Other books that might interest you

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  Bang Bang Crash

  Nic Brown

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  In the mid-1990s, fresh out of high school, Nic Brown was living his childhood dream as a rock and roll drummer. Signing a major label record deal, playing big shows, hitting the charts, giving interviews in Rolling Stone, appearing on The Tonight Show—what could be better for a young artist? But contrary to expectations, getting a shot at his artistic dream early in life was a destabilizing shock. The more he achieved, the more accolades that came his way, the less sure Brown became about his path. 
   
   
   
  Only a few years into a promising musical career, he discovered the crux of his discontent: he was never meant to remain behind the drums. In fact, his true artistic path lay in a radically different direction entirely: he decided to become a writer, embarking on a journey leading him to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop, publish novels and short stories, and teach literature to college students across the country. 
   
   
   
  Bang Bang Crash tells the story of Nic Brown's unusual journey to gain new strength, presence of mind, and sense of perspective, enabling him to discover an even greater life of artistic fulfillment.

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  Still Pictures - On Photography...

  Janet Malcolm, Anne Malcom, Ian...

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  For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. 
   
   
   
  Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own. 
   
   
   
  Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama.

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  Smugglers' Times: - Smuggling In...

  M. Dennis Taylor

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  Life, With A History Of Smuggling. 
  ISLAMORADA, Florida, With Keys Don -- "Marijuana is a people business," explained Don, a long-retired pioneer of the marijuana smuggling industry, who flew single-engine planes back and forth to Colombia, carrying up to a million dollars-worth of pot per load, in today's money. 
  He brought marijuana through the Florida Keys, an area with thousands of places to hide, that's been a haven for smugglers since the times of the Spanish Main up until sometime late last night. Later he and his friends used boats and vehicles and expanded connections throughout the states, Mexico and the Philippines, even working with Federal Agents. 
  "I'll tell you about the life of a smuggler," said Don. "When marijuana is legal, we will be like the rum runners during prohibition and people might be interested in how it was in Smugglers' Times.

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  Mainline Mama - A Memoir

  Keeonna Harris

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  A powerful exploration of self-resilience, family, and community from activist and prison abolitionist Keeonna Harris. 
  Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was “grown.” Within a year she was pregnant and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a “mainline mama,” a parent facing the task of raising a child—while still growing up herself—with an incarcerated partner.  
  In this triumphant memoir, Keeonna recalls her challenging journey as a mainline mama, from learning to overcome the exhausting difficulties of navigating the carceral system in the United States to transforming herself into an advocate for women like her—the predominantly Black and Brown women left behind to pick up the pieces of their families and fractured lives.  
  Keeonna speaks frankly about the forces that threatened to defeat her, how she learned to re - build her broken relationship with a mother who had lost trust in her, and how time eased the shame, guilt, and stigma of being a young Black teen mom with a partner behind bars. She offers inspiration and solace, showing how to create moments of beauty, humanity, and love—such as picking the perfect wedding dress for a ceremony in a state prison visiting room—in a place de - signed to break spirits.  
  Mainline Mama is about creating self-love and community—crucial acts of radical resistance against a prison industrial complex designed to dehumanize and to separate and shut away incarcerated individuals and their loved ones from the world.

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  We Tell Ourselves Stories - Joan...

  Alissa Wilkinson

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  In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned. 
   
   
   
  We Tell Ourselves Stories eloquently traces Didion's journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. She spent much of her adult life deeply embroiled in the glitz and glamour of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed—and denounced—how the nation's fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to celestial heights of fame. 
   
   
   
  Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the cinematic motifs and machinations that informed Didion's writing—and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood's addictive grasp on the American imagination.

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  Roy Orbison - King of Hearts

  Jeff Apter

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  Clad in black with dark shades, Roy Orbison had a mystique, style, and voice that were unmistakable and singularly different from his famous peers of the 1950s and '60s. Born in Vernon, Texas, Roy was the son of a guitar-playing oil worker. Already a music fan by age six, Roy went on to form a high school band. Honky-tonk gigs followed. Then a contract at Elvis Presley's label, Sun Records, where Roy found mentors and friends among the likes of Carl Perkins. Following a shift to Monument Records, he shared a bill with a group called the Beatles, who were huge fans of his.After experimenting with different styles, Roy edged closer to a sound all his own. He found it with smash hits, including "Only the Lonely," "Crying," and "Oh, Pretty Woman," songs heavy with pathos and remarkable vocals. It was gold. But what lay ahead was a professional downswing, and personal tragedy with the death of his wife and two sons. Twenty lean years followed. Yet Roy Orbison was far from over. Amid the rockabilly revival of the 1980s and the formation of the British-American supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, Roy's comeback was legendary. Asked how he'd like to be remembered, Roy said, "One day when they are mentioning people who had an impact, if they just mention me among the rest of the guys and gals, it would be great." He got his wish. Roy Orbison: King of Hearts seals it.

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