Download or read book Born A Bastard Swim Upstream written by Keoki McIver and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2024-03-01 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dive deep into a saga that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, spanning a century from the 1850s to 1950s. This tale, inspired by true events, unravels the intricate tapestry of a family I was adopted into – a lineage rife with hedonism, deceit, and dark desires./span Each character in this sprawling family epic is a study in contrasts: driven by their insatiable passions, they navigate a world laden with amorality, neuroses, and intense eroticism. Their stories are a testament to the tumultuous times they lived in, filled with ambition and treachery./span In 1946, amidst the serene backdrop of a Hawaiian beach house, a Tsunami loomed, threatening to engulf all in its path. Entrusted to the wrath of nature at the tender age of four, the intention was clear: my demise amidst the surging waters and the house's obliteration. Yet, fate had other plans. My survival is just one of the many riveting episodes from a past riddled with enigmas./span Venture into a world of intriguing personalities living through history's defining moments. A tale of resilience, lust, and the lengths to which people go to satisfy their own agendas. Embark on this compelling journey, and uncover the depths of human nature and the indomitable spirit of survival./span

Download or read book Born A Bastard Swim Upstream written by Keoki McIver and published by Austin Macauley. This book was released on 2024-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dive deep into a saga that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, spanning a century from the 1850s to 1950s. This tale, inspired by true events, unravels the intricate tapestry of a family I was adopted into - a lineage rife with hedonism, deceit, and dark desires. Each character in this sprawling family epic is a study in contrasts: driven by their insatiable passions, they navigate a world laden with amorality, neuroses, and intense eroticism. Their stories are a testament to the tumultuous times they lived in, filled with ambition and treachery. In 1946, amidst the serene backdrop of a Hawaiian beach house, a Tsunami loomed, threatening to engulf all in its path. Entrusted to the wrath of nature at the tender age of four, the intention was clear: my demise amidst the surging waters and the house's obliteration. Yet, fate had other plans. My survival is just one of the many riveting episodes from a past riddled with enigmas. Venture into a world of intriguing personalities living through history's defining moments. A tale of resilience, lust, and the lengths to which people go to satisfy their own agendas. Embark on this compelling journey, and uncover the depths of human nature and the indomitable spirit of survival.

Download or read book Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction written by Kenneth Millard and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked:* Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the 'fall' of America?* What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?* Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?* What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the conte

Download or read book The Californians written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Things They Carried written by Tim O'Brien and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Download or read book A Brief History of Vice written by Robert Evans and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time, A Brief History of Vice explores a side of the past that mainstream history books prefer to hide. History has never been more fun—or more intoxicating. Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization. Cracked editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women’s rights to the beer that helped create—and destroy—South America's first empire. And Evans goes deeper than simply writing about ancient debauchery; he recreates some of history's most enjoyable (and most painful) vices and includes guides so you can follow along at home. You’ll learn how to: • Trip like a Greek philosopher. • Rave like your Stone Age ancestors. • Get drunk like a Sumerian. • Smoke a nose pipe like a pre–Columbian Native American. “Mixing science, humor, and grossly irresponsible self-experimentation, Evans paints a vivid picture of how bad habits built the world we know and love.”—David Wong, author of John Dies at the End

Download or read book The Ice Man written by Philip Carlo and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Carlo's The Ice Man spent over six weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Top Mob Hitman. Devoted Family Man. Doting Father. For thirty years, Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski led a shocking double life, becoming the most notorious professional assassin in American history while happily hosting neighborhood barbecues in suburban New Jersey. Richard Kuklinski was Sammy the Bull Gravano's partner in the killing of Paul Castellano, then head of the Gambino crime family, at Sparks Steakhouse. Mob boss John Gotti hired him to torture and kill the neighbor who accidentally ran over his child. For an additional price, Kuklinski would make his victims suffer; he conducted this sadistic business with coldhearted intensity and shocking efficiency, never disappointing his customers. By his own estimate, he killed over two hundred men, taking enormous pride in his variety and ferocity of technique. This trail of murder lasted over thirty years and took Kuklinski all over America and to the far corners of the earth, Brazil, Africa, and Europe. Along the way, he married, had three children, and put them through Catholic school. His daughter's medical condition meant regular stays in children's hospitals, where Kuklinski was remembered, not as a gangster, but as an affectionate father, extremely kind to children. Each Christmas found the Kuklinski home festooned in colorful lights; each summer was a succession of block parties. His family never suspected a thing. Richard Kuklinski is now the subject of the major motion picture titled "The Iceman"(2013), starring James Franco, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta, and Chris Evans.

