The Sound of No Hands Clapping


Book Description

Young is back with the eagerly awaited follow-up to his account of a hilariously failed attempt to conquer the Manhattan social and professional scene in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. All the elements that turned Toby's earlier memoir into a bestseller from coast to coast and on both sides of the Atlantic are back, too. Well, some things have changed for Toby-he has married his girlfriend from How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and now has two kids, and he has moved from the Manhattan that treated him none too kindly to London. But Toby remains Toby, and what Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair called Toby's "brown thumb" continues to work its magic, transforming opportunities into cringeworthy debacles and leading to situations that are classic Toby Young territory. Toby gleefully recounts such dubious journalistic assignments as posing as a patient at a penis-enlargement clinic and as a greeter at a Wal-Mart. He has misadventures in Los Angeles as a screenwriter for films that never quite get made, he's been a contestant on an abysmal reality show that absolutely no one watched, and he has acted in a one-man play that was utterly savaged by the critics. Yes, Toby has become a dutiful husband and a devoted dad, but he's as relentlessly self-sabotaging as ever, with a demonstrated knack for attracting misfortune, publicity-and devoted readers.




The Sound of No Hands Clapping


Book Description

Young is back with the eagerly awaited follow-up to his account of a hilariously failed attempt to conquer the Manhattan social and professional scene in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. All the elements that turned Toby's earlier memoir into a bestseller from coast to coast and on both sides of the Atlantic are back, too. Well, some things have changed for Toby-he has married his girlfriend from How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and now has two kids, and he has moved from the Manhattan that treated him none too kindly to London. But Toby remains Toby, and what Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair called Toby's "brown thumb" continues to work its magic, transforming opportunities into cringeworthy debacles and leading to situations that are classic Toby Young territory. Toby gleefully recounts such dubious journalistic assignments as posing as a patient at a penis-enlargement clinic and as a greeter at a Wal-Mart. He has misadventures in Los Angeles as a screenwriter for films that never quite get made, he's been a contestant on an abysmal reality show that absolutely no one watched, and he has acted in a one-man play that was utterly savaged by the critics. Yes, Toby has become a dutiful husband and a devoted dad, but he's as relentlessly self-sabotaging as ever, with a demonstrated knack for attracting misfortune, publicity-and devoted readers.




How To Lose Friends And Alienate People


Book Description

In 1995 high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan-Alistair Cooke then, Anna Wintour now-so why couldn't he? But things didn't quite go according to plan. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city, and couldn't get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is Toby Young's hilarious account of the five years he spent looking for love in all the wrong places and steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. But it's more than "the longest self-deprecating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen" (Sunday Times); it's also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast. And there's even a happy ending, as Toby Young marries-"for proper, noncynical reasons," as he puts it-the woman of his dreams. "Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first." "I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book." -- Julie Burchill "A relentlessly brilliant book-a What Makes Sammy Run for the twenty-first century . . . the funniest, cleverest, most touching new book I've read for as long as I can remember." -- Julie Burchill, The Spectator




The Sound of Two Hands Clapping


Book Description

Table of contents







The Sound of One Hand Clapping


Book Description

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, her mother disappeared into a blizzard never to return. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to the place of her childhood to visit her drunkard father. The shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, changing forever his living death and her ordered life.




The Sound of Two Hands Clapping


Book Description




The Politics of Autism


Book Description

The Politics of Autism investigates the truths and fictions of public understanding about autism, questioning apparent realities too sensitive or impolitic to challenge. Is there really more autism? How has the count expanded by diagnosing autism over other conditions? Have scientific methods in autism diagnosis gone hand-in-hand with autism increases? Are mild autism cases really a 'disorder,' rather than personality variant? Can autism be quiescent in childhood but truly first recognizable in adulthood? Why does popular media often portray people with autism as odd geniuses ignoring the kind of autism most have? Siegel tackles thorny issues and perennial questions: How do we weigh likely treatment gains with treatment costs? Why does our autism education persist in teaching academic subjects some never master? Why do we fail to plan realistically for autistic adulthood? Which parents get caught up in non-mainstream 'treatments' and fear of vaccines? Readers will see an insider's view of controversies in autism research. Siegel's views, sometimes iconoclastic, always frank and informed, challenge broad unexamined assumptions about our understanding of autism. Each chapter addresses different issues, data, and social policy recommendations. A chapter-by-chapter bibliography with URLs provides both popular media and scientific references.




One Hand Clapping


Book Description

Sometimes when I'm at work and waiting for customers I think about the two of us living like kings and not bothering about the future. Because there may not be any future to bother about, you know. Not for anybody, one of these days. And it's a wicked world. Average couple Janet and Howard's lives begin to unravel when Howard's photographic memory helps win him a gameshow fortune. Janet doesn't want their lives to change that much. She's quite happy working at the supermarket, cooking for her husband three times a day and watching quiz shows in the evening. But once Howard unleashes his photographic brain on the world, the once modest used-car salesman can't seem to stop. And what he sees as the logical conclusion to his success isn't something Janet can agree to. Burgess's 1961 darkly comic satire of drab English consumerism is adapted for the stage by Lucia Cox. This edition was published to coincide with the US premiere at the Brits Off-Broadway Festival, at 59E59 Theatre, New York, in May 2015.