The Good Son


Book Description

Like many parents and children, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and JFK Jr. shared an intense, tender, and often tempestuous bond. It was, quite simply, the most important relationship in John's life. With riveting insight, Andersen reveals how mother and son influenced, challenged, and supported each other through good times and bad, unveiling startling new details about a family we thought we already knew: John's reaction to his mother's bout with suicidal depression and growing dependence on prescription drugs; the surreal and ultimately catastrophic impact of the Onassis years; the premonitions that terrified Jackie about John's fate; Jackie's success at keeping John away from his hellraising cousins, and his complicated relationship with the rest of the clan; the power she wielded over his affairs with Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Daryl Hannah, and others; how John privately handled the scandalous revelations about his parents' marriage; the secrets about John's own turbulent marriage and his senseless death. Bittersweet, provocative, thoughtful and inspiring, this is the often heartbreaking tale of two lives tested by history and tragedy.--From publisher description.




Rubble


Book Description

Marquez provides a powerful portrait of Haiti—both its beauty and pathos—while also telling a tender, emotional story about the lifelong bond she created with an extraordinary young boy.




My Family and Other Strangers


Book Description

When Jeremy Hardy decided to explore his ancestry it was, in part, to get to the bottom of his grandmother Rebecca's dubious claims that the family descended from a certain 17th-century architect and that, more recently, Jeremy's great-grandfather was a Royal bodyguard. Other legends ranged from the great aunt who ran illegal hooch during Prohibition to the wronged Victorian servant girl who bore an illegitimate Hardy, not forgetting the family's rightful claim to a large country estate. Wild stories aside, Jeremy sets out to such diverse locations as the Croydon one-way system and the hostile waters around Malta in order to find traces of recognisable family traits and a sense of how he came to be. With wry humour and a keen eye for the absurd and the frustrating, Jeremy takes us on a by turns funny and moving journey into the world of family ancestry. My Family and Other Strangers will be enjoyed by anyone who has tried to decipher the 1901 census records, or simply wishes they too had asked their grandparents more about their lives.




Sketch


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Kangkushot


Book Description

Kim Beazley, Australian ambassador to the US: ‘Peter Coppin is an exceptional figure… His was a clarion call for justice and his life remains relevant today. This is a timely update of Jolly Read’sexcellent work.’ Prof. Pat Dodson, known colloquially as the ‘Father of Reconciliation’: ‘The Pilbara strike was an important and inspiring milestone in the battle for justice, rights, equality and recognition for Indigenous people.’ An updated edition of an epic and remarkable story. In this powerful memoir, Peter Coppin’s story emerges; told in fragments, moments of time and memories. A senior Nyamal lawman, Coppin was born in Yarrie country in Western Australia’s Pilbara. His was a life of danger, drama and hardship; his people forced to work on pastoral stations for meagre rations, their lives subject to the whims of white pastoralists, government agents and legislators. But Coppin dreamed of a life for his people where they could access education and health services, and control their destinies. Despite great danger to themselves, he and others took part in the first Aboriginal strike in Australia, the Pilbara Strike in 1946. For Peter Coppin the land holds mysteries; it’s special and lifegiving and some of it, sacred. Initially uncertain about telling of his extraordinary life and culture, working with trusted friend Jolly Read, the tales spilled forth, building, the fragments into a whole, little by little, tape by tape. To those who asked him questions he said: ‘What are you asking me these questions for anyway? Just read the book’. Kangkushot provides valuable insights into the rich and spiritual way Aboriginal people view their lives and land, and their place in it.







State


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Reports from Commissioners


Book Description




Murder, Magic, Madness


Book Description

In 1856 William Dove, a young tenant farmer, was tried and executed for the poisoning of his wife Harriet. The trial might have been a straightforward case of homicide, but because Dove became involved with Henry Harrison, a Leeds wizard, and demonstrated through his actions and words a strong belief in magic and the powers of the devil, considerable effort was made to establish whether these beliefs were symptomatic of insanity. It seems that Dove murdered his wife to hasten a prediction made by Harrison that he would remarry a more attractive and wealthy woman. Dove employed Harrison to perform various acts of magic, and also made his own written pact with the devil to improve his personal circumstances. The book will study Dove’s beliefs and Harrison’s activities within the rural and urban communities in which they lived, and examine how modern cultures attempted to explain this largely hidden mental world, which was so sensationally exposed. The Victorian period is often portrayed as an age of great social and educational progress. This book shows how beliefs dismissed by some Victorians as ‘medieval superstitions’ continued to influence the thoughts and actions of many people, viz most famously Conan `table tapper' Doyle.




A book of monsters


Book Description

This books traces the rise to prominence in the twentieth-century of a sub-genre of gothic fiction that is, emphatically, a horror of enlightenment rationality rather than gothic darkness, examining post-modern revisions of Modernist “Promethean” tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing. Whether the subject be terror of London’s churches in the psychogeographical fiction of Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the Orcs in the linguistic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, King Kong, killer-computers, or demon-children in post-war British science-fiction, A Book of Monsters offers illuminating perspectives on the darker recesses of the post-modern imagination, setting out a compelling, and comprehensive, overview on our contemporary unconscious.