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Books > Biography > General
A road trip to Namibia unfolds across these pages, but when? Yesterday,
years ago, or never at all? Barbara Adair refuses to say, creating
something between memoir and fever dream.
This is no ordinary travel narrative. Language shifts without warning:
playful one moment, brutal the next. The text overflows with names of
rivers, flowers, trees, places, and people, then suddenly confronts the
cruel realities of history and contemporary life. Nothing stays still
long enough for comfort.
Here is freedom captured in words: wind, mythology, politics, life and
death all tumbling together. Questions emerge about technology,
mechanics, the vacuous nature of our existence. The reader can never
settle into complacency.
Mark Kannemeyer's eerie illustrations enhance or deliberately undermine
the text, offering visual refuge from the relentless verbal energy.
Non-linear, indulgent, challenging: this book demonstrates how language
can be bent into new shapes, how stories can become something more than
mere storytelling. Fun, sad, and occasionally repellent. Often all at
once.
Bessie Quinn was an early 20th century New Woman, a mother living
her love story in the enchanted world of the Garden City. When she
died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-19, her shattered husband
abandoned her memory, belongings and life history. Her
disappearance reverberated down generations. Starting with only an
Arts and Crafts kettle, one photo and a linen smock, Ursula has
restored her grandmother to life. After long searches she found
Bessie in the Scottish Borders, eighth child of working-class Irish
parents who'd fled hunger after the Great Famine of the 1840s. This
biography of a poor family unearths hard journeys of love, luck and
loss, weaving historical fact with memory and imagination into a
compelling story.
A Los Angeles Times columnist recounts her eighteen-month
undercover stint as a man, a time during which she underwent
considerable personal risks as she worked a sales job, joined a
bowling league, frequented sex clubs, dated, and encountered
firsthand the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. 'This
captivating account will forever change the way you see men - and
perhaps yourself.' -- Marie Claire An addictive, enthralling read?
breathtaking. -- Viv Groskop, Observer Beautifully written? a brave
and fascinating book. -- Christopher Hart, Sunday Times Funny,
compelling and human. -- Sarah Vine, The Times Intelligent,
articulate and perceptive... one of the most sympathetic renderings
of masculinity you?re likely to read.-- Lionel Shriver, Guardian
Massacres, mayhem, and mischief fill the pages of Outlaw Tales of
Utah, 2nd Edition. Ride with horse thieves and cattle rustlers,
stagecoach, and train robbers. Duck the bullets of murderers, plot
strategies with con artists, hiss at lawmen turned outlaws. A
refreshing new perspective on some of the most infamous reprobates
of the Midwest.
This book details the life and activism of Gloria Steinem, using
her life as a lens through which readers can examine the evolution
of women's rights in the United States over the past half-century.
This work traces the life and career of feminist activist Gloria
Steinem, providing an examination of her life and her efforts to
further equal opportunity among all people, especially women, in
the United States from the second half of the 20th century to the
present. It follows Steinem in a primarily chronological fashion to
best convey the impact of her own efforts as well as the changing
nature of women's status in American society during Steinem's
half-century as an active reformer and public figure. The book
notably includes her work with Ms. Magazine and details of her
personal life. This book's wider coverage of Steinem's life, from
her early childhood to the present, adds to previous works, which
tend to stop with the end of the heyday of the women's movement and
the rise of the Conservative movement in the early 1980s. With one
of the defining aspects of Steinem's work being her lifelong
commitment to women's rights and human equality, the treatment of
her whole life helps readers understand the full extent of both her
commitment and impact. More than just a biography, this book
presents a life that is at once an engine for the change Gloria
Steinem sought to achieve and an example and inspiration for future
activists The text offers lessons from the past as guidance for the
future 20 sidebars provide intriguing details about Steinem's life
and accomplishments Five primary source documents give readers a
sense of Steinem's powerful voice and her ability to speak truth to
power
The Comfort Book is a collection of consolations learned in hard times
and suggestions for making the bad days better. Drawing on maxims,
memoir and the inspirational lives of others, these meditations offer
new ways of seeing ourselves and the world.
This is the book to pick up when you need the wisdom of a friend, the
comfort of a hug or a reminder that hope comes from unexpected places.
’n Baie lang brief aan my dogter is Marita van der Vyver, een
van Afrikaans se mees geliefde skrywers, se ontroerende
jeugmemoir. Dit is 'n speurtog deur die skrywer se beginjare,
maar dit is ook ’n liefdesbrief aan ’n dogter en ’n taal en ’n land. En
bowenal is dit ’n ma se poging om sin te maak van hierdie onverskillige
en wrede wêreld waarin sy haar nou begewe.
