Other books that might interest you

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  In the Frame - My Life in Words...

  Helen Mirren

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    Helen Mirren has been an internationally acclaimed actress--and the recipient of many awards, transferring between stage, cinema and television--for over 40 years. Known in her youth for a forthright style, a liberated attitude and a bohemian outlook, she has never ceased to be out of the public eye, with legions of admiring fans all over the world. This illustrated memoir is an account of an extraordinary talent, and a life well lived. Helen's aristocratic Russian grandfather, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, a military man, was sent to London by the Czar and found himself stranded and penniless by the Bolshevik revolution, cut off from the family estate near Smolensk. He brought with him a trunk of papers and photographs. This delightful memoir starts with the contents of the trunk, with evocative pictures of Helen's Russian antecedents. She has kept a rich seam of photo-graphs and memorabilia from her life, and her parents, family life, childhood, teenage and early years as an actress living in insalubrious flats are vividly documented. Helen's many distinguished roles in theatre, cinema and television and the illustrious men and women she has encountered are commemorated, as well as her forays into Hollywood and her sub-sequent life in the United States with her husband, film director Taylor Hackford. Golden Globe and Oscar ceremonies make their appearance, as do many stunning images of Helen by the world's leading photographers. In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures is a book to savour, created and written by one of the great personalities of our age.

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  Summers with Lincoln - Looking...

  James A. Percoco

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  A journey across America revealing “the history of how seven of these monuments came to be . . . and what they mean to us today” (The Washington Times).   Across the country, in the middle of busy city squares and hidden on quiet streets, there are nearly two hundred statues erected in memory of Abraham Lincoln. No other American has ever been so widely commemorated.   A few years ago, Jim Percoco, a history teacher with a passion for both Lincoln and public sculpture, set off to see what he might learn about some of these monuments—what they meant to their creators and to the public when they were unveiled, and what they mean to us today. The result is a fascinating chronicle of four summers on the road looking for Lincoln stories in statues of marble and bronze.   Percoco selects seven emblematic works, among them Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Group, erected east of the Capitol in 1876 with private funds from African Americans and dedicated by Frederick Douglass; Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s majestic Standing Lincoln of 1887 in Chicago; Paul Manship’s 1932 Lincoln the Hoosier Youth, in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Gutzon Borglum’s 1911 Seated Lincoln, struggling with the pain of leadership, beckoning visitors to sit next to him on his metal bench in Newark, New Jersey.   At each stop, Percoco chronicles the history of the monument, spotlighting its artistic, social, political, and cultural origins. His descriptions draw fresh meaning from mute stone and cold metal—raising provocative questions not just about who Lincoln might have been, but about what we’ve wanted him to be in the monuments we’ve built.

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  Eduard Strauss - The Third Man...

  Leigh Bailey

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  Eduard Strauss I (1835–1916), the youngest of the three Strauss brothers – and hence the 'third man' of the family, has always been overshadowed by his siblings Johann II and Josef. However, he was the longest lived and most widely travelled of the three and, as sole conductor and manager of the Strauss Orchestra for thirty years, brought authentic performances of his family's music to audiences in hundreds of towns and cities in Europe and North America. At home in Vienna he made an invaluable contribution to the city's musical and cultural life, while having at the same time to cope with continual tensions and problems within the Strauss family.

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  What one assistant principal...

  PBS NewsHour

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  Karen Ritter, an assistant principal at a high school just outside of Chicago, wanted to see her school through a student’s eyes. So she decided to follow 9th grader Alan Garcia, who came to her asking to be switched out of the many remedial classes in which he is enrolled, hoping to get a clear view of his experience in the classroom. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Education Week reports.

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  Ramble On

  Geoffrey Giuliano

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  Led Zeppelin rocked a generation with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham blazing new trails in popular music which resonate boldly to this day. A riveting inside look at the talented, complex men behind the music and the wild times in which it was born. With exclusive interviews and commentary with the band.

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  Life in a Day - A Memoir

  Doris Grumbach

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  A look into the daily life of one of America’s great memoirists At seventy-seven Doris Grumbach is as sharp as ever, and in Life in a Day she examines the experiences of her later years, from the dreaded writer’s block to the many hours she has spent reading to the effects of an increasingly modern and interconnected world. Imbued with Grumbach’s characteristic candor and verve, Life in a Day is a celebration of the meaning to be found in the quotidian.

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