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  Chase Your Shadow - The Trials...

  John Carlin

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  Oscar Pistorius was eleven months old when he had both legs amputated below the knee, due to congenital fibular disease. Despite this severe disability, Pistorious grew up to be an extraordinary athlete, inspirational role model, and global symbol of resilience. In 2012 he became the first amputee runner in history to compete in the Olympics and was hailed as a hero not only in his native South Africa but around the world.Everything changed for Pistorius in the early morning hours of February 14, 2013—Valentine's Day—when he shot and killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, through a closed bathroom door, allegedly because he mistook her for an intruder intent on doing him harm. He was arrested and charged with premeditated murder, and overnight, the public's view of Pistorius turned on its head.Not since the O. J. Simpson case has a courtroom drama riveted global attention on one man's fate. Acclaimed journalist John Carlin's vivid firsthand account of Pistorius's seven-month murder trial, broadcast worldwide from Johannesburg, details the wrenching emotional breakdowns and merciless interrogation of the accused on and off the stand, the fraught relationship between the Pistorius and Steenkamp families, and the highly controversial verdict of culpable homicide, for which Pistorius received a five-year sentence.But Chase Your Shadow is far more than just a sensational crime story, as Carlin shows through meticulous reporting and extensive access to Pistorius and his family and friends. This courtroom confrontation between a white, privileged, twenty-seven-year-old male athlete on trial for murder and the black female judge who alone would decide his fate—held in a democratic country trying to exorcise its history of racial hatred and endemic violence against women—exposes the complex social and political realities of post-Apartheid South Africa.

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  Folk Punk Literary Style - The...

  Patrick Schneeweis

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  There are artists out there able to lift the spirits of the downtrodden, who point towards a better world with all they are. Sometimes, they do this in DIY punk style: raw, unplugged, and deeply human. 
  Patrick Schneeweis, better known as Pat the Bunny, is an artist who chose the road less travelled, instinctively deeming it more honest and less controlling. Freer. He grew up in Vermont, where he found people liked his voice and the controversial topics he tackled, and by 16 years old, he had released his first album ‘Fire Hazard’. 
  Pat had the courage to test his reality, and then nakedly vocalise it (in both the metaphorical and literal senses). His lyrics saw conflicting ideologies meet and fight to the death, in outlooks that were as captivating as his personal anecdotes were relatable. Pat’s journey offers direction to the lost, if only in the promise that so is he; and for all his youthful anarchism and burn-it-to-the-ground spiritedness, his commentary of the world is ironically sobering. 
  Pat’s music career only spanned thirteen years, from 2003-2016. He reincarnated several times in different bands of his own making, and split albums with other folk-punk artists equally hungry to change the world. He fought like hell for a vision of peace, and made the battlegrounds his own state of consciousness. 
  Like a flashfire burning everything in its wake, towards the end of his career, Pat’s had simmered down, but shoots of new life had sprung up from the ashes, a new direction for which his life could take. 
  This book paints the picture of Pat’s fallings and risings, a final cadence before he left the punk scene behind him for good.  

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  Beethoven for a Later Age -...

  Edward Dusinberre

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  “A richly detailed portrayal of the intimate workings of a great string quartet . . . as revealed to us through the recollections of its first violinist.”—Philip Roth   Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the renowned Takács Quartet, offers a rare peek inside the workings of his ensemble, while providing an insightful history of Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets and their performance. Founded in Hungary in 1975 and now based in Boulder, Colorado, the Takács is one of the world’s preeminent string quartets, and performances of Beethoven have been at the center of their work together for over forty years. Using the history of both the Takács Quartet and the Beethoven quartets as a foundation, Beethoven for a Later Age provides a backstage look at the daily life of a quartet, showing the necessary creative tension between individual and group and how four people can at the same time forge a lasting artistic connection and enjoy making music together over decades.   In an accessible style, suitable for novices and chamber music enthusiasts alike, Dusinberre illuminates the variety and contradictions of Beethoven’s quartets, which were composed against the turbulent backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, and he brings the technical aspects of the music to life. “We are given intimate insight into the almost impossible-to-describe musical process of rehearsal and performance, the artistic and human interaction that links these modern musicians with their forebears and Beethoven himself.”—Garrick Ohlsson, pianist “This singular memoir . . . will be something between informative and revelatory to readers from musicians to music lovers.”—Jan Swafford, author of Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

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  Wilfrid Israel - German Jewry's...

