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  Honeymoons - through writers' eyes

  Rose Baring, Roger Hudson

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  The honeymoon – no other holiday inspires so much anticipation of blissful happiness, nor such potential for catastrophic disappointment. Using extracts from fiction and from real-life diaries and letters, Honeymoons: through writers' eyes takes you on a rollercoaster of an emotional journey into the heart of human longing, to examine what it is we are seeking, what we expect, when we embark on life together. There are real journeys to Pisa and Rome, through Switzerland and India and to the moors of Yorkshire. We hear about the consummations of royal weddings; and the dire consequences of marriages of convenience and those entered into with calculation. The road is littered with pleasures, great and small, not to mention surprises, disappointments, cads and one or two corpses.

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  Gibby - Tales of a Baseball Lifer

  Greg Oliver, John Gibbons, Josh...

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  Over eleven years and two separate managerial stints with the Toronto Blue Jays, John Gibbons endeared himself to fans with his folksy manner and his frequent battles with umpires: "Here comes Gibby!" Winning helped too. Under Gibbons's management, the Jays made the American League Championship Series in 2015, ending a twenty-two-year playoff drought; then they did it again in 2016. Along the way the team defied odds, won over a nation, and with one flip of a bat produced one of the most iconic moments in MLB history. Now, in his memoir, Gibby shares the story: an on-field career that didn't pan out, but a managing career that did . . . eventually. 
   
   
   
  Raised in a military family, he played his first competitive baseball in Newfoundland and Labrador, and, with the family now in San Antonio, Texas, Gibby, a catcher, developed into a first-round draft pick of the New York Mets. While Gibbons only played eighteen major league games, he did earn a World Series ring as the 1986 Mets bullpen catcher and knew all the characters from that team, including Doc Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Lenny Dykstra, and Gary Carter. In 1990, Gibby began his journey as a coach and manager. An old teammate, J. P. Ricciardi, hired him to work with the Jays, and he moved his way up the ranks and into the hearts of baseball fans.

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  The Odyssey

  Homer

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  The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the Iliad, the poem is divided into 24 books. It follows the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his journey home after the Trojan War. After the war, which lasted ten years, his journey lasted for ten additional years, during which time he encountered many perils and all his crew mates were killed. In his absence, Odysseus was assumed dead, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus had to contend with a group of unruly suitors who were competing for Penelope's hand in marriage.The Odyssey was originally composed in Homeric Greek in around the 8th or 7th century BCE and, by the mid-6th century BCE, had become part of the Greek literary canon. In antiquity, Homer's authorship of the poem was not questioned, but contemporary scholarship predominantly assumes that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed independently and that the stories formed as part of a long oral tradition. Given widespread illiteracy, the poem was performed by an aoidos or rhapsode and was more likely to be heard than read.

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  Solo Around The World

  Hamad Ali Jabor Al-Thani

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  The little child's love for his unusual hobby increased as he got older. He used to insist on going almost every day to the old airport and staying there for many hours, to watch the aircraft taking off and landing. Those moments, We remember, were the happiest of his day. When he returned home, he used to recall every single detail of what he had seen.

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  A Truce That Is Not Peace

  Miriam Toews

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  "Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times."—Laura van den Berg 
    
  Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write—a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society. 
    
  “Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews—all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. 
    
  Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

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  Dear America - Notes of an...

  Anonymous

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  Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms. 
  “This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at it's core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. 
  After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.” 
  —Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America

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