Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of...

  Maureen Sullivan

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  When Maureen Sullivan was just twelve years old, she confided in her teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. Never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face a harrowing punishment.Within twenty-four hours, Maureen was taken from her home and her beloved grandmother, and sent to the Magdalene Laundry in New Ross, Co. Wexford, run by the Order of the Good Shepherd nuns. She was told that she would receive an education there, but instead she was immediately stripped of her meagre possessions and thrown into forced labour, washing clothes and scrubbing floors in inhumane and unrelenting conditions. Not allowed to speak, barely fed, and often going without water, the child was viciously beaten by the nuns for years and hidden away in an underground tunnel when government inspectors came. No one must see how cruelly the nuns were treating her.In the heart-breaking Girl in the Tunnel, Maureen bravely recounts her agonising journey from a monstrously violent home to the cold and brutal Magdalene laundry system, and her desperate, gruelling fight for freedom and for justice.

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  There Is No Blue

  Martha Baillie

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  THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023
  		 
  Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father's life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
  		 
  Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers Baillie's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the center of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother's. And then, third, shockingly, the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life, just before the book the sisters co-authored is due to come out.
  		 
  In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report.
  		 
  ”Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love.” — Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
  		 
  “This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings,  and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds.  I couldn’t put it down.” — Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness
  		 
  “Exquisite.” — Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife
  		 
  “I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” — Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker
  		 
  ”This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father.  It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose.  Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness.  It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human.” — Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

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  Patriot Presidents - From George...

  William E. Leuchtenberg

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  The founding fathers of the United States created a unique institution, the presidency, as they were determined to authorize an effective chief executive but wary of monarchy. They endowed this office with broad prerogatives and power but hedged it in with limitations. The presidency that developed over the next generation, however, was fashioned less by the clauses in the Constitution than by the way that the first presidents responded to challenges such as sectional enmity and the vexing Napoleonic warfare that jeopardized maritime rights. 
   
   
   
  Patriot Presidents explores how the presidency took shape from the medley of clauses handed down to George Washington, who said, "I walk on untrodden ground," for virtually everything he did created a precedent. It then follows the overwhelming challenges faced by his successors, from the austere John Adams who spoke passionately in favor of a strong executive, to Thomas Jefferson, a zealous advocate of American liberties, to James Madison, the creator of the first political party, and James Monroe, whose Monroe Doctrine protected the sovereignty of the Western Hemisphere. It concludes with John Quincy Adams, who could be called the prophet of the expansive twentieth-century state of the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society.

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  Admired Painter Frida Kahlo The...

  Bert Alexander Petzold

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  Why does the art world so readily celebrate male genius while sidelining the women who transformed how we see pain, identity and the female experience? "The Admired Painter Frida Kahlo" shows how one Mexican artist defied convention, suffering and erasure to become a defining feminist voice of the twentieth century.
  Frida Kahlo did not simply paint self-portraits; she invented a visual language for the body, wounded and resilient, and for the self as a site of politics and truth. Childhood polio, a catastrophic bus accident at eighteen, chronic pain and repeated operations shaped her daily life, as did her turbulent marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera. Rather than letting illness and patriarchy reduce her to a legend, she made her bedroom a studio and turned lived experience into images that demand attention. The book places her most important works at the centre: "The Two Fridas", "The Broken Column", "Henry Ford Hospital", "My Birth", "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird", "What the Water Gave Me", "The Wounded Deer", and "Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States". Read closely, these paintings do more than confess; they argue, combining tenderness with brutality, symbolism with precise observation.
  Bert Alexander Petzold offers more than pop mythology. Drawing on comprehensive research, he explains how Kahlo fused Mexican folk traditions, pre-Columbian imagery, Catholic iconography and uncompromising honesty about disability, desire, miscarriage and identity into works of exceptional intellectual and emotional power. He also shows why her intimate scale was revolutionary in a culture that prized grand public statements, and how her reputation, long overshadowed by Rivera, came to reshape the canon.
  If Kahlo's image has fascinated you but you want to understand the practice behind it, this study provides the depth and clarity her work deserves. Buy the book and see why Kahlo's vision continues to transform how we read art, selfhood and the female body.
  Perfect for GCSE and A-level revision as well as university study, the book uses Frida Kahlo's biography and masterpieces as a key to looking, so you can not only recognise her but truly understand her.

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  Welcome to Humanity - A...

  Fred Robert Moss MD

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  The mental health system has been asking the wrong question for fifty years. 
  The question isn't what is wrong with you. It's what happened to you — and what do you need now? 
  Fred R. Moss, MD spent 46 years in mental health -- nine as a child care worker and thirty-seven as a board-certified psychiatrist -- in state facilities, private practice, and every institutional setting in between. He worked with more than thirty thousand patients. He watched the system replace listening with labeling, and connection with medication. And then, on a video call in early 2026, he was fired. It felt like freedom. 
  Welcome to Humanity is part memoir, part institutional critique, part human manifesto. In five parts — The Formation, The Descent, The Reckoning, The Return, and The Work — Dr. Moss traces the arc of a career and a conviction: that the medicine the mental health system most desperately needs is the one it stopped prescribing decades ago. Human connection. Genuine presence. The radical act of being seen. 
  This is not an anti-medication book. It is a pro-human one. 
  Before you accept another label, read this book.

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  Understanding the Buddha

  Sébastien Barbara

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  “Neither a god, nor a guru, nor a savior” - who is Buddha? This essay sets out to understand this unclassifiable figure by taking stock of the fundamental principles of Buddhist doctrine and unravelling its most famous shortcuts. By following Gotama's “Spiritual Awakening” step by step, this stimulating look at the man whose emancipatory quest “heals the whole world” is far removed from any reductive pessimism. From the Enlightened One's contemporary Greeks to current scientific research, from Schopenhauer to Einstein, from Nietzsche to Lévi-Strauss, this portrait of Buddha is also an illuminating account of the “elective affinities between Buddhism and the West” and of the constant influence the sage has exerted on our thinking.

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