Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  There's Always The Hills

  Cameron McNeish

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  'A wonderful, personal book.' -Sam Heughan, star of OutlanderFrom his home in the Cairngorms of Scotland, Cameron McNeish reflects on a life dedicated to the outdoors.A prolific author, McNeish has led treks in the Himalayas and Syria, edited The Great Outdoors Magazine, establishing it as Britain's premier walking publication, created new long-distance walks and made television series, contributed a monthly column to Scots Magazine, campaigned for Scottish independence and raised a family with his wife, Gina.In this long-awaited autobiography, he candidly recalls the ups and downs of a full life, much of it in the public eye, much of it until now unseen.

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  Slow Getting Up - A Story of NFL...

  Nate Jackson

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  One man's odyssey into the brutal hive of the National Football LeagueAs an unsigned free agent who rose through the practice squad to the starting lineup of the Denver Broncos, Nate Jackson took the path of thousands of unknowns before him to carve out a professional football career twice as long as the average player. Through his story recounted here—from scouting combines to preseason cuts to byzantine film studies to glorious touchdown catches—even knowledgeable football fans will glean a new, starkly humanized understanding of the NFL's workweek. Fast-paced, lyrical, dirty, and hilariously unvarnished, Slow Getting Up is an unforgettable look at the real lives of America's best athletes putting their bodies and minds through hell.

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  The Black Joy Project

  Kleaver Cruz

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  A breathtaking and necessary love letter to a force that fuels Black life all around the globe, The Black Joy Project is Humans of New York meets The Black Book 
  ""A patchwork quilt of ... moments of triumph, antidotes to trauma narratives and rich, ebullient emotional and verbal spice for the soul."" – Michael W. Twitty, culinary and cultural historian, and author of The Cooking Gene and Koshersoul 
  ""In literature, there are some books that transcend mere pages and ink, becoming essential pieces of cultural expression. One such book poised to make its mark is The Black Joy Project…. This ambitious work breaks new ground."" – Essence 
  Black Joy is everywhere. From the bustling streets of Lagos to hip-hop blasting through apartment windows in the Bronx. From the wide-open coastal desert of Namibia to the lush slopes of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. From the thriving tradition of Candomblé in Bahia to the innovative and trendsetting styles of Soweto, and beyond, Black Joy is present in every place that Black people exist. Now—at last—is a one-of-a-kind celebration of this truth and a life-giving testament to one of the most essential forces that fuels Black life: The Black Joy Project. 
  International in the scale, fist-raising in the prose, and chockfull of gorgeous works by dozens of acclaimed artists, The Black Joy Project does what no other book has ever done. It puts joy on the same track as protest and resistance … because that is how life is actually lived. Uprisings in the street, with music as accompaniment. Heartbreaking funerals followed by second line parades. Microaggressions in the office, then coming home to a warm hug and a garden of lilacs. The list goes on. 
  Black Joy is always held in tension with broader systemic wounds. It is a powerful, historically important salve that allows us to keep going and reimagine new ways of being. The Black Joy Project captures these dual realities to incredible, unforgettable effect. 
  The brainchild of educator and activist Kleaver Cruz, The Black Joy Project is an extension of a real-world initiative of the same name. It has become a source of healing and regeneration for Black people of all backgrounds and identities. Long overdue and somehow still worth the wait, The Black Joy Project is a necessary addition for any book lover, art enthusiast, or freedom fighter. And begs the question, What does Black Joy mean to you?

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  How I Became Hettie Jones

  Hettie Jones

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  “A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation).   Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry African American poet LeRoi Jones. This is her reminiscence of life in the awakening East Village in the era of the Beats, Black Power, and bohemia.   “As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, NY, plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children’s book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others.” —Publishers Weekly  

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  Madame de Pompadour: The Life...

  Charles River Editors

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  Jean Antoinette Poussin, the woman who would become known as Madame de Pompadour, was a middle-class girl of uncertain parenthood who became one of many in a long line of King Louis XV’s mistresses before she died at the age of 42. While none of that stands out on its own when it comes to French history and royalty, historians have labeled her “no ordinary king’s mistress…She made and unmade ministers, she selected ambassadors, she appointed generals, [and] she conferred pensions and places.” In fact, her most savage critics concede her vital importance and historical legacy, even if begrudgingly, as one 1869 magazine noted: “If one could create an expurgated edition of history, one might put Madame de Pompadour out of sight; but alas! the eighteenth century, and even the French Revolution, cannot be understood without taking her into consideration. She was possessed of greater power in Europe than any woman of modern times, with the exception, perhaps, of Elizabeth of England, and Catherine of Russia. She was the Sultana of France for twenty years, with the Sultan in leading-strings. Therefore history, with a blush, is obliged to chronicle the doings of the Pompadour.” Indeed, one writer compared her influence to some of the most famous Frenchmen to emerge from non-royal backgrounds: “Except for Bonaparte, and perhaps Robespierre, whose tenures were briefer, and de Gaulle, who was in principle answerable to an electorate, no French commoner—and certainly no woman—ever achieved such imperial sway.”   
  	Madame de Pompadour achieved her power through her connection to Louis the Beloved, as he was called early in his reign, who had inherited an absolute empire eclipsed by none. His people responded in kind, as one writer noted: “There were in those days no people in the world so passionately attached to their King as the French…The populace stood in the streets and roads to see him pass and watched with awestruck admiration the procession of splendid state coaches when the Court went to Versailles, Marly, or Fontainebleau. To see the King at dinner was one of their favourite [sic] amusements, and in all domestic events in the royal family they had an intense and personal interest.” The people’s interest in their king included his health, his marriage, and his children. Of course, this also meant their interests included the king’s mistresses, who had been part of court life since the Middle Ages. With very few exceptions, a French king took a wife who would provide legitimate heirs to the throne, but he took several mistresses as well.  
  	King Louis XV reigned for 72 years, and his predecessors had survived multiple palace intrigues and challenges to their thrones, sometimes by their mothers, wives, and members of the court. Louis XV had used Versailles, his grandfather’s getaway hunting lodge, to control the nobility and center court life around the king’s personality cult. Rather than seek political power, the nobility sought proximity to the king at Versailles as all other venues paled in comparison. In Madame de Pompadour, author Nancy Mitford explained that “all fashion and all fun were gathered together at Versailles. Parisian society, though very middle-class, hummed with life and could be enjoyed from time to time as a change from the Court; the provinces were unthinkable. The heaviest blow that could befall a man was banishment to his estates; this did not only mean loss of place and influence; the exile, condemned to live in the country became ridiculous in the eyes of his friends. Let him embellish his house and garden, let him give expensive parties and make a social and intellectual center for the whole neighborhood, the poor man was a dowdy provincial; he counted for nothing anymore.”

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  Dressed for a Dance in the Snow...

  Monika Zgustova

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  An unexpectedly uplifting account of women’s suffering and resilience in Stalin’s forced labor camps, diligently transcribed in the kitchens and living rooms of nine survivors.The pain inflicted by the gulags has cast a long shadow over Soviet-era history. Zgustova’s collection of interviews with former female prisoners not only chronicles the hardships of the camps, but also serves as testament to the power of beauty in the face of adversity.Where one would expect to find only hopelessness and despair, Zgustova has unearthed tales of love, art, and friendship that endured and even flourished in times of tragedy. These stories, collected in the vein of Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize–winning oral histories, turn one of the darkest periods of the Soviet era into a song of human perseverance, in a way that reads as an intimate family history.

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