Biography
In this now classic biography, reissued in a new edition for the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter's birth, Linda Lear offers the astonishing portrait of an extraordinary woman who gave us some of the most beloved children's books of all time. Potter found freedom from her conventional Victorian upbringing in the countryside. Nature inspired her imagination as an artist and scientific illustrator, but The Tale of Peter Rabbit brought her fame, financial success, and the promise of happiness when she fell in love with her editor Norman Warne. After his tragic and untimely death, Potter embraced a new life as the owner of Hill Top Farm in the English Lake District and a second chance at happiness. As a visionary landowner, successful farmer and sheep-breeder, she was able to preserve the landscape that had inspired her art.
Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature reveals a lively, independent, and passionate woman, whose art was timeless, and whose generosity left an indelible imprint on the countryside. This anniversary edition is complete with a brand new foreword by James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd and social media sensation who chronicles his world on Twitter and in his wonderful book, "A Shepherd's Life".
Many are asking, what is wrong with teaching, learning, schooling, and education, and what can be done? You will get the answers (panacea) from the letters of a mad public school teacher: intrepid, irascible, cantankerous, provocative, passionate, thought-provoking, iconoclastic, and enhanced with vitriolic demagoguery.
As a grad student / colleague said, Thanks for an enjoyable class on education issues in society. I also enjoyed your letters to the editor. I've been told that I say what other people think. Well, you write and publish what we're all thinking.
Boss Ladies of CLE features the stories and photos of twenty leading women—from a James Beard Award–nominated chef to hip-hop artists to the CEO of a global brand. Some are well known figures, and others are rising stars. Some have formal training, but many are self-taught.
Through their stories, we gain an authentic, attainable portrait of success and learn what it means to be a Boss Lady. As the only book that focuses exclusively on the careers of women in Cleveland, it’s an essential read for women and girls that debunks the mentality that you have to move away to make it.
Chasity Strawder, a Black woman in northern Ohio, recounts her high risk pregnancy and healthcare disparities in this urgent memoir. She also tells stories of kindness, such as when her chiropractor gave her free treatments and herbs to assist with her pain. Her memoir is a powerful call to action for Black women’s maternal health and a universal story of motherhood. Strawder is a well-known advocate for black women's maternal health through Cuyahoga County.
Listen to an interview with Chasity on Lines of Loganberry on Spotify.
NASA astronaut Michael Collins trained as an experimental test pilot before venturing into space as a vital member of the Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 missions. In Carrying the Fire, his account of his voyages into space and the years of training that led up to them, Collins reveals the human tensions, the physical realities, and the personal emotions surrounding the early years of the space race.
Collins provides readers with an insider's view of the space program and conveys the excitement and wonder of his journey to the moon. As skilled at writing as he is at piloting a spacecraft, Collins explains the clash of personalities at NASA and technical aspects of flight with clear, engaging prose, withholding nothing in his candid assessments of fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Buzz Aldrin, and officials within NASA.
A fascinating memoir of mankind's greatest journey told in familiar, human terms, Carrying the Fire is by turns thrilling, humorous, and thought-provoking, a unique work by a remarkable man.
1st edition. Inscribed by author. Scarce. Foreword by Charles A. Lindbergh. Dust jacket in protective cover; top edges of flaps tanned; spine edges lightly creased; blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine; top edges slightly faded. VG/VG
A cat charms its way into a curmudgeon's heart one hilarious holiday season in this bestselling Christmas classic, the perfect gift for the animal lover in your life.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987. 1st edition; inscribed by author. Dust jacket has light shelf wear to edges and corners and crease the length of back cover; gutter exposed at bottom between title page and endpaper; text clean and bright. G/G
The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in orchestrated chaos with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Mommy, a fiercely protective woman with dark eyes full of pep and fire, herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion--and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.
In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents' loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.
At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. God is the color of water, Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life's blessings and life's values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth's determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college--and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.
Interspersed throughout his mother's compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.
