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  New Moons For Sam - Becoming...

  Peter Hamilton

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  A personal, intimate, memoir spanning 70 years, in three parts, describing my childhood in the UK and New Zealand, my 35 years as a New Zealand diplomat, and the hundreds of amazing individuals I met on the way, from farming folk to Kings, Queens and Presidents. Part One is the story of an English boy growing up on a farm in rural Devon and Somerset in an extended family, and then, aged 9, moving to rural New Zealand. It covers my school years, my year as a volunteer teacher, aged 17, at an all boys school, in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga and my year as a university student in a still divided Germany. Part Two describes my career as a junior, then senior, New Zealand diplomat, and my postings in Fiji, Canada, Geneva, Samoa, Germany and Singapore, the last three as Ambassador. Part Three argues that New Zealand should become a republic in the Commonwealth, with its own Head of State. It describes, too, my liberating journey from Anglicanism to freedom from any religion. I have aimed to tell the memoir with a sense of humour, humility and (for the most part) optimism!

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  Emily Brontë - A Biography

  Agnes Mary Frances Robinson

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  “Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. ... 
   
  “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” ... 
   
  “Do I want to live?.. Would you like to live with your soul in the grave?” 
   
  Emily Brontë (1818-1848) is best known for her only novel, "Wuthering Heights." She was born in Yorkshire, northern England, where her father was an Anglican curate. When Brontë was three years old her mother died of cancer. At the age of six, she joined her three sisters briefly at the Clergy Daughters' School, where privations and abuse contributed to the deaths of two of them. Her elder sister, Charlotte, immortalized this terrible place in "Jane Eyre." In 1846 Emily Brontë, under the pseudonym, Ellis Bell published a selection of her poetry. In 1847 appeared her dark, gothic novel, "Wuthering Heights," with its Byronic anti-hero, Heathcliff. Brontë was shy, even reclusive, and never married. In the fall of 1848, she fell ill with inflammation of the lungs, probably due to rapidly-progressive tuberculosis, and died in December of that year, aged twenty-nine. This is a short biography of Brontë written by the British poet, novelist, and critic, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson 

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  Mrs Cook and the Klan - Booze...

  Tom Chorneau

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  On the day she was murdered, Myrtle Underwood Cook boasted to local authorities about new evidence of a major bootlegging ring operating out of the Rock Island train depot behind her house in a small town in eastern Iowa. Then, as she sat at her window sewing, she took a single slug through the heart. She was president of the local temperance union; her killing made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news due to the eerie presence of a small army from the Ku Klux Klan, its members, donned in full regalia, drawn from three surrounding states. 
   
   
   
  It was September 1925, and Al Capone had just taken over the Chicago Outfit, evangelist Billy Sunday was converting thousands to temperance, and the KKK had marched on Washington, DC. During its first half century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry and back eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. And when Iowa was still a territory, its Black Codes imprinted generations with a legacy of intolerance and racism. 
   
   
   
  Mrs. Cook and the Klan is a true crime investigation that not only sheds new light on Myrtle Underwood Cook's unsolved killing but also explores the confluence of the social, political, and economic forces that brought the Klan, street gangs, a local mob boss, and the temperance movement together in a small American town.

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  The In-Between - Life in the Micro

  Christian Espinosa

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  Some regrets don’t hit you all at once. They seep in at the corners of your life, at night or on a long drive, until they become a refrain. Those are the worst regrets of all.I was living in a bubble that burst on May 9, 2022. It was the middle of the afternoon. As my partner Vanessa and I approached a major intersection, a blue car accelerated, ran the red light, and T-boned a black truck directly in front of us.BOOM! The blue car’s hood crumpled like an accordion to absorb the impact. Within seconds, its front end was completely smashed, and its windows were broken. Then, everything went out of focus, except for what I needed to do—assess the scene for safety, check on the drivers of the blue car and black truck, and call 911. Nothing else mattered—I felt a heightened sense of purpose.I had always focused on one macro moment after another—the next mountain to climb or business to start. I hadn’t spent much time appreciating the micro-moments—life in between the macros. I’d been living in a macro-moment bubble.The accident awakened a desire to paint a complete picture of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to approach my life. This is my story of learning how to value the in-between and prioritize consciously living in the micro.

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  Rock Hard! Charlie Watts The...

  Geoffrey Giuliano

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  A TRIBUTE FROM THE AUTHOR OF 'PAINT IT BLACK THE MURDER OF BRIAN JONES' 
  AND 'THE ROLLING STONES ALBUM', SQUID GAME STAR GEOFFREY GIULIANO 
   
  "I wanted to play drums because I fell in love with the glitter and the lights, but it wasn't about adulation. It was being up there playing." 
   
  "I hate leaving home. I love what I do, but I'd love to go home every night." 
   
  "It's been years and years and years I've been playing the drums, and they're still a challenge." 
   
  "I never had lessons. Used to try to play to records, which I hated doing. Still can't play to them." 
  Charlie Watts 
   
  Charlie Watts provided the foundation that underpinned the music of the Rolling Stones. The band became a by-word for rock 'n' roll excess but for Watts, playing with the Stones did not become the ego trip that drove Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. A jazz aficionado, Watts vied with Bill Wyman for the title of least charismatic member of the band; he eschewed the limelight and rarely gave interviews. And he famously described life with the Stones as five years of playing, 20 years of hanging around. 
   
  Charles Robert Watts was born on 2 June 1941 at the University College Hospital in London and was raised in Kingsbury, now part of the London Borough of Brent. His father was a lorry driver and Watts was brought up in a prefabricated house to which the family had moved after German bombs destroyed hundreds of houses in the area. A childhood friend once described how Watts had an early interest in jazz and recalled listening to 78s in Charlie's bedroom by artists such as Jelly Roll Morton and Charlie Parker.

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  In the Company of Grace - A...

  Jody Lulich

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  Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing—and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth. 
   
   
   
  Lulich's white father and Black mother met at a civil rights rally, but love was no defense against their personal demons. His mother's suicide and his sometimes brutal father's subsequent withdrawal set Lulich on a course from the South Side of Chicago to the Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama to an endowed chair at the University of Minnesota. Though shadowed by troubling secrets, his memoir also features scenes of surprising light and promise. Most consequentially, at Tuskegee Lulich rents a room in the home of a seventy-five-year-old Black woman named Grace, whose wholehearted adoption of him—and her own stories of the Jim Crow era—finally gives him a sense of belonging and possibility. 
   
   
   
  Completing his book amid the furor over George Floyd's murder, Lulich reflects on all the ways that race has shaped his life. In the Company of Grace is a moving testament to the power of compassion in the face of seemingly overwhelming circumstances.

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