Download or read book Inventing the Truth written by Russell Baker and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this perfect companion for anyone beguiled by memoirs or embarking on writing one, nine distinguished authors -- Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson -- reflect on the writing process.
Download or read book INVENTING THE TRUTH Memory and Its Tricks A Gay Life written by Lucien L Agosta PhD and published by BookLocker.com, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INVENTING THE TRUTH: MEMORY AND ITS TRICKS offers a collection of essays dealing with the author's life experiences as a gay man. Because exact accuracy is alien to the way memory works, the verifiable fictions in this book are, necessarily, inventions of the truth. Included essays examine the author's early cross-dressing and other childhood challenges to his birth gender, the important formative influences on him of his Catholic parish and school and the local public library, and his belated and complicated coming out as a gay man. Another essay offers a dialectic between lust and love. Defining himself as a "Promiscuous Hedonist" for most of his adult life, the author at long last discovered that love was real and that he could love another man in his own gay way. Subsequent essays investigate the influence on the author of his two immigrant grandfathers and the unsavory memories of a racist past growing up in Louisiana in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. A further essay explores the author's primal fears of darkness and death and how he achieved a satisfactory resolution of those fears. A final essay explores the reams of war-time letters that constituted the courtship of the author's parents who maintained their connection through letters for the nearly three years they were apart during WWII. These letters focus on the challenging beginnings of a 54-year love affair as well as on conditions during the war of a soldier overseas and his intended at home in Ohio whom he was courting by near-daily correspondence. The essays in this book offer accounts of seminal remembered experiences in the author's past now interpreted in a language unavailable to him at the time those experiences were occurring. In these reliable accounts, the author tells the truth about his gay life in the most honest way he knows how to invent it.
Download or read book Inventing the Truth written by Russell Baker and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reveals his liberating decision to write Colored People without a white censor looking over his shoulder. Jill Ker Conway recalls how her memoir of her Australian girlhood, The Road from Coorain, became a call to young women everywhere to take charge of their lives.
Download or read book The Varnished Truth written by David Nyberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone says that lying is wrong. But when we say that lying is bad and hurtful and that we would never intentionally tell a lie, are we really deceiving anyone? In this wise and insightful book, David Nyberg exposes the tacit truth underneath our collective pretense and reveals that an occasional lie can be helpful, healthy, creative, and, in some situations, even downright moral. Through familiar and often entertaining examples, Nyberg explores the purposes deception serves, from the social kindness of the white lie to the political ends of diplomacy to the avoidance of pain or unpleasantness. He looks at the lies we tell ourselves as well, and contrary to the scolding of psychologists demonstrates that self-deception is a necessary function of mental health, one of the mind's many weapons against stress, uncertainty, and chaos. Deception is in our nature, Nyberg tells us. In civilization, just as in the wilderness, survival does not favor the fully exposed or conspicuously transparent self. As our minds have evolved, as practical intelligence has become more refined, as we have learned the subtleties of substituting words and symbols for weapons and violence, deception has come to play a central and complex role in social life. The Varnished Truth takes us beyond philosophical speculation and clinical analysis to give a sense of what it really means to tell the truth. As Nyberg lays out the complexities involved in leading a morally decent life, he compels us to see the spectrum of alternatives to telling the truth and telling a clear-cut lie. A life without self-deception would be intolerable and a world of unconditional truth telling unlivable. His argument that deception and self-deception are valuable to both social stability and individual mental health boldly challenges popular theories on deception, including those held by Sissela Bok and Daniel Goleman. Yet while Nyberg argues that we deceive, among other reasons, so that we might not perish of the truth, he also cautions that we deceive carelessly, thoughtlessly, inhumanely, and selfishly at our own peril.
Download or read book Inventing Falsehood Making Truth written by Malcolm Bull and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-08 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.
Download or read book Inventing American History written by William Hogeland and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historian's call to make the celebration of America's past more honest.
Download or read book Inventing Niagara written by Ginger Strand and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the Falls aren't very natural anymore. In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized and landscape redesigned, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery -- waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblem of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. Archetype of natural beauty, they belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will. Combining history, reportage and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the Falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the Bomb and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara. From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us rethink our place in it today.
Download or read book Cold Hard Truth written by Kevin O'Leary and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kevin O’Leary shares invaluable secrets on entrepreneurship, business, money and life. Can you make millions just by “visualizing yourself rich” as some business prophets suggest? Don’t buy it, says Kevin O’Leary. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur and amass wealth, you’re going to have to work for it. But the good news is: with the right guidance, focus and perseverance, you can turn entrepreneurial vision into lucrative reality and have the personal freedom that only wealth can buy. Kevin O’Leary would know. The much-feared and revered Dragon on the immensely popular show Dragons’ Den (and Shark Tank in the U.S.) started his company in his basement with a $10,000 loan from his financially savvy mother. A few years later, Kevin sold that company for more than four billion dollars. In this compelling, candid and, above all else, brutally honest business memoir, Kevin provides engaging, practical advice and lessons that will give anyone a distinct competitive edge.
