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  Joan Crawford: The Last Word -...

  Fred Lawrence Guiles

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  For most of her adult life, Joan Crawford was a star who dedicated herself entirely to her career. But since her death, her luster has been tarnished. Here, at last, is a biography that sets the record straight. 
  In her heyday, Joan Crawford was probably the most imitated woman in the world. Magazine covers featured her face, and high school and college girls copied her makeup and clothing. Born Lucille Fay LeSueur in Kansas City, she spent her childhood on the edge of poverty. But an iron will developed in adolescence drove her to New York City and eventual work in a chorus line. Spotted by a Hollywood talent scout, she was soon on her way to the film capital. 
  Four times married (to actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franchot Tone, and Philip Terry and Pepsi Cola executive Alfred Steele) and driven by powerful sexuality, Joan Crawford lived her life on the razor’s edge. Yet she was a woman of great generosity who cared deeply for her four adopted children, although her ideas about discipline were colored by her own harsh upbringing. 
  Her professional career spanned more than 40 years and included such classics as Grand Hotel, Mildred Pierce, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Her remarkable progression from silent films to talkies to television exemplified her ability to adapt, chameleon—like, to the ever-changing demands of the industry that in many senses invented her. 
  A supplemental PDF is included with this audiobook.

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  To Be a Friend Is Fatal - The...

  Kirk W. Johnson

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  In January 2005 Kirk Johnson, then twenty-four, arrived in Baghdad as USAID's only American employee who spoke Arabic. Despite his opposition to the war, Johnson felt called to civic duty and wanted to help rebuild Iraq.Appointed as USAID's first reconstruction coordinator in Fallujah, he traversed the city's IED-strewn streets, working alongside idealistic Iraqi translators-young men and women sick of Saddam, filled with Hollywood slang, and enchanted by the idea of a peaceful, democratic Iraq. It was not to be. As sectarian violence escalated, Iraqis employed by the U.S. coalition found themselves subject to a campaign of kidnapping, torture, and death.On his first brief vacation, Johnson, swept into what doctors later described as a "fugue state," crawled onto the ledge outside his hotel window and plunged. He would spend the next year in an abyss of depression, surgery, and PTSD-crushed by having failed in Iraq.One day, Johnson received an email from an Iraqi friend, Yaghdan: People are trying to kill me and I need your help. After being identified by a militiaman, Yaghdan had emerged from his house to find the severed head of a dog and a death threat. That email launched Johnson's mission to get help from the U.S. government for Yaghdan and thousands like him abandoned in Iraq. The List Project has now helped more than 1,500 Iraqis find refuge in America. To Be a Friend Is Fatal is Kirk W. Johnson's unforgettable portrait of the human rubble of war and a book that "redeems a measure of pride from a national episode full of tragedy and shame" (George Packer).

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  You Mean It or You Don't - James...

  Jamie McGhee, Adam Hollowell

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  After a speech at UMass Amherst on February 28, 1984, James Baldwin was asked by a student: "You said that the liberal façade and being a liberal is not enough. Well, what is? What is necessary?" Baldwin responded, "Commitment. That is what is necessary. You mean it or you don't."Taking up that challenge and drawing from Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews, You Mean It or You Don't will spur today's progressives from conviction to action. It is not enough, authors Hollowell and McGhee urge us, to hold progressive views on racial justice, LGBTQ+ identity, and economic inequality. True and lasting change demands a response to Baldwin's radical challenge for moral commitment. Called to move from dreams of justice to living it out in communities, churches, and neighborhoods, we can show that we truly mean it.Welcome to life with James Baldwin. It is raw and challenging, inspired and embodied, passionate, and fully awake.

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  Oscar in Limbo - Wilde

  Richard Erdman

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  The life story of Victorian England's favorite Irish writer: Oscar Wilde. What begins as a charming and witty cross-continental romp becomes a terrible ordeal in the British court, as "the love that dare not speak its name" destroys the writer's reputation. Wilde was incarcerated in Reading Gaol, and experience which begat one of his most beautiful and moving pieces. But upon his release, he was trapped in a state of limbo, living neither in heaven nor hell, though he madly desired both.Starring: David Warner, Samantha Eggar, William Windom, Dan O'Herlihy, Jeanette Nolan, Ian Abercrombe, Sean McClory, Linda Henning, James Lancaster, Baibre Dowling, Shay Duffin, Elliott Reid, Elizabeth Dennehy, and John Harlan.Written and directed by Richard Erdman, produced by Peggy Webber.

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  The Norman Maclean Reader -...

  Norman Maclean

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  Selected works and incidental writings by the celebrated author of A River Runs Through It, plus excerpts from a 1986 interview. 
   
  In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written. 
   
  The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career. 
   
  In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana. 
   
  Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices. 
   
  Praise for The Norman MacLean Reader 
   
  “A solid, satisfying, well-made body of work by a patient craftsman.” —Chicago Tribune 
   
  “The Norman Maclean Reader fills out and makes more human the impressions of the restless, inquiring storyteller we saw in previously published works. In his writings, at their best, we too feel the thrusts and strains. He is a writer of great beauty, in his own terms.” —Financial Times 
   
  “Weltzien has not only done great service for Norman Maclean’s readers, he has rightly expanded Maclean’s place in American literature . . . . For me, The Norman Maclean reader is discovered treasure.” —Bloomsbury Review

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  Elon Musk - Risking it All

  Michael Vlismas

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  'How did a bullied, introverted Pretoria schoolboy become the world's richest person and arguably humanity's greatest change agent? Vlismas's extensively researched biography does a great job of unwrapping Elon Musk's remarkable life story.'– TOBY SHAPSHAK.
  Often in the news for his entrepreneurial exploits and his controversial tweets, Elon Musk is one of the richest and best-known people on earth. In 2022 he made headlines worldwide with his bid to buy Twitter. Who is this boundary-pushing billionaire with grand plans of inhabiting Mars, and what lies at the heart of his vision? Why is he so utterly unafraid of risk?
  As an awkward Pretoria schoolboy who loved comics and science fiction, Musk's early years and singular family background were crucial in forming his stellar ambitions. Journalist and author Michael Vlismas, who attended the same high school as Musk, knows well the environment that shaped him and offers new insights into Musk's development, including his troubled relationship with his father.
  Tracing his remarkable life, from his South African childhood to his move to Canada at 17 and then to the US – where Musk made millions out of PayPal and built Tesla and SpaceX into two of the world's most famous companies – this is the story of a man driven to preserve the optimism he sees in humanity and find a future for humans 'out there among the stars'.

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