Other books that might interest you

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  To the Gorge - Running Grief...

  Emily Halnon

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  When Emily Halnon lost her beloved mother to a rare uterine cancer at just sixty-six years old, she wanted to do something monumental to honor the person her mother had been. Emily's mom had taken up running in her late forties; she ran her first marathon at fifty. She even went skydiving to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. 
   
   
   
  Emily, already an accomplished ultrarunner, decided to try to break the record for the Fastest Known Time by a woman on the Pacific Crest Trail's 460 miles across Oregon. 
   
   
   
  To the Gorge takes the listener through her seven days, nineteen hours, and twenty-three minutes on the trail, covering nearly sixty miles a day on foot over rugged terrain, and battling all the issues that could arise during such a monstrous undertaking. All the while, she simultaneously struggles with how to get through the profound grief of losing her mom. 
   
   
   
  Interwoven with Halnon's eight-day effort are her remembrances from her mother's life and death, exploring the complicated experience of grief—and what shines through it. 
   
   
   
  Filled with adventure and heart, To the Gorge invites listeners to consider what our greatest losses can teach us about how to live the one life we get.

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  Leonardo da Vinci - An...

  Stephen J. Campbell

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  Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo's life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value. 
   
   
   
  In this original and provocative book, Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo's words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo's contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo's life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.

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  South End Syndicate - How I Took...

  Anthony Arillotta, Joe Bradley

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  In 2003, local Genovese family captain "Big Al" Bruno got shot five times with a .45 caliber handgun as he walked out of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel social club in Springfield, Massachusetts. Since Vito Genovese took his empire north from New York City, a string of mobsters dating back a hundred years have operated in the Greater Springfield area. With this migration came murders, mayhem, treachery, criminal trials, and constant corruption. 
   
   
   
  Not until 2010 did authorities charge new Springfield Genovese boss Anthony "Bingy" Arillotta with Bruno's murder. At the time, Arillotta's connections spanned the Northeast—from the Patriarca family in Rhode Island to the Angiulos in Boston to the Gambinos and Bonannos in New York, and from Billy Grasso and Whitey Tropiano in New Haven to Whitey Bulger's Winter Hill Gang. During his seven-year reign, Arillotta had beautiful women, total power, and millions in cash. But it eventually came with a devastating price. 
   
   
   
  South End Syndicate tells the untold story of a young man infatuated with Springfield wiseguys who rose from being a street criminal to becoming his city's Mafia boss. How did a young Italian-American kid from Springfield work his way up the chain to become a Made wiseguy in charge of Western New England? Arillotta, now a free man, tells a timeless tale of power, money, and murder.

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  My Secret Life Vol 7 Chapter 8

  Dominic Crawford Collins

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  My Secret Life is an anonymously penned memoir written during a period from the 1840s to the 1880s by a wealthy and sex obsessed English gentleman who refers to himself simply as ‘Walter’. Part confessional, part investigative erotic journalism, it meticulously documents every detail of the author’s prolific sexual encounters, offering us in the process an eye and thigh opening account of life behind closed doors in the Victorian age.
  
  Women, in both mind and body, were the all consuming object of Walter’s interest. From early youth through to old age his quest for erotic discovery and adventure with them was never diminished.
  
  Unlike contemporary 19th century erotic texts, such as The Pearl, whose sole object was to titillate, Walter’s interest in his subjects did not end with the extinguishing of the carnal flame. His hunger to understand the circumstances and minds of the women he encountered is never upstaged by the sex. Their potted life histories, their most intimate desires and acts were shared with him and in turn meticulously recorded by him, written down verbatim while still fresh in his mind.
  
  The resulting poignant record of a lost era and the intimate moments of the women who inhabited it offer us a remarkable insight into the 19th century that cannot be gleaned from any other source.
  
  The complete unabridged text is being released as a fully scored audiofilm (an audio book with accompanying music soundtrack) by film composer Dominic Crawford Collins.

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  Royal Robbins - The American...

  David Smart

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  Acclaimed writer David Smart illuminates the fascinating life of Royal Robbins—in all its soulful ambition, rivalry, and romance. Royal Robbins chronicles his early years growing up as a latchkey kid in Southern California, the push and pull between being an aspiring banker or one of the original Camp 4 dirtbags, and his later decades as a father, husband, kayaker, and the trailblazing founder of the outdoor apparel company that bears his name. This intimate, colorful tour of climbing history covering Yosemite, the Tetons, the Gunks, the Alps, the United Kingdom, and more from the 1960s onward features star characters such as Liz Robbins—Robbins's wife and a pioneering adventurer in her own right—Yvon Chouinard, John Harlin, Steve Roper, Warren Harding, Tom Frost, and Doug Tompkins. 
   
   
   
  An important addition to our knowledge of the Golden Age of rock climbing in Yosemite and the development of the clean climbing ethos, Royal Robbins sheds new light on an elemental figure of outdoor culture.

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  My Mother's Murder - A...

  Gina McGavin, Jane Hamilton

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  A 35-year-old unsolved murder. Mary’s murder gripped the town of Partick for years after her death. 
   
   
  A cold case reawakened because of the Daily Record with women at the heart of it. The victim, the daughter, the detective, the forensic scientist, the reporter. 
   
   
  For 35 years Gina McGavin hunted for her mother’s killer. 
   
   
  Mary McLaughlin’s senseless brutal murder ignited in Gina a deep sense of injustice and an insatiable need to seek the truth about her death. 
   
   
  The two women had only just begun to work on their broken relationship with Gina finding ways to forgive her mother for abandoning the family home when Gina was just two years old. Now she felt abandoned again and it awakened in her an obsessive quest that would overshadow her whole life. 
   
   
  Gina unravels family secrets and revelations about her mother as she began to suspect that some close to her knew more about Mary’s murder than they were letting on. 
   
   
  She puts family members on the spot and rakes over every detail she can find to not only lead her to a killer but to understand who her mother was and why she abandoned her family. 
   
   
  Gina delves into potential suspects, discovers shocking details about her family and explores how her mother’s death has impacted her own life, her marriage, her relationships and when the case is finally solved by police, it leaves Gina with unanswered questions. She doesn’t believe the man convicted acted alone. 
   
   
  This is the extraordinary journey of a daughter’s search for truth and justice for the mother she never really knew.

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