This book was recently reprinted with a new cover. You may receive one of the two covers shown.
This is a story of nearly 100 years of determination. Albert Pollack's determination was evident at a very young age, as he learned valuable skills - especially woodworking - that last a lifetime. Narrowly escaping the Nazi invasion of his hometown in Chorostkov, Poland, Pollack survived the Holocaust and World War II, where he served in the Russian-formed Polish Army - helping defeat Nazi Germany and bringing all 64 soldiers in his charge safely home to their families.Upon leaving the military, Pollack, a refugee, discovered a new passion for photography. From humble beginnings, he brought his skills to America, where he established a photography studio and custom framing business.Pollack embraces every opportunity in life with energy and determination and freely shares what he has learned with others.
He and his wife, Madelyn, remain active in their community in South Euclid, Ohio, and continue to enjoy their ever-growing family.
Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
"Beautiful and propulsive . . . Despite the singularity of [Tara Westover's] childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?"--Vogue "Westover has somehow managed not only to capture her unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but to make her current situation seem not so exceptional at all, and resonant for many others."--The New York Times Book Review
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) was an American writer, editor, and publisher. He founded the Roycroft Press in 1893 in East Aurora, NY, modeled after William Morris' communal Kelmscott Press in England. Beginning in 1895, Hubbard issued monthly booklets called “Little Journeys," which contained biographical essays of famous persons, interwoven with comment and satire. In 1908, he began to edit and publish a second monthly, The Fra. The Roycroft Press establishment expanded to include furniture and leather shops, a smithy, and an art school, becoming an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Hubbard died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.
The Elbert Hubbard I Knew (Roycrofters, 1929) was written by Hubbard's sister, Mary Hubbard Heath. It contains a family tree and numerous photos. No dust jacket; brown, orange and green marbled leather spine over dark orange paper; gilt lettering on spine rubbed; covers soiled; front hinge weak; slight foxing throughout text; deckled edges. G
First Darling of the Morning is the powerful and poignant memoir of bestselling author Thrity Umrigar, tracing the arc of her Bombay childhood and adolescence from her earliest memories to her eventual departure for the United States at age twenty-one. It is an evocative, emotionally charged story of a young life steeped in paradox; of a middle-class Parsi girl attending Catholic school in a predominantly Hindu city; of a guilt-ridden stranger in her own land, an affluent child in a country mired in abysmal poverty. She reveals intimate secrets and offers an unflinching look at family issues once considered unspeakable as she interweaves two fascinating coming-of-age stories--one of a small child, and one of a nation.
One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.
Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung's powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered, yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.
Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics- indeed of modern science altogether." Galileo's Daughter also presents a stunning portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."
The son of a musician, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) tried at first to enter a monastery before engaging the skills that made him the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest.
Of Galileo's three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then.
Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope.
With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Dava Sobel's previous book Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story.
Fred Rogers (1928-2003) was an enormously influential figure in the history of television. As the creator and star of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, he was a champion of compassion, equality, and kindness, fiercely devoted to children and taking their questions about the world seriously. The Good Neighbor is the first full-length biography of Fred Rogers.
Based on original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, The Good Neighbor traces Rogers's personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work. It includes his surprising decision to walk away from the show in 1976 to make television for adults, only to return to the neighborhood to help children face complex issues such as divorce, discipline, mistakes, anger, and competition. The Good Neighbor is the definitive portrait of a beloved figure.
The Associated Publishers, 1943; green cloth scuffed, light internal staining. Library markings otherwise. Good-
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The PBS Newshour/New York Times Book Club January 2020 selection
Selected by Emma Watson for her "Our Shared Shelf" Book Club"Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection
"A sledgehammer. . . . Her experiments with structure and language . . . are in the service of trying to find new ways to think about the past, trauma, repetition and reconciliation, which might be a way of saying a new model for the memoir." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father--an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist--who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.
Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.
