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  Life Grows in the Soil of Time -...

  Thomas Mann

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  In this essay originally aired in the 1950s, novelist and essayist Thomas Mann expresses appreciation that time gives humanity a sense of life's value in "Life Grows in the Soil of Time", his contribution to NPR's This I Believe series.  
  This I Believe is a National Public Radio program that features Americans, from the famous to the unknown, completing the thought that begins with the series title. The pieces that make up the program compel listeners to re-think not only what and how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others. 
  Featuring a star-studded list of contributors that includes John McCain, Isabel Allende, and Colin Powell, as well as pieces from the original 1950's series including Helen Keller and Jackie Robinson, the This I Believe collection also contains essays by a Brooklyn lawyer, a woman who sells yellow pages advertising in Fort Worth, and a man who serves on the state of Rhode Island's parole board. The result is a stirring, funny and always provocative trip inside the minds and hearts of a diverse group of Americans whose beliefs, and the incredibly varied ways in which they choose to express them, reveal the American spirit at its best. 
  This short audio essay is an excerpt from the audiobook edition of the This I Believe anthology.

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  The Importance of Not Being...

  Mark Kurlansky

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  The New York Times–bestselling author of Salt examines the intersections between his life and Ernest Hemingway’s in this mix of travel memoir and history. 
   
  By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky’s life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway’s legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway’s death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway’s and Kurlansky’s lives, resulting in creative accounts of two inspiring writing careers. Travel the world with Mark Kurlansky and Ernest Hemingway in this personal memoir, where Kurlansky details his ten years in Paris and his time as a journalist in Spain—both cities important to Hemingway’s adventurous life and prolific writing. 
   
  Paris, Basque Country, Havana and Idaho.Get to know the extraordinary people he met there—those who had also fallen under the Hemingway spell, including a Vietnam veteran suffering from the same syndrome the author did, two winners of the Key West Hemingway look-alike contest, and the man in Idaho who took Hemingway hunting and fishing. 
   
  In The Importance of Not Being Ernest, find:A memoir full of entertaining and illuminative storiesLittle-known historical facts about Hemingway’s lifeAnecdotes about those who suffer from what the Kurlansky calls “hemitis” 
   
  Readers of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America, or The Boys will love The Importance of Not Being Ernest. 
   
  Praise for The Importance of Not Being Ernest 
   
  “An absolute delight! Full of personality, Kurlansky’s book will enchant history, literature, and Hemingway fans alike.” —Library Journal (starred review)

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  The First Ten Years - Two Sides...

  Joseph Fink, Meg Bashwiner

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  A sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining joint memoir by Joseph Fink, cocreator of Welcome to Night Vale, and his wife, writer and performer Meg Bashwiner, chronicling the first ten years of their relationship from both sides. 
   
  There are two sides to every love story. 
  In 2009, 22-year-old Joseph Fink, newly arrived to New York City from the West Coast, was juggling odd jobs to pay the rent and volunteering with a theater company in the East Village so he could snag free tickets to their shows. 
  Meg Bashwiner, a 22-year-old aspiring performer and playwright, was living with her parents in New Jersey, working a desk job and commuting to her internship with that same East Village theater company. 
  Joseph and Meg's stories meet when they both find themselves selling tickets in a cramped box office. They quickly became friends. Within a year, they were a couple. Within five years they were touring the world, performing on some of the world's greatest and not so great stages. 
  In this candid, soul-baring memoir, Joseph and Meg recount their first ten years together, each telling their story as they remember it, without having consulted the other. We hear both sides of their first kiss, first breakup, first getting back together, the death of a father, marriage, international fame, world tours, mental illness, and discussions about having children. Sometimes, they recall things differently—neither agrees on who paid for the morning after pill on their first date. Sometimes they remember the exact same details in the same way—but still have their own narrative on just what those details mean. 
  Poignant, funny, and real, alternately told in Joseph and Meg’s remarkably different, yet equally compelling voices, The First Ten Years is the story of two individuals finding their way in the world and becoming ""adults"" as they learn to become a couple.