Download or read book Inventing George Washington written by Edward G. Lengel and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining and erudite history that offers a fresh look at America's first founding father, the creation of his legend, and what it means for our nation and ourselves George Washington's death on December 14, 1799, dealt a dreadful blow to public morale. For three decades, Americans had depended on his leadership to guide them through every trial. At the cusp of a new century, the fledgling nation, caught in another war (this time with its former ally France), desperately needed to believe that Washington was—and would continue to be—there for them. Thus began the extraordinary immortalization of this towering historical figure. In Inventing George Washington, historian Edward G. Lengel shows how the late president and war hero continued to serve his nation on two distinct levels. The public Washington evolved into an eternal symbol as Father of His Country, while the private man remained at the periphery of the national vision—always just out of reach—for successive generations yearning to know him as never before. Both images, public and private, were vital to perceptions Americans had of their nation and themselves. Yet over time, as Lengel shows, the contrasting and simultaneous urges to deify Washington and to understand him as a man have produced tensions that have played out in every generation. As some exalted him, others sought to bring him down to earth, creating a series of competing mythologies that depicted Washington as every sort of human being imaginable. Inventing George Washington explores these representations, shedding new light on this national emblem, our nation itself, and who we are.
Download or read book Inventing the Victorians written by Matthew Sweet and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.
Download or read book Inventing the Flat Earth written by Jeffrey B. Russell and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1997-01-30 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the facts behind the deceiving myths that have been professed about Columbus and his time.
Download or read book Inventing Human Rights A History written by Lynn Hunt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A tour de force.”—Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book Review How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.
Download or read book Inventing Ethan Allen written by John J. Duffy and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1969, Ethan Allen has been the subject of three biographical studies, all of which indulge in sustaining and revitalizing the image of Allen as a physically imposing Vermont yeoman, a defender of the rights of Americans, an eloquent military hero, and a master of many guises, from rough frontiersman to gentleman philosopher. Seeking the authentic Ethan Allen, the authors of this volume ask: How did that Ethan Allen secure his place in popular culture? As they observe, this spectacular persona leaves little room for a more accurate assessment of Allen as a self-interested land speculator, rebellious mob leader, inexperienced militia officer, and truth-challenged man who would steer Vermont into the British Empire. Drawing extensively from the correspondence in Ethan Allen and his Kin and a wide range of historical, political, and cultural sources, Duffy and Muller analyze the factors that led to Ethan Allen's two-hundred-year-old status as the most famous figure in Vermont's past. Placing facts against myths, the authors reveal how Allen acquired and retained his iconic image, how the much-repeated legends composed after his death coincide with his life, why recollections of him are synonymous with the story of Vermont, and why some Vermonters still assign to Allen their own cherished and idealized values.
Download or read book The Secret written by Rhonda Byrne and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tenth-anniversary edition of the book that changed lives in profound ways, now with a new foreword and afterword. In 2006, a groundbreaking feature-length film revealed the great mystery of the universe—The Secret—and, later that year, Rhonda Byrne followed with a book that became a worldwide bestseller. Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it. In this book, you’ll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life—money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You’ll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that’s within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life. The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers—men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.
Download or read book Inventing Victor written by Jennifer Bannan and published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer Bannan, the young author of Inventing Victor, explores with fresh wit the battlefield of truth and lies. Sometimes as hazy as a summer day in Pittsburgh, other times bustling with the celebrity of a Miami vomitorium on opening night, the stories deftly depict the lure of irresponsibility. The characters stoke the flames of artifice in trying to close in on their desires: teenaged Dacia lets her need for popularity lead her to self-destruction, and Orthodox Leah is too busy wanting a child to see that she's already a terrible mother. Middle-aged Mark is vicious to his wife in protecting a romantic past he's no longer sure he lived. When these characters are finally face-to-face with reality, they may succumb to it, but not without a regretful glance over the shoulder. A brave look at American lives in lurid moments of ambition and self-trickery, Inventing Victor provides just a flicker of hope: that the guiltiest among us can see the truth laid out, if only in the instant that dreams go up in smoke.
Download or read book Chainfire written by Terry Goodkind and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-01-04 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard struggles to find his missing wife Kahlan in spite of the bizarre fact that no one else seems to believe she actually exists or that he is married to her.
Download or read book The Paris Wife written by Paula McLain and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity. Ernest and Hadley's marriage begins to founder, and the birth of a beloved son serves only to drive them further apart. Then, at last, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours begin to bring him recognition - not least from a woman intent on making him her own . . .
