Other books that might interest you

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  Sinkhole - The Legacy of a Suicide

  Juliet Patterson

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  A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family. This stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell it slant,” Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father’s death, she struggles to make sense of the loss—sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father’s burial in her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers—one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman—she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.

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  That's What She Said: From the...

  Jenette Jurczyk, Kerry Rossow,...

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  This book is a celebration of women's stories, and hopefully the first of many.  What started as a one-night event in Champaign-Urbana, IL, has grown into annual storytelling events in multiple cities, showcasing dozens of remarkable women who shape their communities. As we celebrate the first ten years of "That's What She Said," we wanted to take a moment to look back on all the voices raised, the stories shared, the lives impacted.  We wanted to get these stories out to even more women who can benefit from them. That's What She Said: From the Stage to the Page, Vol. 1 features stories by 16 women, developed originally for a live storytelling performance. These women were invited back to share their stories in our first ever published collection by the She Said Press. Each story is read by the author, allowing the listener to experience their unique voice and their powerful, yet relatable journey. These are real women sharing their extraordinatory stories.

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  Late Bloomer - Finding My...

  Melissa Giberson

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  Melissa Giberson is a middle-aged wife and mother, solidly planted in the life she’s always wanted. She longs for something more but can’t quite put her finger on it until she finds herself mesmerized by the sight of a naked woman and asks herself for the first time: Am I gay? 
  This revelation sends Melissa on a head-spinning journey of self-discovery, challenging everything she thinks she knows about herself and forcing her to decide how much she’s willing to risk for authenticity.

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  She Danced with Lightning - My...

  Marc Palmieri

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  Part family memoir, part medical mystery involving severe epilepsy, She Danced with Lightning follows one girl's battle to persevere as a competitive dancer, culminating in a terrifying decline, a courageous performance, and an eleventh hour, life-saving brain surgery. 
   
   
   
  Eleven-year-old Anna has lived all her life with severe epilepsy. Despite the ravage of thousands of violent seizures and heavy medications, she has thrived at school, athletics, and her greatest passion—dance. As she approaches her twelfth birthday, Anna's condition takes a dire turn. Her health declines quickly and a new diagnosis is revealed, leaving the family only one excruciating choice. A parent's memoir about the medical mysteries of epilepsy and the personal suffering of raising a child with a deadly health condition, She Danced with Lightning is told from the perspective of Anna's dream-chasing father, who comes to learn from her a strength and courage he never imagined possible.

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  Schoenberg - Why He Matters

  Harvey Sachs

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  An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers. 
   
   
   
  In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century's most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the "Procrustean bed" of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as "degenerate"—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.

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  Charles Before Diana - A King in...

  Helen Cathcart

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  The eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles has been heir to the British throne since he was three years old. 
   
   
   
  In this lively and illuminating account, royal biographer Helen Cathcart charts the first thirty years of Prince Charles's life, from his birth at Buckingham Palace in 1948 and rugby-playing schooldays at Gordonstoun, through his undergraduate years cycling to lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequent military career in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. 
   
   
   
  Cathcart reveals a young man of many interests—actor, polo player, cellist, helicopter pilot, and conservationist—and takes the listener behind the scenes of notable events in the Prince's life, including his investiture as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in 1969 and move to Chevening in 1974, before giving insight into his romantic relationships prior to his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. 
   
   
   
  Drawing on an extraordinary fund of private material, Charles Before Diana is an intimate portrait of the man behind the Prince—a man with an endearing sense of comedy and a conscientious devotion to duty.

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