Other books that might interest you

• 

  Blood Bone and Marrow - A...

  Ted Geltner

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “Brilliantly renders the life of the late writer Harry Crews . . . It captures the wild spirit of an unflinching American writer.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)   In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. His health rapidly deteriorating, Crews told Geltner he was on board and would even sit for interviews and tell his stories one last time. “Ask me anything you want, bud,” Crews said. “But you’d better do it quick.”   The result is Blood, Bone, and Marrow, the first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction. With books such as Scar Lover, Body, and Naked in Garden Hills, Crews opened a new window into southern life, focusing his lens on the poor and disenfranchised, the people who skinned the hogs and tended the fields, the “grits,” as Crews affectionately called his characters and himself. He lived by a code of his own design, flouting authority and baring his soul, and the stories of his whiskey-and-blood-soaked lifestyle created a myth to match any of his fictional creations. His outlaw life, his distinctive voice and the context in which he lived combine to form the elements of a singularly compelling narrative about an underappreciated literary treasure.   “Harry Crews led a big, strange, sad and somehow very American life. It is well told here.”—The New York Times

  Show book

• 

  Vertigo - A Memoir

  Louise DeSalvo

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A scholar’s memoir of growing up and the powerful forces that shaped her as a woman and a writer; “her story will inspire all women” (Library Journal).   In this honest and outspoken reflection on her childhood, Louise DeSalvo explores the many ways literature saved her, both emotionally and practically. Born to Italian immigrants during World War II, DeSalvo takes readers back to the emotional chaos of her 1950s girlhood in New Jersey, growing up with her authoritative, distant father, her depressed mother, and a sister who later committed suicide. Reading and research were an anchor to her then, and widened her choices about her future in ways that weren’t otherwise available to girls of that era.   A Virginia Woolf scholar, DeSalvo wrote a ground-breaking study on the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the reclusive writer. Here, she mines her own early days—and her adolescent obsession with Hitchcock’s Vertigo—in an attempt to give her own life’s path “some shape, some order.”  Publisher’s Weekly said, “Her clarity of insight and expression make this [memoir] an impressive achievement,” and the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed, “DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around.”

  Show book

• 

  Cockpit Commander: A Navigator's...

  Bruce Gibson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Previously self-published by the author, this book charts the course of a dramatic career as a Wing Commander. Living through one of the most dynamic periods in military and Aviation development history, Bruce Gibson saw events play out from his elevated aerial position. His fascinating story will appeal to a wide audience, focussing as it does not only upon Aviation concerns. From life as a mischievous child living in the East End of London, to realising his true direction and joining the RAF Air Volunteer Reserves in 1937, and then the Royal Air Force, and beyond into Aviation ventures in a Civilian capacity. His amusing observations and anecdotes provide the most colourful insight into life during the monochromatic blackout years of World War II, and beyond.Many historical records and operational logs are available on the market to those looking for cold facts and statistical analyses of events; this account features the human tales, the anecdotes and spirit of camaraderie which characterised Gibson's experiences.

  Show book

• 

  Summary of Anderson Cooper &...

  Falcon Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Summary of Anderson Cooper & Gloria Vanderbilt's The Rainbow Comes and Goes is the result of a year of email exchanges between a son and his mother. They explore themes of life, love, and loss. When Vanderbilt was nearing her ninety-first birthday, she was hospitalized with a respiratory infection. This led Cooper to consider her mortality and to wonder if he and his mother knew one another as well as they could. After the untimely death of his father when Cooper was 10 years old and the suicide of his brother Carter when Cooper was 21, Vanderbilt and Cooper formed a close bond. Yet Vanderbilt, who had been born into a famously wealthy family, had revealed little to Cooper about her difficult upbringing. So, on the occasion of her upcoming birthday, the pair began a year-long correspondence in which Vanderbilt explored her childhood and life… 

  Show book

• 

  Behind the Mask - The...

  Patrick Treacy

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This is the story of a boy from a small Irish village who became an adventurer, a humanitarian and a doctor to the stars. Part travelogue, part thriller, part celebrity tell-all, you've never read anything quite like it. Patrick Treacy grew up in rural Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Determined to become a doctor, he raised the money for medical school by smuggling cars from Germany to Turkey. Working in a hospital in Dublin in 1987, a needle he had used to draw blood from a patient with HIV jabbed him in the leg. He took blood test after blood test, wondering whether he was going to die. Overwhelmed, he moved to New Zealand, away from everyone who knew what he was going through: his girlfriend, his friends and his colleagues. Thus he began a peripatetic existence, working as a doctor around the world. In Saddam Hussein's Baghdad, Treacy was arrested and imprisoned, spending days wondering whether he was going to be hanged as a spy. In Australia, he worked for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. On returning to Dublin, Treacy set up the Ailesbury Clinic, where he worked on the cutting-edge of the new field of cosmetic dermatology, championing treatments including the use of Botox. This brought stars to his doorstep, including the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson. Central to this memoir is Treacy's personal journey: his efforts to escape the Troubles, cope with the fear that he might have contracted HIV (until he found out that he had not), get over his lost love and defend Michael Jackson's legacy.

  Show book

• 

  Queen of the Mountaineers - The...

  Cathryn J. Prince

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman to lecture at the Sorbonne and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London, whose members included Charles Darwin, Richard Francis Burton, and David Livingstone. Her books, replete with photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of meteorological conditions, glaciology, and the effect of high altitudes on humans, remained useful decades after their publication. Paving the way for a legion of female climbers, her legacy lives on in scholarship prizes at Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, and Bryn Mawr. 
  Author and journalist Cathryn J. Prince brings Fanny Bullock Workman to life and deftly shows how she negotiated the male-dominated world of alpine clubs and adventure societies as nimbly as she negotiated the deep crevasses and icy granite walls of the Himalayas. It's the story of the role one woman played in science and exploration, in breaking boundaries and frontiers for women everywhere.

  Show book