Author : Richard M. Cohen
Publisher : Large Print Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 26,8 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780786266548
How to live your life to its fullest even though you are ill.
Author : Patricia Reid-Merritt
Publisher : Outskirts Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 44,64 MB
Release : 2017-04-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781478783985
Tarnished Legacy begins at the turn of the new millennium as the author begins to question the pain and secrecy surrounding the deaths of her maternal and paternal ancestors. What proves most troubling is her attempt to understand why all of her ancestors are buried in a poor Colored cemetery on the edge of the City of Philadelphia in unmarked graves. What social and personal shame marked the end of their lives? The story travels back to the late 19th/early 20th century and explores the social conditions which resulted in the birth of the first daughter of a concubine and the resulting social pressures, and privileges, that accompanied the Black community's "high yellow class." In so doing, it helps to shed light on the politics of race and social intercourse. Tarnished Legacy provides insightful revelations as to how folklore, history, humor and culturally embellished spiritual practices and beliefs are used as a form of social resistance from a racially oppressive social environment. Moreover, it details the author's struggle to come to grips with the social ramifications of race, poverty, class and color-caste at the beginning of her young existence and throughout her successful transition into a meaningful life. This remarkably engaging, well-written family memoir is a factually-based, historical account of four generations of family life in twentieth century Black America.
Author : Suzan Saxman
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 37,30 MB
Release : 2015-01-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 125004779X
We all, as children, saw imaginary friends and heard monsters in the closet. But for Suzan Saxman, those friends and monsters didn't go away—and they weren't imaginary. They were the dead who came to her from the time she was a little girl with urgent messages for the living. Raised in a house filled with secrets, she saw and spoke the truth as soon as she could talk, alarming the nuns in her convent school with her revelations and terrifying her own mother with her strange visions. Each night she woke to see a man with no eyes watching her, and each day she kept watch by the window while her father was at work and Steve, her real father, a swarthy drifter, rendezvoused with her mother. It was the 1960s in suburban Staten Island and she tried to hide it all, and be a daughter her mother could love. Always skeptical of her tremendous gift, she struggled to come to terms with her calling even as she revealed the destinies of everyone, from housewives to hit men, stockbrokers to rock-and-rollers. She could witness everyone's future—everyone's but her own. Why was she visited by angels and demons? Could she ever escape this strange fate? Where was her own soul mate? Now Suzan tells the story of her journey and tries to make sense of her family's buried secrets. Through powerful readings of others' destinies interwoven with compelling narrative, a reluctant psychic emerges from the shadows.
Author : Robert Ballagh
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 544 pages
File Size : 12,67 MB
Release : 2018-09-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1786695308
A fiercely honest and unvarnished autobiography from Ireland's most successful and controversial living artist. Making his name as a Pop artist in the late 1960s and 70s, Robert Ballagh quickly achieved an international reputation. With little formal artistic training, he triumphed in his field despite often formidable hostility. His work was also strikingly topical and political, playing with classic images by Goya or Delacroix to express outrage about the situation in Northern Ireland. But it is his series of realistic portraits of writers, politicians and fellow artists – often searingly inquisitive and moving in equal measure – that have won him lasting fame. His subjects include Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, James Watson, Francis Crick, Harold Pinter and Fidel Castro. And his remarkable self-portraits unsparingly document the process of his own ageing. This memoir is also a story of Ireland over the past sixty years, its violence, hypocrisy and immobility as well as its creativity and generosity.
Author : Suki Kim
Publisher : Crown
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 32,82 MB
Release : 2015-10-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0307720667
A haunting account of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has gone undercover as a missionary and a teacher. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them English, all under the watchful eye of the regime. Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues—evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves—their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own—at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged. Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."
Author : Mohsin Hamid
Publisher : Anchor Canada
Page : 155 pages
File Size : 13,27 MB
Release : 2009-06-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307373355
From the author of the award-winning Moth Smoke comes a perspective on love, prejudice, and the war on terror that has never been seen in North American literature. At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with a suspicious, and possibly armed, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting. . . Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by Underwood Samson, an elite firm that specializes in the “valuation” of companies ripe for acquisition. He thrives on the energy of New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation with regal Erica promises entrée into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love. Elegant and compelling, Mohsin Hamid’s second novel is a devastating exploration of our divided and yet ultimately indivisible world. “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services as a bridge.” —from The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Author : Nancy Torgove Clasby
Publisher :
Page : 126 pages
File Size : 43,71 MB
Release : 2016-06-24
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781937650704
Nancy Torgove Clasby, an ordinary mother of three small children, gradually pieces together the greatest mysteries of life after a spontaneous awakening completely redirects her focus and energy and leads her to become a healer.
