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  Life Moves Pretty Fast - The...

  Hadley Freeman

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  From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever—featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics.For Hadley Freeman, movies of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me.In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade’s key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.From how John Hughes discovered Molly Ringwald, to how the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy, and how Eddie Murphy made America believe that race can be transcended, this is a “highly personal, witty love letter to eighties movies, but also an intellectually vigorous, well-researched take on the changing times of the film industry” (The Guardian).

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  The Lost Prince - A Search for...

  Michael Mewshaw

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  Pat Conroy was America's poet laureate of family dysfunction. A larger-than-life character and the author of such classics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, Conroy was remembered by everybody for his energy, his exuberance, and his self-lacerating humor.Michael Mewshaw's The Lost Prince is an intimate memoir of his friendship with Pat Conroy, one that involves their families and those days in Rome when they were both young—when Conroy went from being a popular regional writer to an internationally bestselling author. Family snapshots beautifully illustrate that time. Shortly before his forty-ninth birthday, Conroy telephoned Mewshaw to ask a terrible favor. With great reluctance, Mewshaw did as he was asked—and never saw Pat Conroy again.Although they never managed to reconcile their differences completely, Conroy later urged Mewshaw to write about "me and you and what happened . . . i know it would cause much pain to both of us. but here is what that story has that none of your others have." The Lost Prince is Mewshaw's fulfillment of a promise.

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  Confessions (Pusey translation)

  Saint Augustine of Hippo

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  The Confessions outlines Augustine's sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is widely seen as the first Western autobiography ever written, and was an influential model for Christian writers throughout the following 1,000 years, through the Middle Ages. It is not a complete autobiography, as it was written in his early 40s, and he lived long afterwards, producing another important work (City of God). It does, nonetheless, provide an unbroken record of his development of thought and is the most complete record of any single person from the 4th and 5th centuries. It is a significant theological work, featuring spiritual meditations and insights.  It begins:"GREAT art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite.  And Thee would man praise; man, but a particle of Thy creation; man, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin, the witness, that ]Thou, O God, resistest the proud: yet would man praise Thee; he, but a particle of Thy creation.  Thou awakes us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, unless it repose in Thee.”  (Summary from Wikipedia and Book I, Chapter I.)

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  Poetry Miscellany 02

  Various Authors

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  As we get older, many of us return to youthful memories of poems once significant to us. Outside their association with our youth, we may wonder what significance they have to us now. There were other poems we've met along the way as well: some held no appeal while others were forgotten. And there were others we never had the opportunity to meet. 
   
  This selection hopes to go beyond the experience of meeting old friends and on top opening the door to new ones - poems that might relate more significantly to our current lives. Originally titled "Personal Poems for Later Years," this collection gestures towards poems that ask us to slow down some we can consider them more deeply than before - no matter our age. 
   
  Each time we read a good poem it brings with it a different meaning. Meeting a poem with an open ear, be it old friend or new, we can find its deeper significance. (Summary by Alan Davis Drake)

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  Britain's Unsolved Murders

  Kevin Turton

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  This true crime history spans a century of murder, exploring 13 of the UK’s most notorious cold cases from the Victorian Era to the 1950s.   This book examines some of the most horrifying, mystifying, and fascinating murder cases in British history. Expertly researched by true crime author Kevin Turton, these stories have endured and confounded both police and law courts alike. With a chapter devoted to each story, Turton examines the circumstances surrounding the crime, the people caught up in the investigation, and the impact it had on their lives. Though they span a century—from 1857 to 1957—these murders share one chilling fact in common: despite various accusations, arrests, and trials, no one has ever been proven guilty.   The volume begins with notorious cases from the Victorian Era, such as the questionable trial of Scotland’s accused murderess Madeleine Smith, and the failed investigation into the murder of John Gill—possibly by Jack the Ripper. It then moves into the 20th century with the murders of Caroline Luard, Florence Nightingale Shore, and others. In each case, Turton sifts the facts and poses the questions that mattered at the time of each murder.

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  Sisters of Fortune - America's...

  Jehanne Wake

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  Perfect for fans of the Emmy Award–winning series Downton Abbey, whose creator, Julian Fellowes, raved that Sisters of Fortune is “absolutely fascinating”—a real-life Jane Austen story, that follows the fabulous Caton sisters, the first American heiresses to take Europe by storm.Based on intimate and previously unpublished letters written by the sisters, this is a portrait of four lively and fashionable women in early nineteenth century America. Much of it is told in their own voices as they gossip about prominent people of their time, advise family members on political and financial strategy, soothe each other’s sorrows, and rejoice in each other’s triumphs. Descended from one of the nation’s founding fathers and raised to be educated, independent, and opinionated young women, Marianne, Bess, Louisa, and Emily Caton traveled to England in 1816 and won coveted places at the highest levels of Regency society by virtue of their charm, intelligence, and great beauty. An unusual, remarkable true story of money, love, and life at the top, Sisters of Fortune is a romantic family history and an inside look at the adventures of America’s original blue-blooded girls.

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