Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Profound Benefits of Doing a...

  Andrew Hamilton

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  Andrew Hamilton thought he had life sorted: beautiful fiancée, a popular pizza restaurant, two beloved dogs and a thriving side business supplying massive quantities of magic mushrooms and LSD to eager Sydneysiders. 
   
  Then one night police raided his Surry Hills home and it all came crashing down. Andrew's predicament didn't sink in at first, mainly because he was on a three-day cocaine bender and just wanted to sleep it off. When he was transferred to Parklea Correctional Centre, his prison-inspired existential dilemma began. 
   
  The Profound Benefits of a Stint in Prison is a sometimes confronting, more often hilarious insider's view to life inside. Andrew left prison a changed man, determined to turn his life around. This is the story of what happens when max denial collides with the reality of max security.

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  Empire's Son Empire's Orphan -...

  Nile Green

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  In literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, father and son, Ikbal and Idries Shah, spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics. Above all, father and son told Western readers what they wanted to hear: audacious yarns of eastern adventure and harmless Sufi mystics—myths that, as the century wore on and the Taliban seized power, became increasingly detached from reality. 
   
   
   
  This book follows the Shahs from their origins in colonial India to literary London, wartime Oxford, and counterculture California via the Levant, the League of Nations, and Latin America. Nile Green unravels the conspiracies and pseudonyms, fantastical pasts and self-aggrandizing anecdotes, high stakes and bold schemes that for nearly a century painted the defining portrait of Afghanistan. Ikbal and Idries convinced poets, spies, orientalists, diplomats, occultists, hippies, and even a prime minister that they held the key to understanding the Islamic world. From George Orwell directing Muslim propaganda to Robert Graves translating a fake manuscript of Omar Khayyam and Doris Lessing supporting jihad, Green tells the fascinating tale of how the book world was beguiled by the dream of an Afghan Shangri-La that never existed.

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  The Life of Charlotte Bronte...

  Elizabeth Gaskell

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  Part of the Hero Classics series 
  “As far as she could see, her life was ordained to be lonely, and she must her nature to her life, and, if possible, bring the two into harmony. When she could employ herself in fiction, all was comparatively well. The characters were her companions in the quiet hours, which she spent utterly alone, unable often to stir out of doors for many days together.” 
  When Charlotte Bronte’s father asked Gaskell to write his daughter’s biography, his main concern was to preserve the legacy of Charlotte and present an authorised take on her life as opposed to the speculations and gossip in the yellow papers. Gaskell and Charlotte had met on just a few occasions, so the biographer had to do profound research to actually delve into her mysterious life. From Charlotte’s own notes to various letters she had access to, Gaskell is seen mapping through a range of sources to find out the truth of her life. Right from the first pages of the text, we can distinctly spot Gaskell’s artistic infusions of metaphors and the poetic descriptions of the setting as well as doing justice with the life of Charlotte Bronte. This biography is all that is needed for Bronte’s readers as well as the admirers of inventive stylistic takes in non-fictional writing. 
  Upon its publication in 1857, The Life of Charlotte Bronte quite predictably caused controversy, so much so that the biographer was threatened with a legal action. Exciting exploration into Charlotte’s life and the criticism which followed, this makes it a must read for Bronte students and fans. 
  The Hero Classics series:MeditationsThe ProphetA Room of One’s OwnIncidents in the Life of a Slave GirlThe Art of WarThe Life of Charlotte BronteThe RepublicThe PrinceNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American SlaveUtopia

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  Benediction - From their pens to...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack.

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  The Accidental Archivist

  Angela Bier

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  Family history, modern genetics, and well-kept secrets collide as Angie Bier is drawn into a search for a stranger's birth father hidden somewhere in her own family tree. The search leads to dusty archives, clues hidden in plain sight, and the cutting edge of commercial genetic testing. 
   
   
   
  Fifty-something Kathleen used 23andme to identify her biological mother, who is rumored to have a child with a priest. Kathleen believes that her father is Angie's great-uncle Ed, a beloved monsignor. Couldn't it be one of the other seven priests in the family? 
   
   
   
  Despite initial reluctance, she is drawn full force into the mystery. Angie visits archives around Wisconsin, creating dossiers on the potential priest fathers. Kathleen discovers articles online with tantalizing clues hidden in plain sight. Angie's geneticist sister applies modern techniques to unravel this complex case of genetic genealogy. Angie determines that a distant relative is Kathleen's and Henry's father. They work together to sketch out their biological parents' story, one wound up in expectations, disappointments, and secrets hidden in plain sight. As they arrive at answers, new questions continue to surface and each struggles to craft a narrative that answers them fully. Ultimately, they create a new definition of family and celebrate it with all of its twists and turns.

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  Nightingales Bluebirds and...

  Elise Baker

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  The World Wars of the 20th century caused massive upheavals all over the world. Often overlooked by history are the extraordinary true-life stories of the brave women from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who enlisted in the Allied forces in their thousands to serve as nurses behind the front lines, at great danger to themselves. And while men shot to kill in the North African, European, and the Pacific theaters of war, nurses served right behind them, armed with tools of healing rather than warfare. 
  These untold true stories of women heroes of WWII paint a vivid picture of life as a military nurse—from makeshift field hospitals in France to bombed-out station hospitals in Belgium to journeys fraught with danger on ambulance trains, air ambulances, and hospital ships. 
  Inside Nightingales, Bluebirds & Angels of Mercy: True Stories of the Courage and Heroism of Nurses on the Front Line in WWII, you’ll learn the true stories of nurses in the Second World War, including 
  ●      what it was like for a woman to join the armed services as a nurse and travel across the world to do her duty, 
  ●      the challenges and dangers the Allied nurses faced on the front lines, as well as the camaraderie and wartime romances they experienced, 
  ●      how these women confronted changing social norms around gender and race, 
  ●      true stories of survival at the hands of enemy forces in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, and more. 
  The stories of these brave women are an inspiring record of duty and selflessness. If you haven’t yet met heroes such as Vivian Bullwinkel and Margot Turner, you’ll definitely want to listen to this book.

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