"I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot's deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words - but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say... [T]he writing is so good it's hard not to temporarily be distracted from the content or narrative by its brilliance... Perhaps, because this author so generously allows us to be her witness, we are somehow able to see ourselves more clearly and become better witnesses to ourselves." --Emma Watson, Official March/April selection for Our Shared Shelf
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?
What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.
With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.
From the acclaimed, best-selling memoirist, novelist and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets, comes a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love. In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.
Inheritance is a book about secrets. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
Dani Shapiro's memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace--part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision.
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, and adventurer. It's Me O Lord is the full autobiography of his exciting life, and it is filled with his incredible illustrations. As an added bonus, a 21-page booklet titled An Index to the Paintings and Illustrations in Rockwell Kent's It's Me O Lord, compiled by Robert Rightmire in 1997 is included with this book.
1st edition; dust jacket in protective cover; some chips and small tears at top edge and corners; front cover has small white and blue splotches on lettering; price clipped; inside front flap has small rust stain; two areas of rust stains on ffep and two areas of rust on rear free endpaper; former owner bookplate on ffep; ink notes made on reare free endpaper; front hinge weak; text clean. G/G
Singer, movie star, actress, wife of the late playwright and director Moss Hart, and a regular on To Tell the Truth, Kitty Carlisle Hart relates stories of the joys and heartbreaks that have shaped her indomitable spirit. Black-and-white photos.
1st edition; inscribed by author; dust jacket in protective cover; red cloth over tan boards; binding tight; text clean and bright. Like new. VG/VG
Amelia Earhart's own story of her flight around the world, which ended in her tragic disappearance somewhere in mid-Pacific. As she completed each stage of her journey, Earhart sent back personal letters and her diaries, which have been compiled and arranged by George Palmer Putnam.
Original red cloth with gilt lettering on cover and spine; dust jacket has light foxing on flaps, in protective mylar cover. End papers have decorative maps; photographs throughout. VG/G
The woman whose life story is a demonstration of the power of faith, here makes eloquent plea for the evaluation and perpetuation of faith. ""Faith is thought directed toward good, and like all thought-power, it is infinite"", she says. She defines her conception of God, not a dictator-God, but a God of love and tolerance; she shows how faith can be acquired, and how it is America's responsibility to affirm its existence and to rely on faith to combat a totalitarian world.
New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940; 1st edition; dust jacket in protective cover; edges chipped and worn; green cloth; edges slightly faded; binding tight; text clean. G+/G-
In this enchanting and unforgettable memoir, Judi Lifton captures her luminous years growing up in a small Minnesota town where childhood was a time to read a book, ride your bike, explore the neighborhood and let your mind shift through unexpected discoveries. Lifton's memories are creatively presented as letters written by her fourteen-year-old self to a beloved and terminally ill friend who frequently travelled to her hometown, Chief White Feather, an America Indian storyteller/singer and advocate for Indian rights. In reality, the letters were "letters of the heart," thus never written down until rendered now in sepia-tone prose that glistens with fondness for family and friends, nostalgia for the simple pleasures of childhood in the 50s, and the heartache of loneliness and loss. This is a story that will stay with you for a long time.
Singer, a Nobel Prize-winning author, reminisces about leaving his friends in Poland in the 1930's, coming to America to join his brother in New York, and his experiences in this strange new land.
Limited to 500 copies signed by Isaac Bashevis Singer and contains a numbered colored print signed by Raphael Soyer; this is no. 176/500. Maroon cloth in red slipcover; illustrated endpapers; binding tight; text clean and bright; slipcase has three tiny white spots near top of spine. Fine/VG+
In her bestselling memoir First They Killed my Father, Loung Ung describes the horrific experiences she and her family endured under the rule of Cambodia's Pol Pot regime. In this heartbreaking yet triumphant sequel, Ung writes about the challenges of building a new life in a new country after her home and past have been destroyed.
