Download or read book My Unsentimental Education written by Debra Monroe and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the story of Monroe's steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.
Download or read book My Unsentimental Education written by Debra Monroe and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman reflects on her working-class roots, her unsuitable exes, and her accidental road to happiness in a memoir of “many delights” (Atlanta Journal Constitution). A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career—if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she’s still blue-collar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as “liberated.” Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn’t. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began. “Trying to be a Midwestern housewife in the tradition of her mother and grandmothers, and an early feminist at the same time, makes for comic incongruity.”—Wisconsin State Journal “Monroe’s candid memoir reads like a country ballad: a down-and-out woman, working gritty jobs, gets entangled with Mr. Completely, Laughably Wrong. But her unexpected story is far from a cliché.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book An Unsentimental Education written by Molly McQuade and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Unsentimental Education is a collection of candid interviews with twenty-one of our leading novelists and poets. Presented as first-person essays, the interviews are with contemporary writers who have studied or taught at the University of Chicago. The book provides an occasion for the writers to reflect on their Chicago experiences and on ideas about education in general. What education does a writer need? How can formal learning impel the writing life? What school stories or tales told out of school do Philip Roth, Hayden Carruth, Marguerite Young, George Steiner, Charles Simic, Susan Sontag, and Saul Bellow have in store and want to share?
Download or read book Jigsaw written by Sybille Bedford and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Bedford's autobiographical novel paints a vivid picture of life in 1920s Europe between the wars. Sybille Bedford placed the ambiguous and inescapable stuff of her own life at the center of her fiction, and in Jigsaw—her fourth and final novel, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize—she did it with particular artistry. “What I had in mind,” she was later to say, “was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth...Truth here was an artistic, not moral, requirement...It involved...writing about myself, my feelings, my actions.” And so she assembled the puzzle pieces of her singular past into a picture of her “unsentimental education.” We learn of a childhood spent alone with her father, “a stranded man of the world” living a life of “ungenteel poverty in quite grand surroundings,” a château, that is, deep in the German countryside, with wine but little else for him and his young daughter to hold body and soul together. We learn of her return to Italy and her mother, “the one character I wished to keep minor and knew all along that it could not be done,” and the dark secret consuming her mother’s life. Finally, she tells us how she lived with and learned from Aldous and Maria Huxley on the French Riviera, developing the sense of purpose and determination that made her the great writer she would become.
Download or read book Things I Didn t Know written by Robert Hughes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso. From his relationship with his stern and distant father to his Catholic upbringing and school years; and from his development as an artist, writer, and critic to his growing appreciation of art and his exhilaration at leaving Australia to discover a new life, Hughes’ memoir is an extraordinary feat of exploration and celebration.
Download or read book Nothing Daunted written by Dorothy Wickenden and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Agitators, the acclaimed and captivating true story of two restless society girls who left their affluent lives to “rough it” as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know. In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.
Download or read book Everafter Vol 2 The Unsentimental Education written by Dave Justus and published by Vertigo. This book was released on 2017-12-26 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinning off from Bill Willingham’s FABLES saga! young ally, the deadliest class of all time is now in session. Will it prove to be a learning experience? Or will the Fable and Mundy worlds both discover that school is out—forever? Infamous Mundy writers Dave Justus and Lilah Sturges join acclaimed artists Travis Moore and FABLES’ own Mark Buckingham to add to the legacy of creator Bill Willingham’s modern classic with EVERAFTER VOL. 2: THE UNSENTIMENTAL Peter Piper. Bo Peep. Connor Wolf. As members of the elite network of agents known as the Shadow Players, these three legendary Fables share a single purpose: to protect the newly merged magical and mundane worlds from all threats. But what happens when the greatest threat of all comes from within? Bobby Speckland may look like any other Texas high school student, but as the first Mundy to gain magical abilities in the post-Everafter world, he’s also a sorcerer of incredible power. So when a trio of bullied teens take over their school using stolen Fable weapons and unleash the Lone Star State’s supernatural shock troops to consolidate their coup d’école, it’s up to Bobby to find a way to bring them down—by any means necessary. For the three veteran agents and their volatile EDUCATION—the final chapter in the Shadow Players saga! Collects issues #7-12.
