in the Old South.
'Frank Tallis brings a lifetime's clinical experience and wise reflection to a condition that, by its own strange routes, leads us into the very heart of love itself. This is a brilliant, compelling book' Ian McEwan Love is a great leveller. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone loses love, and everyone knows something of love's madness. But the experience of obsessive love is no trivial matter. In the course of his career psychologist Dr Frank Tallis has treated many unusual patients, whose stories have lessons for all of us. A barristers' clerk becomes convinced that her dentist has fallen in love with her and they are destined to be together for eternity; a widow is visited by the ghost of her dead husband; an academic is besotted with his own reflection; a beautiful woman searches jealously for a rival who isn't there; and a night porter is possessed by a lascivious demon. These are just some of the people whom we meet in an extraordinary and original book that explores the conditions of longing and desire - true accounts of psychotherapy that take the reader on a journey through the darker realms of the amorous mind. Drawing on the latest scientific research into the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying romance and emotional attachment, THE INCURABLE ROMANTIC demonstrates that ultimately love dissolves the divide between what we judge to be normal and abnormal.
We all know HOW TO SHIT IN THE WOODS--but do we dare? After reading this uproarious collection of "fecal misadventures" from a veteran river-rafting guide and yarn spinner extraordinaire, you may think twice before venturing out into the great beyond...or even down the hall to your nice safe water closet.
Janice and Bill were the perfect couple. They met during college, got married and began promising careers. But in 1987 their storybook life was shattered forever when they were diagnosed with HIV. Janice explains how they coped.
The names, we sometimes say, have been changed "to protect the innocent". As regards those agents in KGB networks in the U.S. during and following World War II, their presence and their deeds (or misdeeds) were known, but their names were not. The FBI-KGB War is the exciting, true (which often really is stranger than fiction), and authentic story of how those names became known and how the not-so-innocent persons to whom those names belonged were finally called to account. Following World War II, FBI Special Agent Robert J. Lamphere set out to uncover the extensive American networks of the KGB. Lamphere used a large file of secret Russian messages intercepted during the war. The FBI-KGB War is the detailed (but never boring) story of how those messages were finally decoded and made to reveal their secrets, secrets that led to persons with such now-infamous names as Judith Coplon, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The gripping true story of the undercover agent risking his life to fight terrorism Their aim was to kill as many people as possible. His mission was to stop them. A terrorist plot to kill hundreds of innocent people. An undercover agent posing as a wealthy Al-Qaeda sympathiser. A race against time to gain the terrorists' trust and bring them down. Before it's too late... In the aftermath of 9/11, long-time undercover FBI agent Tamer Elnoury joined an elite counterterrorism unit. Its mission: to infiltrate terror cells, gain detailed knowledge of their networks and bring them successfully to justice. Writing under a pseudonym, Tamer Elnoury here tells the hair-raising true story of life undercover, risking his life to keep us safe.
Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience--that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone. Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world. In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.
Running's Strangest Tales is a fascinating collection of weird and wonderful stories from the world of running, from the earliest marathon to today's high-tech, apped-up approach. Within these pages you'll find the bizarre story of the Norwegian footballer forced to miss a crucial World Cup qualifier after colliding with a moose on his morning jog, the American ultra-marathoner who had all his toenails removed to improve his running, and why some runners at the 2015 Tokyo marathon were wearing GPS-enabled, edible bananas, complete with LEDs and incoming Twitter updates. Packed with tales that are so odd you'll hardly believe them, this book makes the perfect gift for all running enthusiasts, from the seasoned marathoner to the park jogger, and those who only ever run a bath. Word count: 45,000
There is a war on truth. And the liars are winning. There is an increasingly large number of weapons in the arsenal of the rich, the powerful and the elected to prevent the truth from coming out - to bury it, warp it, twist it to suit their purposes. Truthteller exposes this toolbox of lies and deception, and reveals how governments and corporations have covered-up mass murder, corruption and catastrophe. In a world where Putin and Trump have successfully branded journalists as traffickers in fake news, while promoting the actual creators of fake news, investigative reporter Stephen Davis shows the tools that are used to deceive us and explains why they work. He draws from over three decades as an award-winning reporter, editor, foreign correspondent, television producer, documentary filmmaker, and journalism educator to analyse exclusive documents and interviews. Discover shocking details of deception in media across the globe and learn how to recognise and decode the lies we are told by those in power. Truthteller is an essential guide for understanding the modern media world - for teachers, students and concerned citizens who want to know the facts, not fake news and conspiracy theories. It takes you inside the world of investigative reporting in an intimate history of a reporter's battles, won and lost, the personal and professional costs and the lives damaged along the way.
Let Me Go is the powerful new memoir from foster carer and Sunday Times bestselling author Casey Watson. Harley is a troubled 13-year-old girl who wants to end her own life and there's only one woman who can find out why. When Harley is sectioned after attempting suicide, she ends up in Casey's care under a 28-day care order. But before Casey can even get her back to the safety of her home, Harley hurls herself out of the moving car. Harley has a family - a widowed mother and older sister Milly. But Milly has left home and her mum, who has addiction issues, feels unable to cope. Despite the dysfunctional family, Casey suspects there is more to Harley's distress and after weeks of gentle coaching, a sudden breakthrough sheds light on the disturbing truth - Milly and her mum are not the only people in Harley's life. There is a man, a very dangerous man indeed.
Tell Me You're Sorry, Daddy is the moving true story of one man's horrific campaign of abuse against his own daughter, which continued for more than seven years of her childhood, and has had effects which continue to this day. 32 years after the abuse began, Caryn Walker finally saw her father in court in 2011, charged with 24 counts of abuse against her. As she awaited the verdict, she looked at the man who robbed her of so many years, who never showed any remorse, and realised that she was the one who was strong, she was the survivor. Caryn knew that it was time for her to tell her full story - and that of her dead sister, Jennifer. Against all the odds, she fought. And she won.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Want to know the truth about what life is like as a mum and step-mum with a chaotic patchwork family? This book is everything I've been through that's made me who I am, plus the lessons I've learned from many mistakes. I hope that it will make you laugh as well as give you strength to keep going when times get tough. After all, we are all in this together... Rachaele, aka Part-Time Working Mummy Hundreds of thousands of fans flock to the Part-Time Working Mummy page for its heartfelt posts, honest accounts of complicated family life and its appeal to 'bring parents together to support each other through all the sh*t that life throws at us!'. This book channels the amazing spirit of the page, with Rachaele sharing behind-the-scenes experiences that have shaped her own views on parenting and life; packed with personal stories and lessons learned, it's about the best, the worst and the ok times in a 'normal' family. As well as tackling subjects like single parenthood, patchwork families, unexpected pregnancy, domestic violence and bullying, the book ultimately spreads a message of kindness amidst the chaos and inspires you to change the world for the better - and, of course, a good laugh to see you through the tough times!
Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2018 If you had told Helen two years ago that she would be getting up at 6 a.m. on Sundays to swim in a freezing reservoir and spending her Saturday nights unshowered and covered in mud in a pub, she would have spat out her champagne. But when everyone around you starts settling down, what else is a glamorous party girl to do but to launch herself into the world of endurance sport? For someone who didn't even own a pair of flat shoes (and definitely no waterproofs), Helen would soon find she had a lot to learn. Join Helen on her hilarious and soul-searching journey as she swaps a life of cocktail bars and dating for the challenges and exhilaration of triathlons, trail runs, obstacle races, long-distance cycles and ocean swims... and sets herself the seemingly impossible goal of qualifying as a Team GB triathlete. |
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