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  Tupac - A Thug Life

  Various Contributors

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  Tupac Shakur is not just a posthumous hip-hop icon. In the years since his September 1996 murder, he has attained a status that led some to coin him 'the Black Elvis'. More successful as a recording artist than at the active peak of his career, his posthumous albums continue to sell in massive quantities around the world. His cultural importance is reflected in a 'Tupac's not dead' myth - the first time a black performing artist has been mythologised on the level of a Presley or a James Dean. Crucial to the iconic appeal of Tupac is the mass of contradictions that define him: the macho gansta-rapper who eulogised the 'thug life'; the erudite young man who hoped for a political and spiritual awakening among his peers; the sexually insatiable star who served a prison term for sexual abuse of a young woman fan; the sensitive son of a politicised single mother, who recorded a sympathetic pain to women. A Thug Life explores all these contradictions, alongside every other aspect of Tupac's life and career.
  
  Compiling interviews, articles, reviews and essays on rap music's enduring icon, this extensively illustrated anthology is divided into five distinct sections, covering his early life, his music, film and the dark side of his life - the flirtations with gang culture, accusations of forcible sodomy and rape, his lucky escape from death after a 1994 shooting, and his accusations against former friend, the Notorious BIG, that fuelled the East-West Coast rap wars. The final section examines the murder of Tupac one September night in Las Vegas, and the conspiracy theories it fuelled. Interview transcripts are included of Death Row Records boss Suge Knight, talking of how Shakur died in his car, and Afeni Shakur, describing her legal action against the young gang member she blamed for her son's death - which was halted with the suspect's own shooting.

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  Champion of Choice - The Life...

  Cathleen Miller

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  Not many women can claim to have changed history, but Nafis Sadik set that goal in her youth, and change the world she did. Champion of Choice tells the remarkable story of how Sadik, born into a prominent Indian family in 1929, came to be the world’s foremost advocate for women’s health and reproductive rights, the first female director of a United Nations agency, and “one of the most powerful women in the world” (London Times). 
   
  An obstetrician, wife, mother, and devout Muslim, Sadik has been a courageous and tireless advocate for women, insisting on discussing the difficult issues that impact their lives: education, contraception, abortion, as well as rape and other forms of violence. After Sadik joined the fledgling UN Population Fund in 1971, her groundbreaking strategy for providing females with education and the tools to control their own fertility has dramatically influenced the global birthrate. This book is the first to examine Sadik’s contribution to history and the unconventional methods she has employed to go head-to-head with world leaders to improve millions of women’s lives. 
   
  Interspersed between the chapters recounting Sadik’s life are vignettes of females around the globe who represent her campaign against domestic abuse, child marriage, genital mutilation, and other human rights violations. With its insights into the political, religious, and domestic battles that have dominated women’s destinies, Sadik’s life story is as inspirational as it is dramatic. 
   
  Named one of the American Library Association’s Top Ten 2013 Biographies 
   
  "Extensively researched, Miller’s engrossing biography illuminates Sadik’s formidable passion for [women’s] issues, most notably through crystalline vignettes about women from Kenya to Kosovo whose individual narratives transformed Sadik’s mission into a personal commitment." 
  —Booklist

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  Four French Holidays - Daphne Du...

  Anne Hall

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  Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, Rumer Godden based The Greengage Summer on her recollections of her family's 1923 battlefield-tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp's 1936 holiday in Southern France led to 'Still Waters' and The Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix-les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne Du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novel The Scapegoat was the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons' last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely reflected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.

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  Dinner on Monster Island - Essays

  Tania De Rozario

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  In this unusual, engaging, and intimate collection of personal essays, Lambda Literary Award finalist Tania De Rozario recalls growing up as a queer, brown, fat girl in Singapore, blending memoir with elements of history, pop culture, horror films, and current events to explore the nature of monsters and what it means to be different. 
  Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to “banish the evil” from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren’t just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere—including your own family and community—and look just like you. 
   Dinner on Monster Island is Tania’s memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore—where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic. As she pulls back the veil on life on the small island, she reveals the sometimes kind, sometimes monstrous side of all of us. Intertwined with her experiences is an analysis of the role of women in horror. Tania looks at films and popular culture such as Carrie, The Witch, and The Ring to illuminate the ways in which women are often portrayed as monsters, and how in real life, monsters are not what we think. 
   Moving and lyrical, written with earnest candor, and leavened with moments of humor and optimism, Dinner on Monster Island is a deeply personal examination of one woman’s experience grappling with her identity and a fantastic analysis of monsters, monstrous women and the worlds in which they live.

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  The Confessions of Saint Augustine

  Saint Augustine

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  Saint Augustine's contributions to Christian theology are second to no other post-apostolic author in the whole sweep of church history. Yet along side his doctrinal treatises, Augustine tells a story of his life devoted to Christ as his only satisfaction.
  The Confessions is at once the autobiographical account of Augustine's life of Christian faith and at the same time a compelling theology of Christian spirituality for everyone. Among the most important classics in Western literature, it continues to engage modern readers through Augustine's timeless illustrations and beautiful prose.
  
  Augustine's Confessions is a work to relish the first time through and then profoundly enjoy over a lifetime of revisiting.An EChristian, Inc production.

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  My Animal Life - A Memoir

  Maggie Gee

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  How do you become a writer, and why? Maggie Gee's journey starts a long way from the literary world in a small family in post-war Britain. At seventeen, Maggie goes, a lamb to the slaughter, to university. From the 1960s onwards she lives the defining events of her generation: the coming of the Pill and sexual freedom, tremors in the British layer-cake of class and race. In the 1980s, Maggie finally gets published, falls in love, marries and has a daughter -- but for the next three decades and beyond, she survives, and sometimes thrives, by writing. This frank, bold memoir dares to explore the big questions: success and failure, sex, death and parenthood -- our animal life. 'A wise and beautiful book about what it feels like to be alive -- I really loved it' Zadie Smith 'Exceptionally interesting and brave ... a wonderful book' Claire Tomalin 'A fine, honest, complex portrait of an artist's mind' Michele Roberts, Independent 'Every word strikes like a hammer on an anvil, throwing off sizzling sparks' Bidisha, The f word 'Anyone who yearns for that lost post-war Britain would do well to read this vivid, minutely observed memoir ...Gee has a sensuous eye for detail' Sinclair McKay, Telegraph 'It is a testament to Gee's skill with structure, her lightness of touch and her honesty, particularly about the most painful episodes, that she has fashioned this account of a fundamentally satisfying and happy writer's life into such a page-turner.' Melissa Benn, New Statesman 'Maggie Gee writes with such courage and wit. This is a vivid portrait of a woman finding her way through the maze of class ridden post war England, the 60's, feminism and how to be a mother and a writer.' Diana Melly 'Highly recommended for all aspiring writers' Bernardine Evaristo 'Observant, honest and sensitively-written...' Michael Holroyd 'Fresh and funny ... with a zest for living that bounces off the page...' Psychologies 'Sensitive, honest, courageous, stylish' The Times '[Gee's] utterly compelling on the rollercoaster of writing life, from early success to rock-bottom rejection. Often joyous; infinitely wise; passionate and poised, this is a book you'll want to sit in silence with and hug to yourself -- then start again.' Daily Mail

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