In Lucky Child, Ung chronicles her attempts to adapt to life in Vermont, while grappling with her memories of genocide and the deep scars of war. At the same time, her sister struggles to survive in rural Cambodia. Lucky Child is every bit as inspiring and unforgettable as First They Killed My Father. Loung Ung is National Spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine Free World, a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. VVAF founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. Ung lectures extensively throughout the United States and appears regularly in the media. "Ung's story is a compelling and inspirational one that touches universal chords. Americans would do well to read it, no matter where they were born." -- Washington Post Book World--Kirkus Reviews
The work's subtitle describes it well. Dax, the editor, has prepared for publication the manuscripts of a distant relative, Davydoff. This Russian aristocratic lady spent her life up to the Revolution in the Ukraine on the large estates of the gentry. Privately educated and trained in watercoloring, she wrote and painted for her heirs from memory after fleeing the Revolution. As published, the stories and drawings are wonderfully matched, sharing a simplicity and wistfulness for a lost society, while vividly portraying a sense of life and leisure. The watercolors combine detail with whimsy. A lovely addition to subject collections and for those interested in the cultural and social life of the era. Rena Fowler, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette (Library Journal, 1986)
1st edition; dust jacket has only minor scuffs; blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine; binding tight; text clean and bright. VG/VG
Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.
When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell's family's experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies into their home.
Brad Ricca's Olive MacLeod is my favorite sort of woman from history--bold and unconventional, utterly unsinkable--and her story is so full of adventure and acts of courage, it's hard to believe she actually lived. And yet she did! Brad Ricca has found a heroine for the ages, and written her tale with a winning combination of accuracy and imagination. -- Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin and The Paris Wife
From the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Mrs. Sherlock Holmes comes the true story of a woman's quest to Africa in the 1900s to find her missing fiancé, and the adventure that ensues.
Are you concerned about time slipping through your fingers like wet sand in the ocean's tide? Like other precious resources, our time must be protected from loss, from theft, and from waste. Most humans are acquainted with fear of running out of time. Each measured movement by the hands of the clock take us closer to being out of time and into eternity.
Redeeming Wasted Years will help you identify time wasters and help move you into a life of placing proper value on your time. It will alleviate the despair you may be experiencing over months or years of living outside of purpose, and help you anchor your hope in the gracious redemptive power of God. You will be warned about a road called Regret and learn that on this journey, U-Turns are allowed. The Lord is a Redeemer, and he alone can redeem your wasted years!
A Song Flung Up to Heaven is the sixth book in author Maya Angelou's series of autobiographies. Set between 1965 and 1968, it begins where Angelou's previous book, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, ends, with Angelou's trip from Accra, Ghana, where she had lived for the past four years, back to the United States.
New York: Random House, 2002. 1st edition. Inscribed by author. Small water stain on front lower corner of book and dust jacket. VG/VG
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: O Magazine, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Seattle Times
The definitive portrait of one of the American Century's most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money--and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated--and undermined--her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo--and featuring nearly one hundred images--Sontag is the first book based on the writer's restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait--a great American novel in the form of a biography.
The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh's parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters, in Korean, over the years seeking forgiveness and love--letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.
As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history--her grandmother Jun's years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre--and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words--in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language--to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? Eun Ji Koh fearlessly grapples with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma, arriving at insights that are essential reading for anyone who has ever had to balance love, longing, heartbreak, and joy.
The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing--in Eun Ji Koh--a singular, incandescent voice.
This book grew out of a sermon delivered by Cheryl Goggans at the Faith United Church of Christ in Richmond Heights, OH.
A poignant meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters—and the inescapable effects of time—from the author of A Wrinkle in Time.
In the second memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, Madeleine L’Engle chronicles a season of extremes. Four generations of family have gathered at Crosswicks, her Connecticut farmhouse, to care for L’Engle’s ninety-year-old mother. As summer days fade to sleepless nights, her mother’s health rapidly declines and her once astute mind slips into senility. With poignant honesty, L’Engle describes the gifts and graces, as well as the painful emotional cost, of caring for the one who once cared for you.
