Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Pioneering Life of Mary...

  Jo Willett

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  The first biography to look at the early feminist and radical Mary Wortley Montagu, who successfully introduced Britain to the inoculation against the smallpox virus.300 years ago, in April 1721, a smallpox epidemic was raging in England. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu knew that she could save her 3-year-old daughter using the process of inoculation. She had witnessed this at first hand in Turkey, while she was living there as the wife of the British ambassador. She also knew that by inoculating - making her daughter the first person protected in the West - she would face opposition from doctors, politicians and clerics. Her courageous action eventually led to the eradication of smallpox and the prevention of millions of deaths.  But Mary was more than a scientific campaigner. She mixed with the greatest politicians, writers, artists and thinkers of her day. She was also an important early feminist, writing powerfully and provocatively about the position of women.  She was best friends with the poet Alexander Pope. They collaborated on a series of poems, which made her into a household name, an ‘It Girl.' But their friendship turned sour and he used his pen to vilify her publicly.  Aristocratic by birth, Mary chose to elope with Edward Wortley Montagu, whom she knew she did not love, so as to avoid being forced into marrying someone else. In middle age, her marriage stale, she fell for someone young enough to be her son - and, unknown to her, bisexual. She set off on a new life with him abroad. When this relationship failed, she stayed on in Europe, narrowly escaping the coercive control of an Italian con man.  After twenty-two years abroad, she returned home to London to die. The son-in-law she had dismissed as a young man had meanwhile become Prime Minister.

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  John Fleming and Hugh Honour...

  Susanna Johnston

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  The prodigiously gifted John Fleming and Hugh Honour were the last titans of art history, living in a beautiful, secluded Italian villa that cocooned their private lives as their world fame grew. To Susanna Johnston, however, they were simply John and Hugh, an inseparable couple and two of her closest friends. They had met at Gli Scafari, the opulent villa on the Italian Riviera of the blind writer Percy Lubbock - one of Henry James' inamoratos and Iris Origo's step father - when she was twenty one, on holiday, penniless and in need of a job. John and Hugh had convinced Percy that she would take over as his reading companion despite being a girl, and she thus freed them to embark on careers that would propagate their wide-ranging enthusiasms and rigorous knowledge, enriching the lives of millions of art lovers.
  Originally part of the Anglo-Italian world orbiting Bernard Berenson's I Tatti and Harold Acton's La Pietra, John Fleming and Hugh Honour were bemused by being lionised by the super-rich who beat a path to their Villa Marchio. Privately poking merciless fun at this (to them) puzzling phenomenon, their reluctance to engage with the outside world increased precipitously following a traumatic burglary in the 1980s, just as they won prestigious prize after prize, when two truck loads of priceless, meticulously-collected but uninsured works of art were pillaged from their secluded villa. This candid memoir, full of private anecdotes, illuminates these two celebrated, passionate, and very English geniuses, through a close-up of a well-seasoned friendship of over 60 years.

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  Searching for My Heart - Essays...

  Dawn Downey

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  You’re not alone.Hollow words for any tender soul smiling through the day, while hiding a deep sense of loneliness.For such a soul—like Dawn Downey—the friendliest encounter is an exercise in alienation. In her essay titled "A Traveler's Tale," she describes a stroll through her neighborhood.“A dust mop of a puppy bounded toward me, her brush tail slicing the air with hello come play and a young woman on the other end of her leash. Straggling behind them was a toddler pushing an umbrella stroller. I knew they lived in the blue house on the corner … in their front yard, a stand of coreopsis whose yellow starbursts surprised me every summer.“The little girl skipped along in my blind spot, peppering me with questions and her own answers. I fantasized a life-long friendship between us, taught her to read, gave her sage advice after a teenage spat with her boyfriend.“I wanted to ask the young woman’s name, but they hurried past, toward their blue house on the corner, dust mop’s yap yap yap fading.”Through the stories in Searching for My Heart, Downey investigates why she feels left out, returning to themes of alienation, shame, and the self-awareness that leads to love. Downey is a seeker, on a quest for closeness. Every step in her search is a homecoming, where she discovers connection begins with herself. An audiobook for anyone with a desire to belong.

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  Give Me Everything You Have - On...

  James Lasdun

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  A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled verbal terrorist, who began trying, in her words, to 'ruin him.' Hate mail, online postings, and public accusations of plagiarism and sexual misconduct were her weapons of choice and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, proved remarkably difficult to combat. James Lasdun's account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humor, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle East politics, and the meaning of honor and reputation in the Internet age.

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  Love and Mr Lewisham

  H. G. Wells

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  Young, impoverished and ambitious, science student Mr Lewisham is locked in a struggle to further himself through academic achievement. But when his former sweetheart, Ethel Henderson, re-enters his life his strictly regimented existence is thrown into chaos by the resurgence of old passion. Driven by overwhelming desire, he pursues Ethel passionately, only to find that while she returns his love she also hides a dark secret. For she is involved in a plot of trickery that goes against his firmest beliefs, working as an assistant to her stepfather - a cynical charlatan 'mystic' who earns his living by deluding the weak-willed with sly trickery.

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  In the Country of Brooklyn -...

  Peter Golenbock

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  One of every seven people in the United States can trace their family back to Brooklyn, New York—all seventy-one square miles of it; home to millions of people from every corner of the globe over the last 150 years. Now Peter Golenbock, the author of the acclaimed book Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, returns to Kings County to collect the firsthand stories of the life and times of the people of Brooklyn—and how they changed the world.The nostalgic myth that is Brooklyn is all about egg creams and stickball, and, of course, the Dodgers. The Dodgers left fifty years ago, but Brooklyn is still here—transformed by waves of suburban flight, new immigrants, urban homesteaders, and gentrification. Deep down, Brooklyn has always been about new ideas—freedom and tolerance paramount among them—that have changed the world, all the way back to Lady Deborah Moody, who escaped religious persecution in both Old and New England, and founded Coney Island and the town of Gravesend in the 1600s.So why was Jackie Robinson embraced by Brooklynites of all colors, and so despised everywhere else? Why was Brooklyn one of the first urban areas to decay into slums—and one of the first to be reborn? And what was it that made Brooklynites fight for their rights, for their country, for their ideas—sometimes to the detriment of their own well-being? In the Country of Brooklyn, filled with rare photos, is history at its very best—engaging, personal, fascinating—a social history and a history of social justice; an oral history of a land and its people spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; a microcosm of how Americans there faced and defeated discrimination, oppression, and unjust laws, and fought for what was right. And the voices and stories are as amazing as they are varied.Meet: Daily Worker sportswriter Lester Rodney • rock and roll DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow • labor leader Henry Foner • Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa • journalist and author Pete Hamill • Black Panther–turned-politician Charles Barron • Hall of Fame baseball player Monte Irvin • Spanish Civil War veteran Abe Smorodin • borough president Marty Markowitz • real estate developer Joseph Sitt • jujitsu world champion Robert Crosson • songwriter Neil Sedaka • NYPD officer John Mackie • ACLU president Ira Glasser • and many others!It's Brooklyn as we've never seen it before, a place of social activism, political energy, and creative thinking—a place whose vitality has spread around the world for more than 350 years. And a place where you can still get a decent egg cream.

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