Download or read book Scrambled Hard Boiled written by Jr. White and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's Mayberry On Meth!Sex, drugs and double-knit polyester provide the key ingredients in this decidedly off-center take of the traditional detective novel. Scrambled Hard-Boiled is the story of a young man named Jay Dafoe coming into his own as private detective. Dafoe learns the in and outs of snooping into other people's lives and how to take advantage and profit from it. Philip Marlowe, he ain't.Full of dark humor, the novel is a tale of coming of age in the New South with its class and racial conflicts and the unfortunate habit of killing one another that people have always had in that part of the country. The traditional elements of the hard-boiled murder mystery are here: homicides, adultery, greed, crooked lawyers, mean cops and even meaner broads. Then, just to make things interesting, some regional spices like faith healing, homophobia, rednecks, county fairs and inter-species wrestling have been added to the recipe.

Download or read book Ocean written by Steve Mentz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience. From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Download or read book The Poisonwood Bible written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

Download or read book Surely You re Joking Mr Feynman Adventures of a Curious Character written by Richard P. Feynman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most famous science books of our time, the phenomenal national bestseller that "buzzes with energy, anecdote and life. It almost makes you want to become a physicist" (Science Digest). Richard P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. In this lively work that “can shatter the stereotype of the stuffy scientist” (Detroit Free Press), Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets—and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature. In his stories, Feynman’s life shines through in all its eccentric glory—a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah. Included for this edition is a new introduction by Bill Gates.

Download or read book The Yearling written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American classic—and Pulitzer Prize–winning story—that shows the ultimate bond between child and pet. No novel better epitomizes the love between a child and a pet than The Yearling. Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend. There has been a film and even a musical based on this moving story, a fine work of great American literature.

Download or read book The Water Dancer written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by One World. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone

Download or read book Generals Die in Bed written by Charles Yale Harrison and published by Annick Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Yale Harrison draws on his own experiences in the First World War to tell the story of a young man sent to fight on the Western Front.

Download or read book David and Goliath written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the power of the underdog in Malcolm Gladwell's dazzling examination of success, motivation, and the role of adversity in shaping our lives, from the bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia. Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn't have won. Or should he have? In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwellchallenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. Gladwell begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy those many years ago. From there, David and Goliath examines Northern Ireland's Troubles, the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, murder and the high costs of revenge, and the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms—all to demonstrate how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity. In the tradition of Gladwell's previous bestsellers—The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw—David and Goliath draws upon history, psychology, and powerful storytelling to reshape the way we think of the world around us.

Download or read book The Secret History of the Mongols written by Urgunge Onon and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fresh translation of one of the only surviving Mongol sources about the Mongol empire, brings out the excitement of this epic with its wide-ranging commentaries on military and social conditions, religion and philosophy, while remaining faithful to the original text.

Download or read book A Patriot s History of the United States written by Larry Schweikart and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-12-29 with total page 1350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past three decades, many history professors have allowed their biases to distort the way America’s past is taught. These intellectuals have searched for instances of racism, sexism, and bigotry in our history while downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of “dead white men.” As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington; more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II than about D-Day or Iwo Jima; more on the dangers we faced from Joseph McCarthy than those we faced from Josef Stalin. A Patriot’s History of the United States corrects those doctrinaire biases. In this groundbreaking book, America’s discovery, founding, and development are reexamined with an appreciation for the elements of public virtue, personal liberty, and private property that make this nation uniquely successful. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s true and proud history.