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  The Life of Richard Nash Esq...

  Peter Cunningham

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  Beau Nash (1674–1762), born Richard Nash, was a celebrated dandy and leader of fashion in 18th-century Britain. He is best remembered as the Master of Ceremonies at the spa town of Bath. (Wikipedia) 
   
  This, the best of Goldsmith's Biographies, was published the year after Nash's death. It was at once popular, and went through two editions in the same year in which it was published. To the second edition (it never reached a third), Goldsmith made many important additions. Yet strange to say none of these have been attended to by the editors of his Works. The text of this reprint is that of the second edition, compared with the first. The text of previous editions has been that of a mutilated first impression. (Peter Cunningham, Editor)

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  School Was Our Life -...

  Jane Roland Martin

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  Personal accounts of the early days of New York City’s Little Red School House, analysis of its success, and a look at the future of education. 
   
  The late 1930s and early 1940s were the peak of progressive education in the United States, and Elisabeth Irwin’s Little Red School House in New York City was iconic in that movement. For the first time, stories and recollections from students who attended Little Red during this era have been collected by author Jane Roland Martin. Now in their late eighties, these classmates can still sing the songs they learned in elementary school and credit the progressive education they loved with shaping their outlooks and life trajectories. Martin frames these stories from the former students “tell it like it was” point of view with philosophical commentary, bringing to light the underpinnings of the kind of progressive education employed at Little Red and commenting critically on the endeavor. In a time when the role of the arts in education and public schooling itself are under attack in the United States, Martin makes a case for a different style of education designed for the defense of democracy and expresses hope that an education like hers can become an opportunity for all. 
   
  “This sparkling, intimate, and delightfully written memoir demonstrates conclusively how and why elementary education should be designed to fit the natural growth of the human mind.” —E.O. Wilson author of The Social Conquest of Earth 
   
  “Drawing on her own experiences 75 years ago and those of her classmates, researchers and many others, [Jane Roland Martin] has made it clear why we, even though she and the rest of us privileged to have gone through Little Red can’t write cursive and never had to memorize facts and figures, are “The Lucky Ones.” She draws on memories of everything from class trips, to writing poetry, to group singing to explain why much of the conventional literature about progressive education has missed the story. If it’s too late for you to apply (or send your children and/or grandchildren) to Little Red, read School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education. It’s the next best thing.” —Victor S. Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation

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  The Battle of Berlin - Bomber...

  Martin W. Bowman

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  “A fascinating look into the aircrews used and the effect on those who had to live through this constant bombing” by the RAF during World War II (UK Historian). Berlin was bombed by four Allied air forces between 1940 and 1945. British bombers alone dropped 45,517 tons of bombs, while the Americans a further 23,000 tons. By 1944, some 1.2 million people, 790,000 of them women and children, about a quarter of Berlin’s population, had been evacuated to rural areas. An effort was made to evacuate all children from Berlin, but this was defeated by parents and many evacuees who soon made their way back to the city. However, by May 1945, 1.7 million people—40% of the population—had fled the city. This fitting tribute to those who died in the relentless struggle to knock Berlin, and hopefully Germany, out of the war resonates with eyewitness accounts and background information which the author has painstakingly investigated and researched. The result is a hugely fascinating and highly readable narrative containing very real and unique observations by British and Commonwealth aircrew and, equally importantly, the long-suffering citizens of Berlin, and well as the capital’s defenders. Though not a defeat in absolute terms, in the operational sense The Battle of Berlin was an offensive that Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and his aircrews could not win. “Berlin won” concluded Sir Ralph Cochrane, the Air Officer Commanding 5 Group RAF Bomber Command. “It was just too tough a nut.”“An impressively informative, deftly written, exceptionally well documented, and expertly organized history . . . a seminal work of original scholarship.” —Midwest Book Review

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