As she spends her days with a mother who barely resembles the competent and vigorous woman who bore and raised her, L’Engle delves into her memories, reflecting on the lives of the strong women in her family’s history. Evoking both personal experiences and universal themes, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother takes an unflinching look at diminishment and death, all the while celebrating the wonder of life.
1st edition, inscribed by author on ffep; dust jacket in protective cover; spine edges lightly creased; flaps slightly tanned; ffep has name of former owner in ink, plus an embossed owner's stamp; binding good; text clean and bright. VG/VG
"An exquisitely moving portrait of the daily stuff of life."--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - Time - Real Simple - Good Housekeeping That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to flee with her family the political upheaval of her country in the late 1970s. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. She would go on to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, and a life she had once assumed would be impossible. Then, at age thirty-seven, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it--a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion--this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep--an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously. With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie Yip-Williams set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life. Praise for The Unwinding of the Miracle "Everything worth understanding and holding on to is in this book. . . . A miracle indeed."--Kelly Corrigan, New York Times bestselling author "A beautifully written, moving, and compassionate chronicle that deserves to be read and absorbed widely."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies
Charles Ellenbogen has been teaching for a long time. He moved into his first classroom when Bill Clinton moved into the White House and has been teaching long enough to see Hillary Clinton lose an election and to hear a student point to a picture of the Clintons and say, "That's Hillary Clinton and. . . and her husband."
That doesn't mean he's especially good at it; it just means that he's been doing it a long time. It doesn't mean he has 38 Recipes for Great Teaching; it does mean he has a lot of stories. And these are some of them. You will laugh at some and get frustrated or even angry at others. But they all are real, and some of them don't end well because, after all, this isn't the movies.
A thrilling account of one of the greatest adventures of all time: man's journey to the moon. Irwin not only recounts his voyage to the moon, he also tells an inspiring story of his personal journey to faith in God.
1st edition; signed by author; dust jacket in protective cover; edges lightly worn; black cloth with gilt lettering on spine; binding tight; text clean and bright. G+/G
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020.
Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, ELLE, and Good Housekeeping. One of Amazon's Best 100 Books of 2020. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a January 2020 IndieNext Pick.A definitive document of a world in transition: I won't be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come. --Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
The prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital age In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener--stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial--left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress. Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building. Part coming-of-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener's memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry's shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment. Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.
From the civil rights revolution to the halls of power, the life story of an American leader. As a student in Atlanta, Vernon Jordan had a summer job driving a white banker around town. During the man's afternoon naps, Jordan passed the time reading books, a fact that astounded his boss. Vernon can read! the man exclaimed to his relatives. Nearly 50 years later, Vernon Jordan, long-time civil rights leader, adviser and close friend to presidents and business leaders, and one of the most charismatic figures in America, has written this book about his life and times. It is a story that encompasses the sweeping struggles, changes, and dangers of black life during the civil rights revolution.
Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences--some previously published, some written expressly for this book--bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction
A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
Bombarded by voices of fear and failure, how do you move past them to become all God designed for you? Our thoughts, and those of our parents, cloud our thinking. They feed us positive and negative images based on past hurts, telling us we're not good enough.
Unfortunately, our children can inherit those voices and adopt them.
Do you feel controlled by fear and circumstance? You are not alone. As an award-winning journalist, Romona Robinson heard thousands of women share feelings of entrapment. Waiting to hear from God about their career, finances, their children, relationships or health, they grow weary, searching for answers. Why hasn't God come to their rescue?
Controlled by pain, Romona almost missed God's purpose. In Your Voice is Your Power, she shares agonizing and triumphant stories of women and painful personal lessons about living in fear and listening to negative influences. Those voices threatened to take her down and out, until she learned to take back her life. "Now that God is in charge, I am finally living the abundant life He promised--and so can you."