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My Mother Laughs
(Paperback)
Chantal Akerman; Introduction by Eileen Myles; Translated by Danielle Shreir; Afterword by Frances Morgan
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This book provides new and exciting interpretations of Helen
Keller's unparalleled life as "the most famous American woman in
the world" during her time, celebrating the 141st anniversary of
her birth. Helen Keller: A Life in American History explores
Keller's life, career as a lobbyist, and experiences as a
deaf-blind woman within the context of her relationship with
teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy and overarching social
history. The book tells the dual story of a pair struggling with
respective disabilities and financial hardship and the oppressive
societal expectations set for women during Keller's lifetime. This
narrative is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Helen Keller's
role in the development of support services specifically related to
the deaf-blind, as delineated as different from the blind. Readers
will learn about Keller's challenges and choices as well as how her
public image often eclipsed her personal desires to live
independently. Keller's deaf-blindness and hard-earned but limited
speech did not define her as a human being as she explored the
world of ideas and wove those ideas into her writing, lobbying for
funds for the American Federation for the Blind and working with
disabled activists and supporters to bring about practical help
during times of tremendous societal change. Presents
well-researched, factual material in an easy-to-understand writing
style about a complex, iconic American woman, Helen Keller, who
inspired generations of people worldwide because of her lifelong
quest for knowledge and her ability to communicate ideas despite
being deaf-blind Humanizes and demonstrates the diversity of the
deaf-blind community, which has historically been the smallest
minority in the United States at less than 1% of the population
Positions Keller in the panorama of American history, economics,
politics, and popular culture, challenging the existing narrative
created by her teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy
Re-envisions Keller within the world of ideas where she experienced
and expressed individuality through dialogs constructed from her
writings and the work of those who informed her thinking Includes
10 images that provide an intimate look into Keller's personal and
public life
a Call Them the Happy Yearsa recounts at first hand the first 40
years of the life of Barbara Everard in her own words, augmented,
now in this second edition, with her elder son, Martina s boyhood
memories of some of those years. From a privileged early childhood
as a daughter of a wealthy Sussex farming family, Barbara grew up
through the depression desperate to become an artist, an ambition
that she achieved with award-winning success as one of the worlda s
foremost botanical artists. But this followed some years of
colonial life in Malaya and the horrors of war both in Singapore
and England, described in graphic detail as is her husband, Raya s
story as a Japanese PoW on the infamous Siam railway.
'Extraordinary . . . a profound and beautiful book . . . a moving
meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy,
wonder and the miracle of love . . . Witty, wise, beautifully
structured and written in clear, singing prose' - Sunday Times
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction Eighteen
months before Kathryn Schulz's beloved father died, she met the
woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories
of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our
lives are shaped by loss and discovery - from the maddening
disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of
war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to
falling in love. Three very different American families form the
heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz's father, a
charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made
her partner, an equally brilliant farmer's daughter and devout
Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage. But
Schulz is also attentive to other, more universal kinds of
conjunction: how private happiness can coexist with global
catastrophe, how we get irritated with those we adore, how love and
loss are themselves unavoidably inseparable. The resulting book is
part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is
simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and
suffering - a world that always demands both our gratitude and our
grief. A staff writer at the New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer
Prize, Kathryn Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition,
and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Crafted
with the emotional clarity of C. S. Lewis and the intellectual
force of Susan Sontag, Lost & Found is an uncommon book about
common experiences. 'An extraordinary gift of a book, a tender,
searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be
human. I wept at it, laughed with it, was entirely fascinated by
it. I emerged feeling a little as if the world around me had been
made anew.' - Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
The rise, fall, and revival of the Caesar of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk famously leads his companies from a bully pulpit, cutting through red tape whenever possible with little regard for the fallout. Musk's approach to business and politics is truly singular - he alternately seems to be either in complete command or on the verge of a meltdown, and many in his orbit have had their lives upended by buying into his utopian vision. From the chaotic launch of the Tesla Cybertruck to his decision to reshape Twitter into 'X' as part of his self-proclaimed mission to defeat the 'woke mind virus', Musk is seemingly drawn to public controversy, yet he has emerged from these turbulent moments more influential and powerful than ever. Hubris Maximus offers an unprecedented insight into the motives and mindset that have driven Musk's stratospheric rise to power. In this cautionary tale about the pitfalls of magnetic leaders, Washington Post journalist Faiz Siddiqui offers a gripping portrait of a uniquely messy and lucrative period in Musk's career, one which has seen him ascend into a key role in Trump's administration.
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