Other books that might interest you

• 

  Goddie

  Robert Picart

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In Robert Picart’s debut novel Goddie, we read the story of Goddie, a young girl born in the mid-1900s in the picturesque Blue Mountains of Jamaica. With the sudden loss of both parents, Goddie finds herself indentured to strangers in order to pay for school. Heartbroken, weary and alone, she forms a plan to escape to Great Britain as the Windrush movement escalates.Will Goddie be able to escape the depths of betrayal for good and start over again? Will she succumb to despair? Or will she find the strength to find her place in a new and turbulent world?

  Show book

• 

  Joan Crawford: The Last Word -...

  Fred Lawrence Guiles

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  For most of her adult life, Joan Crawford was a star who dedicated herself entirely to her career. But since her death, her luster has been tarnished. Here, at last, is a biography that sets the record straight. 
  In her heyday, Joan Crawford was probably the most imitated woman in the world. Magazine covers featured her face, and high school and college girls copied her makeup and clothing. Born Lucille Fay LeSueur in Kansas City, she spent her childhood on the edge of poverty. But an iron will developed in adolescence drove her to New York City and eventual work in a chorus line. Spotted by a Hollywood talent scout, she was soon on her way to the film capital. 
  Four times married (to actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franchot Tone, and Philip Terry and Pepsi Cola executive Alfred Steele) and driven by powerful sexuality, Joan Crawford lived her life on the razor’s edge. Yet she was a woman of great generosity who cared deeply for her four adopted children, although her ideas about discipline were colored by her own harsh upbringing. 
  Her professional career spanned more than 40 years and included such classics as Grand Hotel, Mildred Pierce, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Her remarkable progression from silent films to talkies to television exemplified her ability to adapt, chameleon—like, to the ever-changing demands of the industry that in many senses invented her. 
  A supplemental PDF is included with this audiobook.

  Show book

• 

  Selected Travel Writing -...

  Graham Greene

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A pair of revelatory travel memoirs from “a superb storyteller . . . [who] had a talent for depicting local color” (The New York Times).   “One of the finest writers of any language,” British author Graham Greene embarked on two awe-inspiring and eye-opening journeys in the 1930s—to West Africa and to Mexico (The Washington Post). Greene would find himself both shaken and inspired by these trips, which would go on to inform his novels.  Journey Without Maps: When Graham Greene set off from Liverpool in 1935 for what was then an Africa unmarked by colonization, it was to leave the known transgressions of his own civilization behind for those unknown. First by cargo ship, then by train and truck through Sierra Leone, and finally on foot, Greene embarked on a dangerous and unpredictable 350-mile, four-week trek through Liberia with his cousin and a handful of servants and bearers into a world where few had ever seen a white man. For Greene, this odyssey became as much a trip into the primitive interiors of the writer himself as it was a physical journey into a land foreign to his experience.   “One of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century.” —The Independent  The Lawless Roads: This eyewitness account of religious and political persecution in 1930s Mexico inspired The Power and the Glory, the British novelist’s “masterpiece” (John Updike). In 1938, Greene, a burgeoning convert to Roman Catholicism, was commissioned to expose the anticlerical purges in Mexico. Churches had been destroyed, peasants held secret masses in their homes, religious icons were banned, and priests disappeared. Traveling under the growing clouds of fascism, Greene was anxious to see for himself the effect it had on the people. Journeying through the rugged and remote terrain of Chiapas and Tabasco, Greene’s emotional, gut response to the landscape; the sights and sounds; the oppressive heat; and the people’s fear, despair, resignation, and fierce resilience makes for a vivid and powerful chronicle.   “[A] singularly beautiful travel book.” —New Statesman

  Show book

• 

  Why I Was Late

  Charlie Petch

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.   
  Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, bringing a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing—Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject—grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence—is off limits.  
  A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.

  Show book

• 

  On the Devil's Tail - In Combat...

  Paul Martelli, Vittorino dal Cengio

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A collaborationist who fought for Germany during WWII and later for the French in Vietnam tells his eventful life story in this military memoir.   This is the riveting true story of Paul Martelli who fought on the Eastern Front in 1945 as a fifteen-year-old member of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier-Division of the SS Charlemagne, and later, as a soldier with French forces in the Tonkin area of Vietnam.   Paul recounts his time at the Sennheim military training base; his experience of the German invasion of France when he was still a boy in Lorraine; and his motivations for enlisting with the Waffen SS a few years later. He reveals his escapades at Greifenberg, his first love with a German girl helping refugees, and his experiences of combat. After the German defeat, Martelli ends up delivering a group of female camp prisoners to a Russian officer, then living in disguise among enemy soldiers until he escapes and surrenders to the Americans.   After a prison sentence and military service in Morocco, Paul is sent to fight in defense of French bases north of Hanoi, Vietnam. Though he survives three years of fierce combat, he compares his service in the Waffen SS with the inefficiency of the French Expeditionary Force and comes out deeply frustrated.   At almost twenty-six, Martelli has fought and lost in two wars, both against the communists. Unemployed, and with the ideals of a ‘Nouvelle Europe’ in pieces, he briefly joins the French Foreign Legion before choosing another path

  Show book

• 

  And Always One More Time: A Memoir

  Margaret Mandell

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Every year, more than a million women find themselves grappling with the devastating loss of a life partner—a loss that shatters their present and leaves their future in doubt. At 65, Margaret Mandell faces this heart-wrenching reality when she loses her husband of 45 years to a fast-moving disease. The bed is now half-empty, her body betrays her, and laughter seems elusive. 
  In the depths of longing and haunted by memories, Mandell embarks on a journey of healing through the written word. She begins to write letters to the man she loved in a poignant process of retracing their shared history. But when a tender-hearted college professor steps quietly into her life and listens attentively as Mandell reads her accumulating stack of letters out loud, her world is transformed in profound and unexpected ways. 
  And Always One More Time is a story that delves deep into the human experience, reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed in its wisdom and Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story in its suspense. It offers universal truths about love, loss, and resilience, much like Steve Leder's The Beauty of What Remains. With potent and swift-moving words, this book can be devoured in a single sitting. It is a beacon of hope for those navigating the aftermath of the greatest loss. 
  --- 
  "Offering one example after another of appreciating the beauty in life without denying its heartaches, the memoir asks, 'Can you keep loving when the man you love is gone?' and answers with a resounding yes. 
    
  "A moving, insightful, and beautifully crafted story of losing one great love and finding another." 
    
  -- Kirkus Reviews

  Show book