Memoirs


Book Description

Aron reflects with simplicity and depth on industrial society, communism, the future of democracy, peace and war, the nuclear age, and also Charles de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Henry Kissinger and others.




In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks


Book Description

A couple years back, I was at the Phoenix airport bar. It was empty except for one heavy-set, gray bearded, grizzled guy who looked like he just rode his donkey into town after a long day of panning for silver in them thar hills. He ordered a Jack Daniels straight up, and that's when I overheard the young guy with the earring behind the bar asking him if he had ID. At first the old sea captain just laughed. But the guy with the twinkle in his ear asked again. At this point it became apparent that he was serious. Dan Haggerty's dad fired back, "You've got to be kidding me, son." The bartender replied, "New policy. Everyone has to show their ID." Then I watched Burl Ives reluctantly reach into his dungarees and pull out his military identification card from World War II. It's a sad and eerie harbinger of our times that the Oprah-watching, crystal-rubbing, Whole Foods-shopping moms and their whipped attorney husbands have taken the ability to reason away from the poor schlub who makes the Bloody Marys. What we used to settle with common sense or a fist, we now settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers. Adam Carolla has had enough of this insanity and he's here to help us get our collective balls back. In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks is Adam's comedic gospel of modern America. He rips into the absurdity of the culture that demonized the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, turned the nation's bathrooms into a lawless free-for-all of urine and fecal matter, and put its citizens at the mercy of a bunch of minimum wagers with axes to grind. Peppered between complaints Carolla shares candid anecdotes from his day to day life as well as his past—Sunday football at Jimmy Kimmel's house, his attempts to raise his kids in a society that he mostly disagrees with, his big showbiz break, and much, much more. Brilliantly showcasing Adam's spot-on sense of humor, this book cements his status as a cultural commentator/comedian/complainer extraordinaire.




Fifty Years a Country Doctor


Book Description

"Cook recounts fifty years of service as a rural doctor in Texas and Nebraska, where a wide spectrum of dilemmas tested his resourcefulness, endurance, and sense of humor. His humourous account of life in the first half of the twentieth century conveys a distinct sense of the slings and arrows of doctoring on the plains". -- Jacket.




Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma


Book Description

Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma is about commitment to an ideal, individual survival and the universality of the human experience. A memoir of two tenacious souls, it sheds light on why Burma/Myanmar's decades-long pursuit for a peaceful and democratic future has been elusive. Simply put, the aspirations of Burma's ethnic nationalities for self-determination within a genuine federal union runs counter to the idea of a unitary state orchestrated and run by the dominant majority Burmans, or Bamar. This seemingly intractable dilemma of opposing visions for Burma is personified in the story of Saw Ralph and Naw Sheera, two prominent ethnic Karen leaders who lived—and eventually left—"the Longest War," leaving the reader with insights on the cultural, social, and political challenges facing other non-Burman ethnic nationalities. Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma is also about the ordinariness and universality of the challenges increasingly faced by diaspora communities around the world today. Saw Ralph and Naw Sheera's day to day lives—how they fell in love, married, had children—while trying to survive in a precarious war zone—and how they had to adapt to their new lives as refugees and immigrants in Australia will resound with many.




Fifty Years On


Book Description

In 1969, an eruption of armed violence traumatized Northern Ireland and transformed a period of street protest over civil rights into decades of paramilitary warfare by republicans and loyalists. In this evocative memoir, Malachi O'Doherty not only recounts his experiences of living through the Troubles, but also recalls a revolution in his lifetime. However, it wasn't the bloody revolution that was shown on TV but rather the slow reshaping of the culture of Northern Ireland - a real revolution that was entirely overshadowed by the conflict. Incorporating interviews with political, professional and paramilitary figures, O'Doherty draws a profile of an era that produced real social change, comparing and contrasting it with today, and asks how frail is the current peace as Brexit approaches, protest is back on the streets and violence is simmering in both republican and loyalist camps.




Fifty Years of Europe


Book Description

In this vibrant, personal journey through Europe proper, historian and writer Jan Morris--the world's most celebrated traveler--offers an intimate exploration of the continent, telling how it has changed--as well as remained unalterable--for the past half century.




50 Years of Silence


Book Description

The long idyllic summer of Jan Ruff O'Herne's ildhood in Dutch colonial Indonesia ended in 1942 with the Japanese invasion of Java. She was interned in Ambarawa Prison Camp, along with her mother and two younger sisters. In February 1944, when Jan was 21, her life was torn apart. Along with nine other young women, all of them virgins, she was plucked from the camp and her family, and enslaved into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army.




Fifty Miles from Tomorrow


Book Description

Documents the author's traditional childhood north of the Arctic Circle, his education in the continental U.S., and his lobbying efforts that convinced the government to allocate resources to Alaska's natives in compensation for incursions on their way of life.




Fifty Years a Feminist


Book Description

In 1971 Sue Kedgley and a group of other young feminists carried a coffin into Auckland's Albert Park to protest against decades of stagnant advancement for New Zealand women since they won the right to vote in 1893. From that day, she became synonymous with Second Wave feminism in this country, most notably organising a tour by Germaine Greer that ended in an arrest and court appearance.In this direct, energetic and focused autobiography, Kedgley tracks the development of feminism over the last five decades and its intersection with her life, describing how she went from debutante to stroppy activist, journalist, safe-food activist and Green politician.Her rich and rewarding life has included encounters with Betty Friedan, Yoko Ono, Kofi Annan, Sonja Davies and the Dalai Lama, and she has never abandoned her feminist convictions. She regrets that there is still a culture of male entitlement, sexism and double standards, and that women are still victims of violence. Even so, she argues, feminism has achieved an extraordinary amount. Fifty years ago women were a sort of underclass. Now they have entered almost every sphere of national life, even if many pay a high price for their hard-won success.Thanks to the movement, she says, after centuries of subjugation, women are finally coming into their own. It is, she says, their time now, and their turn.