Author : Tom J Bross
Publisher : Independently Published
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 38,31 MB
Release : 2021-02-19
Category :
ISBN :
Don't Call Me Jupiter is a true-story memoir about an All-American family that becomes all hippied out. It's about the pros and cons that kids growing up in hippie environments encountered and how their early experiences continue to shape them later in life. This "First Family" story begins in 1961 in Cincinnati, Ohio with Dr. Sabin as they're selected to demonstrate the oral vaccine for polio. They are the paragon of midwestern, conservative, white-bread, Catholic idealism. And yet, led by an eccentric mother, the Martha Stewart of hippies, the family transforms into a clan of liberal, pot-smoking, psychedelic-bus-tripping, nature-loving California free spirits. Told through the wide-eyes of a middle child; a reluctant hippie kid who loves his family as much as he is embarrassed by them, this is a hilarious book about abandonment. Climb aboard their magic yellow bus for an unforgettable ride with colorful characters caught in situations that will make you laugh, cry, and cringe. Don't Call me Jupiter is a page-turning ride down memory lane when many parents went in search of themselves and lost their children along the way. "Growing up in this era was groovy and far out. We believed in the power of the people. We felt we could save the whales and make the world a better place. But there was bad craziness too."The '60s were a pivotal time. It revolutionized the way people looked at the world and their place in it. People challenged tradition, experimented with new lifestyles - and drugs. The very definition of family was stretched. Many people share unforgettable memories connected to the hippie movement and want to know how it's affecting them today. What was gained? What was lost? Are any of our adult disorders and anxiety tied to our unusual childhoods? This book presents a strong case in favor of the "fuck yea - of course it does!"In this first book of three in the series, you'll get an intimate understanding of the main characters, the changes they embrace, and how it affects their decisions and behaviors. Years later, this disbanded group is forced back together to deal with a family crisis. Similar memories about surviving dysfunctional families include: Running with Scissors, The Glass Castle, Let's Pretend this Never Happened, The Liar's Club, This Boy's Life, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's like a 70's version of Shameless but with less booze, more weed, and way more hallucinogenics. This book needs to be read because it expands our understanding of the hippie movement and its continuing impact on society. Don't Call Me Jupiter provides an accurate, visceral, entertaining, real-life perspective into the ups and downs of surviving a hippie childhood.
Author : Robert Ballagh
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 13,63 MB
Release : 2021-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781786695321
A fiercely honest and unvarnished autobiography from Ireland's most successful and controversial living artist. Making his name as a Pop artist in the late 1960s and 70s, Robert Ballagh quickly achieved an international reputation. With little formal artistic training, he triumphed in his field despite often formidable hostility. His work was also strikingly topical and political, playing with classic images by Goya or Delacroix to express outrage about the situation in Northern Ireland. But it is his series of realistic portraits of writers, politicians and fellow artists - often searingly inquisitive and moving in equal measure - that have won him lasting fame. His subjects include Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, James Watson, Francis Crick, Harold Pinter and Fidel Castro. And his remarkable self-portraits unsparingly document the process of his own ageing. This memoir is also a story of Ireland over the past sixty years, its violence, hypocrisy and immobility as well as its creativity and generosity.
Author : Gerry Pelser
Publisher : Independently Published
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 18,87 MB
Release : 2021-12-04
Category :
ISBN :
In December 2020 my wife, Andrea, died of breast cancer. This sucks. I've a lot to say about this matter, actually! And boy, say it I did. The day after Andrea died, I started posting semi-daily postings on Facebook, telling people about my feelings, my experiences, my emotions, and making crappy jokes to make myself feel better. I held nothing back, just let it out for the world to see. And boy, see it they did! These social media entries went places. Several posts went viral, and I got messages of support - and urging me to continue - from as far away as India and New Zealand. Some of these messages asked me when they will be available in book form, because people wanted to share my journey with others. Because my journey helped them. Y'know, this seems like a jolly good idea! But there is a lot more to life than death. Like how the skinny runt with the ponytail managed to get the girl, marry her in a literal fairy tale wedding, and (now fat and bald) live until death do us part. Like the importance of music, dogs, and cricket. ...and stuffed animals. But I digress. I also have a lot to say about life after death, and carrying on as a reluctant widower. Because who the hell wants to be an enthusiastic one, anyway? How I plodded along after the most important being in the universe died, and how I managed to get out the other side, if only just. This is a book on love, death, and life. And the most self-indulgent homage I can write to my wife. I cannot wait to tell you all about it. Beer's on me! WARNING: This book contains more triggers than a gun shop. Reader discretion is advised. Not for inexperienced readers.
