Other books that might interest you

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  Summary of Sue Klebold’s A...

  Falcon Press

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  Summary of Sue Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning, Sue Klebold struggles to come to terms with her son Dylan’s role in the infamous Columbine High School shooting. Writing 16 years after the shooting, she reflects on when and where things went wrong for Dylan—and how she and her husband, who were loving parents, could have missed the warning signs.

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  Ain't No Sunshine - The Smooth...

  Mark Ribowsky

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  The first biography of Bill Withers, the most accidental music supernova, who walked away from fame and never looked back.Bill Withers entered the music fray as hardly an afterthought, rewrote the rules for a decade, earned a fortune, then, unable to square himself with the requisites of the music business, took his leave. When he died in 2019 at eighty-one, he was every bit the mystery he was when he started.Born and raised in Slab Fork, West Virginia—his father a coal miner, his childhood spent in a pit of racism, and a shy kid who was asthmatic and stuttered—Withers had every reason to say, “People ask what are the blues. Hell, I was the blues!” His adulthood was spent running away from Slab Fork as a navy enlistee who worked military-related jobs, including making toilets for 747s. Music was a fantasy, ruled by unscrupulous brokers whom he thought he would never be able to live easily with. When he sang of calling on a “lonely brother” in “Lean on Me,” his biggest hit and an astounding feast for the ears, few knew that he was singing about himself. He was the lonely brother, and the business whose audio rules he refashioned only made him lonelier. His songs were not riling, but easing and caressing the deepest of emotional clefts that bore the weight of the world and the reassurance of a better day on his shoulders—“Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me,” “Use Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Just the Two of Us”—as well as album cuts that leaped off the vinyl and helped form a coterie of evergreens among his fans. Yet he ruled in his precious fold of time—eight years in the sun—without as much as an agent, manager, lawyer, accountant, valet, or flunky. He was on his own in every way.This is the craziest success story music has known—a whirlwind that didn’t begin until Withers was in his thirties and carried on as if in neat slow-motion. Now, in this remarkable biography by acclaimed author Mark Ribowsky, Withers is brought to life in vivid detail, told with insights from those who knew him throughout his short but incredibly impactful career.

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  Complications - A Surgeon’s...

  Atul Gawande

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  A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. 
  Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is — complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. 
  Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. 
  At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor.

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  Zen Buddhism and Its relation to...

  Arthur Waley

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  Two books by the greatest translator of Chinese poetry, Arthur Waley (1889-1966) 
  Arthur Waley was one of the first great Orientalists, bringing translations and commentaries from China and Japan to the West. This volume combines two of his books, the first investigating how Zen buddhism evolved to produce the kinds of artwork that it does, and how the artistic practice is also a spiritual practice. 
  Zen Buddhism can often be confusing to the outsider. This book explores the evolution of Zen, from it's origins and early masters through to it's influence in the modern world on art and literature. 
  This second part contains a selection of poems by China's greatest poet, Li Po, of whom it was said "Li Po’s style is swift, yet never careless; lively, yet never informal. But his intellectual outlook was low and sordid. In nine poems out of ten he deals with nothing but wine or women." 
  "The world acclaims Li Po as its master poet. I grant that his works show unparalleled talent and originality, but not one in ten contains any moral reflection or deeper meaning." 
  Ebook contains images of Li Po taken from manuscripts around his time, and over the centuries as he became recognised as one of China's great poets. 
  Book editions include classical illustrations of and calligraphy by Li Po

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  Off-Road with Clarkson Hammond &...

  Phillipa Sage

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  For over 12 years Phillipa Sage worked alongside Clarkson, Hammond and May as their PA, gofer, and fixer where she saw the boys at their best and, hilariously, at their worst. A closet petrol head, Phillipa started working in the motor industry on live events over 20 years ago and first worked with Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Wilman (formerly Top Gear and now the Grand Tour’s Executive Producer) in 1997. She proved to be a loyal, trusted friend and colleague to all the presenters—from back in the beginning with Tiff Needell and Quentin Wilson—to the now infamous trio of Clarkson, Hammond and May, and became a key member of what became known as ‘The Bubble’, the exclusive, dysfunctional working family that toured the world.  
  With an enormous budget, they travelled like rock stars—with super cars, yachts, private jets, helicopters, and five-star wining and dining—taking their unique brand of motoring madness to 18 countries, 31 cities and to over 2 million fans in arenas and at festivals from New Zealand to Norway.  
  Supported by a large crew and their personal entourage, Clarkson, Hammond and May, when not performing in their extraordinary, high octane, live action, motoring theatre, indulged in extravagant holidays. They and their ‘Bubble’ family relaxed in luxury resorts or private houses entertaining themselves with pool parties, drinking, heli-sightseeing, drinking, private motorboat cruises, drinking, jet skiing, sailing, drinking and eating, and drinking.

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  James S Pyke-Nott, G K...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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