  Naomi Shepherd

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  Wilfrid Israel was a most unlikely hero. Heir to a Jewish business dynasty in Berlin, he was a contemporary of Einstein and Spender in the cosmopolitan circles of Weimar Berlin, and emerged from his world of privilege to become German Jewry's  chief (and often anonymous) emissary to the outside world and one of the great unsung heroes of the Holocaust.  In the dark days of the 1930s, the ever tightening persecution of German Jews made the diffident Wilfrid Israel assume a major role in their escape. Using his British passport and high connections, he lobbied British diplomats and politicians with plans for Jewish support and rescue. At home he faced down stormtroopers and the Gestapo, enabled the emigration of the Jewish employees of his firm, and ransomed thousands of Jewish and anti-Nazi prisoners from the concentration camps.
  
  When the Nazis finally requisitioned the Israel firm, and the Jewish leadership disintegrated, he ran the Jewish emigration office which enabled thousands to find refuge abroad, partly by his connection with the head of British intelligence in Berlin. After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, through the Council for German Jewry in London, and with the help of his Quaker friends and German Jewish women's organisations, he set in motion the famous Kindertransport. This was the admission to Britain without formalities of nearly ten thousand unaccompanied Jewish children. Leaving Germany days before the outbreak of the war, he lobbied on behalf of German Jews interned as enemy aliens.  In 1942 he was recruited by the British Foreign Office to put his extensive knowledge of German politics and economics at the disposal of the government – also his expertise in rescue to its Refugee Department.
  
  Wilfrid Israel was one of the first to warn of the Nazis' plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe and the dimensions of the Holocaust. His final mission, to distribute certificates of admission to Palestine among the Jews of Spain and Portugal, ended when the plane in which he was returning to England was shot down by the Luftwaffe.
  
  This biography, first published in 1984 and now revised with a new foreword, restores Wilfrid Israel to his rightful place in the history of the Holocaust. It also brings into new focus the disturbing indifference of Allied leaders to the plight of the Jews, early arguments over the emerging Palestinian homeland, and questions still unresolved today about the politics of rescue and the practicality of humanist ideals.

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  Spirit of Place - Letters and...

  Lawrence Durrell

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  The definitive collection of travel writings by one of the twentieth century’s best-loved journeyersFrom the moment of his birth, Lawrence Durrell was far from home. A British child in India, he was sent to England to receive an education, and by his early twenties had already tired of his native land. With family in tow, he departed for Greece, and spent the rest of his life wandering the world. He traveled not to sightsee but to live, and made homes in Egypt, France, Yugoslavia, and Argentina. Each time he landed, he rooted himself deep into the native soil, taking in not just the sights and sounds of his new land, but the essential character of the country. In these letters and essays, Durrell exhibits the power of poetic observation that made his travel writing so extraordinary to post–World War II readers. In these pages he reminds us not just of each country’s hidden charms, but of the unique characteristics that persist through the generations.

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  Hemingway's Key West

  Stuart B. McIver

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  The only place in the United States that Hemingway could really call home after he started writing was the tropical island of Key West. During his decade here in the 1930s, he acquired his famed macho persona as Papa, the biggest Big Daddy of them all. This vivid portrait of Ernest Hemingway's Key West reveals both Hemingway, the writer, and Hemingway, the macho, hard-drinking sportsman. His Key West years turned out to be his most productive: he finished A Farewell to Arms, started For Whom the Bell Tolls, and wrote several other books, including Green Hills of Africa, Death in the Afternoon, and To Have and Have Not. He also turned out some of his best short stories. There was plenty of time left over for eating, drinking, fighting, fishing, chasing women, and hanging out with his circle of friends (known as "the Mob"). Hemingway spent the last years of his life in Cuba, and it was here he overcame several demons—accidents, failing health, depression—to write The Old Man and the Sea, for which he won both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize in Literature.This book includes a two-hour walking tour of Key West and a tour of Hemingway's favorite Cuban haunts. It also includes a record of his exploits in Bimini and Cuba. Accompany Hemingway on fishing expeditions in the Gulf Stream aboard his custom-built boat, Pilar. A treat for Hemingway fans!

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