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  The Good Life

  Tony Bennett, Will Friedwald

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  A wonderfully warm, resonant, and captivating autobiography from iconic singer and entertainer Tony Bennett.He’s that regular guy from Astoria, Queens, who left his heart in San Francisco. He’s the postwar heartthrob who inspired hundreds of young girls to wear black outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral on his wedding day. He’s the darling of the MTV generation who made music history when, at the age of 68, he won the coveted Grammy Award for Album of the Year. He’s the consummate artist known worldwide for his paintings. He’s Tony Bennett, and here, this legend shares his amazing life story. “Tony Bennett has not just bridged the generation gap, he has demolished it,” praised The New York Times. From his appearance with the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the 1993 MTV Video Awards to his Radio City Music Hall concert with Lady Gaga, Bennett was the hottest—and coolest—pop-culture icon for today’s younger listeners, while remaining beloved by their parents and grandparents. Multiple generations have experienced the Tony Bennett magic—the mesmerizing spell of a singer in love with singing, who embraces his audience with a soulful serenity communicated by both the man and his music. Honored with countless awards and with more than ninety albums to his credit, no other recording artist has attained Bennett’s stature—or garnered the half-century of memories shared in The Good Life. From Sinatra, Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald, to k.d. lang and Elvis Costello, Bennett shares his unique takes on the most fascinating talents of our time. Here is the story of his lifelong love affair with art, music, and performing—from his childhood in Depression-era Queens, where opera and Billie Holiday flowed freely; to his stint as a singing waiter; to soaking up the New York jazz scene in the 1940s. With crisp wit and firmly grounded emotion, Bennett captures the people and places that shaped his sublime performances. The dozens of hits he introduced to the great American songbook, including “Because of You,” “Rags to Riches,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” and his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” remain a legacy of truth and beauty for the classic art of intimate singing. In this unforgettable self-portrait, we get to know Tony Bennett as he really is: an unpretentious and thoughtful human being. Through all of his personal and artistic challenges, he was, in his own words, “a humanist” whose Zen-like philosophy of life remains an inspiration for all ages. Like the fascinating story he shares in The Good Life, Tony Bennett was one of a kind, an American treasure, an enduring artist seasoned with experience and self-knowledge, and a true class act.

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  Family Lexicon

  Natalia Ginzburg, Peg Boyers

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  An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini's Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. "Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it]," Ginzburg tells us at the start. "The places, events, and people are all real."

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  The Ingenious Language - Nine...

  Andrea Marcolongo

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  An Italian journalist pleads her case for learning ancient Greek in modern times. For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language of Sappho, Plato, and Thucydides, and its relevance to our lives today, nine chapters that will leave readers with a new passion for a very old language, nine epic reasons to love Greek.The Ingenious Language is a love song dedicated to the language of history’s greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. Greek, as Marcolongo explains in her buoyant and entertaining prose, is unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity, but it can also offer us new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. She takes readers on an astonishing journey, at the end of which, while it may still be Greek to you, you’ll have nine reasons to be glad it is. No batteries or prior knowledge of Greek required!Praise for The Ingenious Language“Andrea Marcolongo is today’s Montaigne. She possesses an amazing familiarity with the classics combined with the ease and lightness of those who surf the web.” —André Aciman, New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me“[Marcolongo’s] declaration of love for Ancient Greek does more than celebrate the virtues of its grammar, it shows us modern fools how this language can help us understand ourselves better and live a better life.” —Le Monde (France)

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  The Very Best Vampire Short Stories

  Various Authors

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  A selection of some of the best short stories about Vampires ever written. Includes The Vampire Maid by Hume Nisbet, Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron, Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker, and Count Magnus by M.R. James

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  My Kaleidoscope Eyes: A Journal...

  Pamela Edwards

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  Pamela Edwards was going blind. 
  What job could she do without vision? 
  How would she support herself and her children? 
  When Pamela received her retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis, it sent her world into chaos. As a single mother of three small children, she had to fight. Giving into the blindness was never an option. She needed to find a way but feared time was not on her side. With the help of those closest to her, she found the resources and confidence to persevere. 
  Consumed with self-doubt, Pamela pursued training and education to help her function in daily life without vision. Every experience taught her something new about herself and helped her to go on another day. Despair consumed her, but she reached deep within and searched her inner soul. She wrapped herself in music. She found joy in her children. She prepared for a future without sight. And she journaled almost every day. But with each passing day, month, and year, she waited for the morning when she would wake up to complete darkness. 
  Many years later, with a small field of vision remaining, Pamela revisited her personal journals from the years when she struggled to make it through the day. She saw them in a new light. The grief that had overwhelmed her had not kept her from finding joy and purpose in life. The journey brought her full circle in her healing and self-growth. Through every bittersweet hardship, she was transformed. She replaced the days of feeling inadequate with days of creative self-expression. Now, she sees her life for what it is and what it has always been. 
  A kaleidoscope of beauty.

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  Operation Family Secrets - How a...

  Frank Calabrese Jr., Paul...

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  The Calabrese family of Chicago is a close-knit, middle-class, multi-generational Italian-Irish-American clan. They operate family businesses. They work day and night striving for the American Dream. All three sons forge a bond with their controlling father, Frank Sr., and their soft-spoken favorite uncle, Nick. As a boy, the oldest son, Frank Jr., realizes that his father and uncle are also "made" members of another close-knit family: the oufit.In Operation Family Secrets, Frank Calabrese, Jr., tells the turbulent tale of a family dominated by a violent patriarch who breaks a long-standing unwritten outfit code and "brings the street into his home" by enlisting two of his sons into the outfit's 26th Street/Chinatown crew. Calabrese reveals for the first time the outfit's "made" ceremony and describes being put to work alongside his father and uncle in loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and extortion, and plotting the slaying of a fellow gangster, while they commit the bombing murder of a trucking executive, the gangland execution of two mobsters whose burial in an Indiana cornfield was reenacted in Martin Scorsese's blockbuster film Casino, and numerous other hits.The Calabrese crew's colossal earnings and extreme ruthlessness made them both a dreaded criminal gang and the object of an intense FBI inquiry. Eventually Frank Jr., his father, and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering violations, and "Junior" and "Senior" are sent to the same federal penitentiary in Michigan. Upon arrival, Frank Jr. makes a life-changing decision: to go straight rather than agree to his father's plans to resume crew activities afer serving his sentence. But he needs to keep his father behind bars in order to regain control of his life and save his family. Frank Jr. makes a secret deal with prosecutors, and for six months-unmonitored and unprotected-he wears a wire as his father recounts decades of hideous crimes. Frank Jr.'s cooperation with the FBI for virtually no monetary gain or special privileges helps create the government's "Operation Family Secrets" campaign against the Chicago outfit. The case reopens eighteen unsolved murders and also implicates twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit bosses. It becomes one of the largest organized crime cases in U.S. history.Operation Family Secrets intimately portrays how organized crime rots a family from the inside out while detailing Frank Jr.'s deadly prison-yard mission, the FBI's landmark investigation, and the U.S. Attorney's Office's daring prosecution of America's most dangerous criminal organization.

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