Outros livros que poderiam interessá-lo

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  Dishing the Dirt - The Hidden...

  Nick Duerden

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  'A jaw-dropping investigation' – THE BOOKSELLER'Succeeds brilliantly in dismantling casual assumptions about the drudgery of cleaning' – THE GUARDIAN'A great book, well researched, funny and poignant. I loved it.' – KIT DE WAALDishing the Dirt tells the jaw-dropping stories of London's house cleaners for the first time.Journalist Nick Duerden spoke to a vast array of domestic helps for this insightful, surprising and gripping non-fiction book.We hear from immigrants who clean suburban family homes to butlers who manage the homes of the super wealthy, and from joyful cleaners and entrepreneurs to escaped victims of human trafficking.Then there are women who dust nude and male cleaners who have to fight off wandering hands. And the crime scene cleaners.With the revelation of Maid by Stephanie Land and the cleaning tips of Mrs Hinch's Hinch Yourself Happy, Dishing the Dirt will turn all of your assumptions about cleaners upside down.About the AuthorNick Duerden is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the i paper, and GQ. His books include Exit Stage Left, Get Well Soon: Adventures in Alternative Healthcare, A Life Less Lonely, and The Smallest Things. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.ExtractPrologue. Clocking OnIt was as if she were invisible, like she wasn't even there. Or, perhaps more accurately, like she didn't really count, not in any tangible sense, this mostly silent domestic cleaner with the broken English whose back was perpetually stooped over the vacuum cleaner, the dustpan and brush, the damp mop; someone who likely knew her way around the utility room better than the homeowners themselves.Today, the wife was away on business, as she frequently was, but the husband wasn't here alone. The marital bed was not empty.'A different woman,' she says. 'Younger.'And he didn't hide this from you, wasn't embarrassed, ashamed of parading his affair so brazenly under your nose?She shakes her head, and smiles tightly. 'No,' she says. 'No.'She was seemingly in his confidence, then, but not through any prior agreement, a finger to the side of the nose, and nor was he paying her for her silence, her implicit complicity. 'I don't think he even considered me,' she says. 'Or my reaction.' She was merely part of the furniture, a once-weekly presence in the house who mutely got on with her work as she always did, over three floors, three bedrooms and two bathrooms: the vacuuming, the polishing, the dusting......In the 1980s, both husbands and wives were now required to go out to work, to pursue careers. This left little time for domestic upkeep... There was no shortage of willing char ladies. In the 21st Century, we are willing to delegate more, specifically to pay others to do the work we'd rather not do ourselves, even if we cannot really afford it. A wave of cheap immigrant labour entered the UK between 2000 and 2020, especially from the new EU member states in eastern Europe. Better to pay a Magda from Poland, say, £30 a week to run the Hoover around the house for a few hours than to save the money for a rainy day....Those that clean for Londoners are a silent army. They bring order to our lives, they put out the bins, and relieve us of at least some of the myriad pressures of modern life. They are privy to our indiscretions, our peculiarities, our curious habits. They put up with us, which isn't always easy because some of us are complicated souls.But who are the members of these well-drilled regiments? What are their stories? Buy the book and start listening

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  Patience Worth

  Casper S. Yost

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  Patience Worth is an examination of the communications between a seventeenth century woman and a certain Mrs. Curran of St. Louis, in 1913. Contact with the spirit world or parlor trick? If the latter, it was well done: the quick-witted repartee appeared unrehearsed, the language was authentic, the references to English nature and life accurate, although Mrs. Curran had never visited England. Mrs. Curran, herself, was a smart, quick-witted socialite of good repute, unlikely to have been a fraudster. She did not 'perform' publicly, only in front of friends and invited guests, and never for money. She was a musician by training, not a writer or poet, yet many of the communications took the form of blank verse and were of a poetical nature. Since its publication, the phenomenon has been much studied and general view is that Patience Worth was the invention of Pearl Curran's imagination. In this volume, we are presented with the evidence and left to decide for ourselves. - Summary by Lynne Thompson

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  The Man Behind the Tudors -...

  Kirsten Claiden-Yardley

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  “Shed[s] some light on a rather remarkable man who was really behind the curtain during the reigns of quite a few English kings.” —Adventures of a Tudor Nerd 
   
  Thomas Howard, 2nd duke of Norfolk, lived a remarkable life spanning eighty years and the reigns of six kings. Amongst his descendants are his granddaughters, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and his great-granddaughter, Elizabeth I. The foundations of this dramatic and influential dynasty rest on Thomas’ shoulders, and it was his career that placed the Howard family in a prominent position in English society and at the Tudor royal court. 
   
  Thomas was born into a fairly ordinary gentry family, albeit distantly related to the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk. During the course of the fifteenth century, he and his father would rise through the political and social ranks as a result of their loyal service to Edward IV and Richard III. In a tragic turn of events, all their hard work was undone at the Battle of Bosworth and his father was killed fighting for King Richard.  
   
  Imprisoned for treason and stripped of his lands and titles, Thomas had to start from the beginning to gain the trust of a new king. He spent the next thirty-five years devoting his administrative, military and diplomatic skills to the Tudors whilst rebuilding his family fortunes and ensuring that his numerous children were well-placed to prosper. 
   
  “The Howards are one of the most intriguing families of the 16th century and this book opens up a chapter that hasn’t been much written about.” —The Tudor Blogger

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  Spreading My Wings - One of...

  Diana Barnato Walker

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  The remarkable autobiography of a pioneering female aviator who left a privileged life to serve in World War II.Her father was a millionaire race car driver who became chairman of Bentley Motors, and her grandfather cofounded the De Beers mining company. But by the late 1930s, debutante Diana Barnato had enough of her affluent, chaperoned existence and sought excitement in flying — soloing at Brooklands after only six hours' training.Joining the Air Transport Auxiliary in 1941 to help ferry aircraft to squadrons and bases throughout the country, she flew scores of different aircraft — fighters, bombers, and trainers — in all kinds of conditions and without a radio. By 1945, Barnato had lost many friends, a fiance, and a husband - but she continued to fly.In 1962, she was awarded the Jean Lennox Bird Trophy for notable achievement in aviation, but her greatest moment was yet to come, when in 1963 she flew a Lightning through the sound barrier, becoming "the fastest woman in the world". Spreading My Wings is her remarkable memoir, brimming with history and adventure.

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  Louisa on the Front Lines -...

  Samantha Seiple

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  An eye-opening look at Little Women author Louisa May Alcott's time as a Civil War nurse, and the far-reaching implications her service had on her writing and her activismLouisa on the Frontlines is the first narrative nonfiction audiobook focusing on the least-known aspect of Louisa May Alcott's career — her time spent as a nurse during the Civil War. Though her service was brief, the dramatic experience was one that she considered pivotal in helping her write the beloved classic Little Women. It also deeply affected her tenuous relationship with her father, and inspired her commitment to abolitionism. Through it all, she kept a journal and wrote letters to her family and friends. These letters were published in the newspaper, and her subsequent book, Hospital Sketches spotlighted the dire conditions of the military hospitals and the suffering endured by the wounded soldiers she cared for. To this day, her work is considered a pioneering account of military nursing.Alcott's time as an Army nurse in the Civil War helped her find her authentic voice — and cemented her foundational belief system. Louisa on the Frontlines reveals the emergence of this prominent feminist and abolitionist — a woman whose life and work has inspired millions and continues to do so today.

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  The Upstairs Delicatessen - On...

  Dwight Garner

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  Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book is a product of these combined gluttonies.Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner's Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and his father's famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family, and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.

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