Other books that might interest you

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  I Will Get By

  Fred Cadden

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  In ‘I Will Get By,’ Fred Cadden invites readers on a heartfelt journey through his life, reflecting on the resilience that defines the human spirit. Growing up in the close-knit community of Poughkeepsie, New York, Fred paints a vivid portrait of his childhood, filled with warmth, love, and unforgettable family traditions. From the magic of Christmas celebrations at his grandparents' house to the strong moral compass instilled by his parents, Fred's early years set the stage for the challenges that lay ahead. 
  After enlisting in the Air Force and serving in Vietnam, he navigates the complexities of military life, drawing strength from his experiences while grappling with the impacts of war. Through candid storytelling, Fred shares his struggles and triumphs, highlighting the bonds formed with family and friends along the way. 
  I Will Get By is more than a memoir; it’s an inspiring testament to the power of perseverance. With each page, Fred reminds us that our past shapes us, and no matter the obstacles we face, we can emerge stronger and more resilient than ever.

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  American Buddhist Rebel

  Liz Lewinson

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  Winner of the Eric Hoffer and Benjamin Franklin literary awards, this biography tells the story of Rama, Dr. Frederick P. Lenz, (1950-1998), an enlightened spiritual teacher who taught a brilliant, boundary-breaking form of American Buddhism to tens of thousands of people.Rama could heal people whom he never met. He naturally filled large auditoriums with sparkling rays of golden light—the essence of his being. He made huge audiences shake with laughter, as he filled them with luminosity and joy. Omens of an unusual, not special, life began in 1953, when, as a toddler, he slipped into samadhi—a timeless state of immersion in infinite light—in his mother's garden. His journey continued after high school, when he flew from Connecticut to Kathmandu, Nepal, with a homemade snowboard, seeking to snow-surf the highest mountains he could find. On his first downhill run, he plowed into an aged Buddhist monk, who told the incredulous teen their meeting was destined, that his past life enlightenment would return, and he would help millions of people. Upon his return to the US, he earned his PhD and began to teach on his own, and implemented new ways of placing independent and skeptical Westerners on the path to enlightenment, beginning with higher and happier states of mind. As his own realization deepened, the energy he emanated was like a huge timeless force of pure love.This biography includes interviews and stories from over 100 students and colleagues, each with a different perspective. Rama did not just speak about enlightenment; he modeled it. Compassionate, controversial, wise, honest, prescient, reverent, irreverent, he was always teaching and still is.

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  Did I Ever Tell You This?

  Sam Neill

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  In this unexpected memoir, written in a creative burst of just a few months in 2022, Sam Neill tells the story of how he became one of the world’s most celebrated actors, who has worked with everyone from Meryl Streep to Isabel Adjani, from Jeff Goldblum to Sean Connery, from Steven Spielberg to Jane Campion. 
  By his own account, his career has been a series of unpredictable turns of fortune. Born in 1947 in Northern Ireland, he emigrated to New Zealand at the age of seven. His family settled in Dunedin on the South Island, but young Sam was sent away to boarding school in Christchurch, where he was hopeless at sports and discovered he enjoyed acting. 
  But how did you become an actor in New Zealand in the 1960 and 1970s where there was no film industry? After university he made documentary films while also appearing in occasional amateur productions of Shakespeare. In 1977 he took the lead in Sleeping Dogs, the first feature made in New Zealand in more than a decade, a project that led to a major role in Gillian Armstrong’s celebrated My Brilliant Career. 
   
  And after that Sam Neill found his way, sometimes by accident, into his own brilliant career. He has worked around the world, an actor who has moved effortlessly from blockbuster to art house to TV, from Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park movies to The Piano and Peaky Blinders. 
   
  Did I Ever Tell You This? is a joy to read, a marvellous and often very funny book, the work of a natural storyteller who is a superb observer of other people, and who writes with love and warmth about his family. It is also his account of his life outside film, especially in Central Otago where he established Two Paddocks, his vineyard famous for its pinot noir. 
   
  ‘Sam Neill is one of my favourite people in the world, and a great entertainer. Did I Ever Tell You This? is full of warm, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking stories. It will make you feel like you have just sat down under a tree to chat with a dear friend.’ JIMMY BARNES 
   
  ‘Just wonderful, so funny and charming and sharp. Sam Neill’s lively, lovely book made me laugh out loud.’ MERYL STREEP 
    
  ‘A fabulously entertaining, insanely readable memoir.’ STEPHEN FRY 
    
  'DID I EVER TELL YOU THIS? is tender, funny and emotional, modest and generous, both unbearably sad and deliciously companionable.’ JANE CAMPION

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  This Party's Dead - Grief Joy...

  Erica Buist

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  Grief, joy and spilled rum at the world's death festivals
  By the time Erica Buist's father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. Erica searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.
  With Mexico's Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, she decided to confront death head on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn't find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.
  This Party's Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they're going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn't seem so scary after all.

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  Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere -...

  Robert Lopez

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  Robert Lopez's grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family's efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations. 
   
   
   
  Little is known of Sixto—he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely a longshoreman—or why he originally decided to leave Puerto Rico, other than that he was a meticulously slow eater who played the standup keyboard and guitar, and enjoyed watching baseball. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn's diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto's remembered traits, in Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and reclaim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.

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  A Hundred to One - 100...

  Pat Sheedy

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  Was it worth it? Probably not.
  At the age of twelve, Pat Sheedy placed his first 10p bet and concocted his first scam. This marked the beginning of his descent into a compulsive gambling addiction that would lead to close to one hundred criminal convictions, over a million euro squandered on bets and time served in some of Ireland's most unforgiving prisons. Now, almost four decades later, Pat Sheedy has, against all odds, got his life back on track and taken control of his addiction.
  This is the unvarnished account of the author's relentless pursuit of the elusive 'big win', a pursuit that left a trail of devastation in its wake. Pat's story chronicles his protracted battle with addiction and the extreme lengths he went to in order to fund it. It is also a beacon of hope, demonstrating that recovery is possible, even from the depths of addiction.

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