The Silent Weaver - The Extraordinary Life and Work of Angus MacPhee

Roger Hutchinson

Publisher: Birlinn

Summary

A “fascinating, poignant” biography of the WWII veteran who, while confined to an asylum, became one of the great outsider artists of modern times (The Scotsman). In September 1939, groups of horsemen in battledress cantered down a broad, grassy plain on the western edge of Europe. The young men of the Western Isles of Scotland were going to war again. They included a tall, shy twenty-four-year-old named Angus MacPhee. Angus returned from war alive but in chronic mental pain, and was referred to the asylum in Inverness, where he spent the next fifty years of his life. During his time at Craig Dunain Hospital, he retreated into his own silent world, and did not speak again until shortly before his death. But “the quiet big man,” as he was known, spent his time creating a huge number of objects out of woven grass, sheep’s wool, and beach leaves—mostly clothes, caps, and hats—which he then let decay or deliberately burned. Only after an art therapist discovered his miraculous creations were some of them preserved for posterity. And only then did Angus MacPhee come home to South Uist, where he died a year later. The Silent Weaver is a rich, moving and enthralling exploration of mental health, the creative process, human frailty, and ancient traditions.

Available since: 10/06/2011.

Print length: 208 pages.

Other books that might interest you

So You're Going Bald!

Julius Sharpe

Educational, uplifting, and thoroughly hilarious, this rollicking “bald memoir” is a one-stop guide to appreciating life as you lose your hair and offers dating, grooming, marriage, sex, and even toupee advice for bald men and the people who claim to love them.Humorist and comedy television writer Julius Sharpe woke up on 9/11 to his own personal disaster: His hair was falling out. So You’re Going Bald is his hilarious odyssey — a tale filled with despair, horror, acceptance, and humor that everyone can relate to, whether you’re 19 or approaching 50 — or are simply bald-curious.As Julius tells it, going bald is for-real traumatic. Losing his hair preoccupied his days and kept him up Googling every night for five straight years. He suffered in private, but now, he’s making it his mission that no cue ball will live alone with the agony of hair loss ever again. Sharpe examines what it means to be hairless up top and walks you through how to look at yourself in the mirror and not want to die. He outlines the three stages of baldness (anger, more anger, even more anger), and volunteers himself as a guinea pig, testing laser helmets, plugs, and toupees. So You’re Going Bald is one-part tough love and one-part inspiration...the same way that Fran Drescher’s Cancer Schmancer inspired a cure for schmancer.We all know someone who is bald, or going bald, or got their hair cut way too short. In So You’re Going Bald, Sharper provides an emotional road map for living life in the bald lane, giving voice to what it feels like to know that “grass doesn’t grow on a busy street”.

Show book

Top Girl

Danielle Marin

Gritty...shocking...trueTop Girl is the tell-all, true story of a grammar school girl turned county lines drug dealer.Danielle has a safe, happy childhood growing up in West London, but her bright future fades as she turns her back on school for gang life and crime.Betrayed by the police after a brutal gang rape, she finds protection under the wing of organised criminals and falls in love with the local ‘top boy’.However, her allegiances bring terror to her doorstep when gun-toting rivals target her flat – and the authorities answer by taking away her baby.Heartbroken, Danielle spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation, running drugs to satellite towns all over the UK from the gang’s London HQ.The Harrods shopping sprees, designer handbags and hedonistic lifestyle are the envy of her friends, but the good times and cash mask the grim realities of her life.A turning point comes when Danielle is arrested and – with the help of a probation officer – she begins to question whether she really is ‘top girl’ after all. But after five years deep in the high-earning street hustle, can she really leave it all behind?Danielle’s gritty, emotional, no-holds-barred memoir lays bare the reality of a county lines insider and reveals the truth about life on the frontline of Britain’s biggest drug threat for a generation.

Show book

James Garfield & the Civil War -...

Daniel J Vermilya

This biography of America’s twentieth president sheds light on his Civil War years, when he served as a major general for the Union Army.   While his presidency was tragically cut short by his assassination, James Abraham Garfield's eventful life covered some of the most consequential years of American history. When the United States was divided by war, Garfield was one of many who stepped forward to defend the Union. In this biography, historian Daniel J. Vermilya reveals the little-known story of Garfield's role in the Civil War.   From humble beginnings in Ohio, Garfield rose to become a major general in the Union army. His military career took him to the backwoods of Kentucky, the fields of Shiloh and Chickamauga, and ultimately to the halls of Congress. His service during the war established Garfield as a courageous leader who would one day lead the country as president.

Show book

Always Crashing in the Same Car...

Matthew Specktor

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.

Show book

Narrative of the Life of...

Frederick Douglass

Born into a life of bondage, Frederick Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write. For a slave, it was a crime punishable by death, but it resulted in one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. Douglass's autobiography traces his birth into slavery, his escape to the North, and the beginnings of the career that was to make him the preeminent spokesman for his people. His gripping narrative takes us into the fields, cabins, and manors of pre-Civil War plantations in the South and reveals the daily terrors he suffered as a slave.Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is one of the most influential autobiographies ever written. This classic text did as much as or more than any other book to motivate the abolitionists to continue to fight for freedom in America. Written more than a century and a half ago, this timeless classic still speaks directly to our age. It is a record of savagery and inhumanity that goes far to explain why America still suffers from the great injustices of the past.

Show book

History's 9 Most Insane Rulers

Scott Rank

Few mixtures are as toxic as absolute power and insanity. When nothing stands between a leader's delusional whims and seeing them carried out, all sorts of bizarre outcomes are possible.
This audiobook will look at the lives of the nine most mentally unbalanced figures in history. Some suffered from genetic disorders that led to schizophrenia, such as French King Charles VI, who thought he was made of glass. Others believed themselves to be Gods representatives on earth and wrote religious writings that they guaranteed to the reader would get them into heaven, even if these leaders were barely literate.
Whether it is Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim I practicing archery on palace servants or Turkmenistan president-for-life Akhbar Turkmenbashi renaming the days of the week after himself and constructing an 80-foot-tall golden statue that revolves to face the sun, crazed leaders have plagued society for millenia.
While such stories are amusing, this audiobook also contemplates the addictive nature of power and the effects it has on those who cling to it for too long. It explores how leaders can undertake the extraordinarily complicated job of leading a country without their full mental faculties and sometimes manage to be moderately successful. It examines why society tolerates their actions for so long and even attempts to put a facade of normalcy on rulers, despite everyone knowing that they are mentally unstable. The audiobook also explores if insane rulers are a relic of the age of monarchs and will die out in the age of democracy, or if they will continue to plague nations in the twenty-first century.
Finally, as many armchair psychologists question the mental health of Donald Trump and other populist politicians in the United States and Europe, all but diagnosing them with mental illness, this audiobook sets to show that truly insane rulers are categorically different in the ways they endanger their population.

Show book