Download or read book An Italian Education written by Tim Parks and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “marvelous” Mediterranean memoir of an expatriate father raising his children in Italy—from the author of Italian Neighbors (The Washington Post). Tim Parks offers another lively firsthand account of Italian society and culture—this time focusing on all the little things that turn an ordinary newborn infant into a true Italian. When British-born Tim Parks heard a mother at the beach in Pescara shout to her son, “Alberto, don’t sweat! No you can’t go in the sea till eleven, it’s still too cold, go and see your cousin in row three number fifty-two,” he was inspired to write about parenting in Italy—which he was doing himself at the time after adopting the country as his own. In this humorous memoir, Parks offers an enchanting portrait of Italian childhood that shifts from comedy to despair in the time it takes to sing a lullaby. The result is “a wry, thoughtful, and often hilarious book . . . a parable of how our children, no matter what, are other than ourselves” (The New Yorker). “Glimpses of Italy that are fond, critical, pithy and penetrating.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Download or read book Breaking Night written by Liz Murray and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vein of The Glass Castle, Breaking Night is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard. Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep. When Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman's indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.
Download or read book The Rules Do Not Apply written by Ariel Levy and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.
Download or read book Dirt Work written by Christine Byl and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined. During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path. Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.
Download or read book Low Down Junk Jazz and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood written by A.J. Albany and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of life at all too early an age, A.J. Albany guides us through dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood shadowy underbelly and beyond. A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a set in some red-boothed dive, chances were you'd find Amy curled up to sleep on someone's fur coat, clutching a 78 of Louis Armstrong's "Sugar Blues" or, later, a photograph of the man himself, inscribed, "To little Amy Jo, always in love with you--Pops." Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of Old Lady Life at all too early an age, A. J. Albany guides us through the dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood's shadowy underbelly and beyond. What emerges is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive among the outcasts, misfits, and artists who surrounded her.
Download or read book Rescuing Haya written by Shelly Spilka and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this memoir, the author, an eighth generation sabra, speaks openly and honestly about her reasons for rejecting the Zionist vision and seeking her identity, her self-expression, and her freedom abroad. Left in an orphanage when she was five, the author takes us on a journey through exile and grief to redemption—the search and rescue of the orphan she once was—the child called Haya.
Download or read book The Empathy Diaries written by Sherry Turkle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus • Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography & Memoir • Winner of the New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own. In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father--and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life's work.
Download or read book Delusions of Grandeur written by Joey Franklin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Delusions of Grandeur Joey Franklin examines the dreams and delusions of America's most persistent mythologies--including the beliefs in white supremacy and rugged individualism and the problems of toxic masculinity and religious extremism--as they reveal themselves in the life of a husband and father fast approaching forty. With prose steeped in research and a playful, lyric attention to language, Franklin asks candid questions about what it takes to see clearly as a citizen, a parent, a child, a neighbor, and a human being. How should a white father from the suburbs talk with his sons about the death of Trayvon Martin? What do video games like Fortnite and Minecraft reveal about our appetites for destruction? Is it possible for Americans to celebrate bootstrap pioneer history while also lamenting the slavery that made it possible? How does the American tradition of exploiting cheap labor create a link between coal mining and plasma donation in southeast Ohio? Part cultural critique, part parental confessional, Delusions of Grandeur embraces the notion that the personal is always political, and reveals important, if sometimes uncomfortable, truths about our American obsessions with race, class, religion, and family.
Download or read book Late Work written by Joan Frank and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours what Rachel Kushner called “the strange remove that is the life of the writer.” Frank’s essays cover a vast spectrum—from handling dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work offers a seasoned artist’s thinking through the exploration of issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience from the trenches.
Download or read book Beneath the Shadow written by Justin Gardiner and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 2010, with the help of a friend who works as a photographer with a National Geographic–sponsored cruise line, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences on this voyage as the narrative backdrop for Beneath the Shadow, a compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, and Captain Roald Amundsen. Beneath the Shadow is centered on journal excerpts by eight famous explorers, which Gardiner uses as touchstones for modern-day experiences of harsh seas, chance encounters, rugged terrain, and unspeakable beauty. With equal parts levity and lyricism, Gardiner navigates the distance between the historical and the contemporary, the artistic and the scientific, the heroic and the mundane. The bold and tragic tales of Antarctic explorers have long held our collective imagination—almost as much as the mythically remote land such explorers ventured to—and this book makes those voices come to life as few ever have.
