Other books that might interest you

• 

  Prisoner of the State - The...

  Renee Chiang, Adi Ignatius, Bao Pu

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  How often can you peek behind the curtains of one of the most secretive governments in the world? Prisoner of the State is the first book to give listeners a front row seat to the secret inner workings of China's government. It is the story of Premier Zhao Ziyang, the man who brought liberal change to that nation and who, at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to stop the massacre and was dethroned for his efforts.When China's army moved in, killing hundreds of students and other demonstrators, Zhao was placed under house arrest at his home on a quiet alley in Beijing. China's most promising change agent had been disgraced, along with the policies he stood for. The premier spent the last sixteen years of his life, up until his death in 2005, in seclusion. An occasional detail about his life would slip out: reports of a golf excursion, a photo of his aging visage, a leaked letter to China's leaders. But China scholars often lamented that Zhao never had his final say.As it turns out, Zhao did produce a memoir in complete secrecy. He methodically recorded his thoughts and recollections on what had happened behind the scenes during many of modern China's most critical moments. The tapes he produced were smuggled out of the country and form the basis for Prisoner of the State. In this audio journal, Zhao provides intimate details about the Tiananmen crackdown, describes the ploys and double-crosses China's top leaders use to gain advantage over one another, and talks about the necessity for China to adopt democracy in order to achieve long-term stability.The China that Zhao portrays is not some long-lost dynasty. It is today's China, where the nation's leaders accept economic freedom but continue to resist political change. If Zhao had survived-that is, if the hard-line hadn't prevailed during Tiananmen-he might have been able to steer China's political system toward more openness and tolerance. Zhao's call to begin lifting the party's control over China's life-to let a little freedom into the public square-is remarkable coming from a man who had once dominated that square. Although Zhao now speaks from the grave in this moving and riveting memoir, his voice has the moral power to make China sit up and listen.

  Show book

• 

  The Projectionist - The Story of...

  Carlo Gébler

  • 0
  • 2
  • 0

  'Projection (Psychoanalysis). The unconscious process or fact of projecting one's fears, feelings, desires or fantasies onto other persons, things or situations, in order to avoid recognizing them as one's own and so as to justify one's behaviour.' Ernest Gébler, writer of such international bestsellers as The Plymouth Adventure and Call Me Daddy, which became the film Hoffman, led a turbulent and fascinating life. At the helm of one of Ireland's best-known literary families, his life was one of staggering complexity, elusiveness and immense talent that spanned a tumultuous century. In a book that is both biography and memoir, Carlo Gébler, Ernest's estranged son, tells the enthralling story of his father's life, covering his strange and alienated childhood, his disastrous family relationships, his marriage to writer Edna O'Brien, his staunch socialism and uncompromising disciplinary attitude, and his final heartbreaking struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Had the subject been given a choice, he would never have allowed the writer to tell his story. In The Projectionist, Carlo Gébler draws on a rich archive of previously undiscovered autobiographical notes, as well as his own personal memories. He explores and interprets his Ernest's life in the hope of understanding a father he barely knew, a life he didn't share, and a man who was both fascinating and fearful.

  Show book

• 

  Body Dump - Kendall Francois the...

  Fred Rosen

  • 1
  • 3
  • 0

  The inside story of an upstate New York serial killer who abducted, raped, and murdered women and hid their bodies in his home.  In the late 1990s in Poughkeepsie, New York, prostitutes began to go missing off the streets of the old Hudson River town. Due to the women’s nomadic lifestyles, which many people condemned, few in the town noticed they were gone besides their families and Lieutenant Bill Siegrist, who suspected that a serial killer was behind the disappearances. Local prostitutes described a strange man lurking around, leading Siegrist to Kendall Francois, an overweight, slovenly middle school hall monitor nicknamed Stinky. Police brought in Francois for a lie detector test, which he passed, and they were forced to release him. Area women continued to disappear.   In a shocking twist of fate, Francois was finally arrested when a woman he had raped managed to escape from his house and ran into a roadblock set up by Siegrist. She led the police back to Francois’s home, and the hall monitor soon gave a full confession and cut a deal with the prosecution. By then, cops in Tyvek suits had already found eight bodies concealed in the attic and crawl space of Francois’s house of horrors. To this day, one victim is still missing. From the author of numerous true crime books, including Lobster Boy and Deacon of Death, this is the frightening story of a brutal murderer whose neighbors never suspected what was going on behind his front door.  

  Show book

• 

  Becoming Richard Pryor

  Scott Sauls

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  An intimate biography with photographs included: “The most detailed and rigorously researched work on the comic’s life and performances.” —The Washington Post 
   
  Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family’s brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he’d known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career—Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar—flowed directly out of his spirit of creative improvisation. The major studios considered him dangerous. Audiences felt plugged directly into the socket of life. 
   
  Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research—interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts—Scott Saul traces Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s. 
   
  Illuminating an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy, it reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still. 
   
  “Absorbing, incisive . . . .With skill and insight, Saul shows how both the best and the worst of Pryor could merge into a great body of work unmatched by anyone who was ever paid to make people laugh.”—USA Today 
   
  “A pop-culture masterpiece of exhaustive reporting, psychological insight and elegant writing.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer 
   
  “Shines a light on a revolutionary stand-up comic who perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s.”—Publishers Weekly

  Show book

• 

  May Cause Side Effects

  Brooke Siem

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  An unforgettable memoir about the turmoil of antidepressant withdrawal and the work it takes to unravel the stories we tell ourselves to rationalize our suffering. Brooke Siem was among the first generation of minors to be prescribed antidepressants. Initially diagnosed and treated in the wake of her father’s sudden death, this psychiatric intervention sent a message that something was pathologically wrong with her and that the only “fix” was medication. As a teenager, she stepped into the hazy world of antidepressants just at the time when she was forming the foundation of her identity. For the following fifteen years, every situation she faced was seen through the lens of brokenness. A decade and a half later, still on the same cocktail of drugs, Brooke found herself hanging halfway out her Manhattan high-rise window, calculating the time it would take to hit the ground. As she looked for breaks in the pedestrian traffic patterns, a thought dawned on her: “I’ve spent half my life—and my entire adult life—on antidepressants. Who might I be without them?” Unfurled against a global backdrop, May Cause Side Effects is the gripping story of what happened when, after fifteen years and 32,760 pills, Brooke was faced with a profound choice that plunged her into a year of excruciating antidepressant withdrawal and forced her to rebuild her entire life. An illuminating memoir for those who take, prescribe, or are considering psychiatric drugs, May Cause Side Effects is an honest reminder that the road to true happiness is not mapped on a prescription pad. Instead, Brooke’s story reveals the messy reality of how healing begins at the bottomless depth of our suffering, in the deep self-work that pushes us to the edges of who we are.

  Show book

• 

  Writings From Prison - Bobby Sands

  Bobby Sands Trust

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In this book the author chronicles the abuse by the British state of emergency laws: harassment and intimidation of civilians; injuries and deaths caused by rubber and plastic bullets; collusion between British security forces, British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries; unjust killings and murders by the security forces; excessive punishments and degrading strip-searches in prisons – abuses ignored by all but a handful of individuals and civil rights organisations.

  Show book