Other books that might interest you

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  Current Superstitions

  Fanny Dickerson Bergen

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  No matter how enlightened, chances are you've been raised around superstitious lore of one kind or another. Fanny Dickerson Bergen was one of the original researchers of North American oral traditions relating to such key life events and experiences as babyhood and childhood, marriage, wishes and dreams, luck, warts and cures, death omens and mortuary customs, and "such truck," as Huck Finn would say. 
  You'll be surprised at how many of these old saws you'll know. Here's a quote from Chapter One, Babyhood: 
  Monday’s child is fair of face,Tuesday’s child is full of grace,Wednesday’s child is sour and sad,Thursday’s child is merry and glad,Friday’s child is loving and giving,Saturday’s child must work for a living;But the child that is born on the Sabbath dayIs blithe and bonny, good and gay.--Baldwinsville, N. Y. 
  All of these readings are as short as 5 minutes and no longer than 15 minutes, with plenty of pithy one-liners in the form of proverbs, always given with the locale they came from in Canada or the United States (with clear influences in British tradition). (summary by Denny Sayers)

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  SAS: The History of the SAS

  Joshua Levine

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  The authorised history of the SAS by the number one bestselling author of Dunkirk, Joshua Levine. With unheard stories, this is the SAS’s wartime history in vivid and astonishing detail. 
  The SAS began as a lie, a story of a British parachute unit in the North African desert, to convince the Axis they were under imminent threat. The lie was so effective that soon a small band of men were brought together to make it real. These recruits were the toughest and brightest of their cohort, the most resilient, most dynamic and most self-sufficient. Their first commanders, David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, would go down in history as unorthodox visionaries. Yet this book tells much more than the usual origin story of the unit and seeks out less well-known leaders like Bill Fraser, who was essential in helping the SAS achieve fame for their devastating raids. By looking beyond the myth, this book brings back to life a group of men who showed immense bravery and endured unimaginable risks behind enemy lines. 
  Written with the full cooperation of the SAS and with exclusive access to SAS archives, Levine draws on individual stories and personal testimony, including interviews with veterans and family members. The book gives a visceral sense of what it was like to fight and train in the SAS in both North Africa and Europe during the Second World War, focusing on their failures as well as their successes. 
  This book is vivid with the characters of the men, their eclectic personalities, their strengths, weaknesses and many disagreements. Levine has uncovered a remarkable portrait of this enigmatic unit with stories long thought lost to history 
  Joshua Levine, the Sunday Times bestselling author, brings to life the last of Britain's special forces in this riveting biography. It's a non-fiction masterpiece that explores the military strategies and personal sacrifices of World War II. 
  For fans of Max Arthur (The Paras), James Holland (The Savage Storm), Roderick Bailey (Forgotten Voices of D-Day), Julian Thompson (Dunkirk), and Ben Macintyre (Colditz). 
  HarperCollins 2023

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  Always Crashing in the Same Car...

  Matthew Specktor

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  Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment.In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor's first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or "cracking up," he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of "success" and "failure" that haunt the artist's life and the American imagination.Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It's a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author's own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives.

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  One Bright Moon - Winner of the...

  Andrew Kwong

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  Winner of the 2021 Michael Crouch Award, debut category of the National Biography Award: From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao's China to a new life in Australia 
    
  Andrew Kwong was only seven when he witnessed his first execution. The grim scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his commitment as a revolutionary in Mao's New China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him. 
  Months later, it was his own father on trial. This time the sentence was banishment to a re-education camp, not death. It left the family tainted, despised, and with few means of survival during the terrible years of persecution and famine known as the Great Leap Forward. Even after his father returned, things remained desperate. Escape seemed the only solution, and it would be twelve-year-old Andrew who undertook the perilous journey first. 
  This is the poignant, resonant story of a young boy's awakening – to survival, education, fulfilment, and eventually to a new life of freedom. 
  PRAISE 
  'An incredibly powerful book' Benjamin Law 
  '[A] moving family saga, shot through with yearning and hard-won joy' Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald 
  'This book will live on in your heart long after you've read the last page' Vicki Laveau-Harvie, author of The Erratics 
  'Heart-breaking, honest, personal, Andrew Kwong's moving journey from oppression to freedom is inspiring' Susanne Gervay, OAM, author 
  'A work of startling clarity ... reminiscent of Angela's Ashes' South China Morning Post Magazine 
  'Deeply moving ... The unique perspective of a child ... places One Bright Moon in the vicinity of Night, Elie Wiesel's pathbreaking memoir of his early life prior to and of his time in German concentration camps' Meenakshi Bharat, IIC Quarterly 
  'A few pages into this compelling memoir proves it was written by a master storyteller' Sharon Rundle, Australian Book Review 
  'A profoundly moving and spellbinding story that perfectly illuminates the terror of the times and the irrepressible yearning for something better' Carol Major, author and writing mentor 
  'One Bright Moon is extraordinary writing that encapsulates long-term hunger as a background feature of daily life in Mao's New China. In the foreground are images of adults and children populating the world of the pre-teenage boy with a photographic memory who would later write of them. The book is rich archival material for the study of China's social history' Mabel Lee, PhD FAHA, writer and translator 
  'Reading this memoir is a healing experience' Devika Brendon, author and editor  
  HarperCollins Australia 2022

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  Lizards on the Mantel Burros at...

  Etta Koch, June Cooper Price

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  A warm, witty memoir of a young family’s rugged adventure living in the newly established Big Bend National Park in the 1940s.   A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a twenty-three-foot travel trailer in tow—which they named Porky, the Road Hog—she anticipated a brief, civilized camping trip between her old home in Ohio and a new one in Arizona. It was only when she found herself moving into an old rock house without plumbing or electricity in the new Big Bend National Park that Etta realized she’d left her sheltered life behind for an experience in frontier living.   In this book based on her journals and letters, Etta Koch and her daughter June Cooper Price chronicle their family’s first years—1944–1946—in the Big Bend. Etta describes how her photographer husband Peter Koch became captivated by the region as a place for natural history filmmaking—and how she and their three young daughters slowly adapted to a pioneer lifestyle during his months-long absences on the photo-lecture circuit. In vivid, often humorous anecdotes, she describes making the rock house into a home, getting to know the Park Service personnel and other neighbors, coping with the local wildlife, and, most of all, learning to love the rugged landscape and the hardy individuals who call it home.

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  Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  Julian Barnes

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  A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction. If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty and an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for, against, and with God, and at his own bloodline, which has become, following his parents’ death, another realm of mystery.Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.

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