Download or read book Self Amused written by Peter Funt and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a lifetime doing TV's original reality show, "Candid Camera," as well as experiences from an insane number of odd jobs, Self-Amused offers laughs, loves and "Candid Camera" secrets, with zero universality. Peter Funt is surely the only person to ever be profiled in The New York Times while also writing for The Times, and at the same time selling copies of The Times on street corners. He was an award-winning journalist at ABC News, launched a national magazine that reached 1.5 million circulation-and also sold birthday cakes, dried flowers and restaurant placemats on which he printed news reports. Against the advice of lawyers, Peter argued a case on Court TV. He foolishly hit Cybill Shepherd with a four-layer cake, and sat next to Clint Eastwood on a private jet as Clint cuddled a baby pig. He spent a day with Mickey Mantle and painted a billboard on a highway outside Denver. Peter's bookkeeper stole $250,000 and his house was twice burglarized. He's rescued three cats and one crow, kidnapped a baby deer, and battled raccoons. Dad Allen Funt once painted Peter white from head to toe and had him pose as a Roman statue in an art gallery. He also ordered Peter to hang from a 10-foot ceiling so people might think they were in an "upside-down room." Peter says he's most proud of an award from a plumbing supply company, declaring the famous slogan "Smile, you're on Candid Camera" the most popular graffiti above restroom urinals. BONUS: Self-Amused comes with a free download of 15 "Candid Camera" sequences.

Download or read book Cue the Sun written by Emily Nussbaum and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rollicking saga of reality television—an ambitious cultural history of America’s most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker writer “Written with a storyteller’s verve, a journalist’s skepticism, a critic’s astuteness, and a fan’s loving eye.”—Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Who invented reality television, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can’t we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary”—from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump—Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake. In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium. She introduces the genre’s trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World—along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor. We learn about the tools of the trade—like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and ugly tales of exploitation. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality’s peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script. What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds—and why won’t they speak to the couple who filmed them? Which serial killer won on The Dating Game? Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more. A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.

Download or read book Proving Ground written by William David Tarver and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would cause a young African American engineer to walk away from a promising career at the world's foremost electronics research and development company to start a business, from scratch, in his basement? David Tarver not only did that, he convinced two African American colleagues to join him in the improbable venture. Twelve years later, he negotiated the sale of that venture, Telecom Analysis Systems Inc., for $30 million. Tarver's business success was accomplished without the help of angel investors, venture capital, government grants, or minority business development programs. Overcoming obstacles related to race, technology, and business, Tarver and his colleagues conceived, designed, engineered, and manufactured sophisticated telecommunications instruments and sold them in more than twenty countries. David Tarver felt he had something important to prove to himself, to his colleagues, and to society. That is why he was willing to risk everything on a roll of the entrepreneuri

Download or read book Playing POTUS written by Peter Funt and published by . This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining and probing look at how comedic impressions of U.S. presidents evolved from Kennedy to Biden-and their impact on real-life politics.

Download or read book Self Contained written by Emma John and published by Cassell. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a piece of cod-wisdom regularly dispensed to single women: romance will arrive when you least expect it. I had assumed it would also make its own travel arrangements too. Emma John is in her 40s; she is neither married, nor partnered, with child or planning to be. In her hilarious and unflinching memoir, Self Contained, she asks why the world only views a woman as complete when she is no longer a single figure and addresses what it means to be alone when everyone else isn't. In her book, she captures what it is to be single in your forties, from sharing a twin room with someone you've never met on a group holiday (because the couples have all the doubles with ensuite) to coming to the realisation that maybe your singleness isn't a temporary arrangement, that maybe you aren't pre-married at all, and in fact you are self-contained. The book is an exploration of being lifelong single and what happens if you don't meet the right person, don't settle down with the wrong person and realise the biggest commitment is to yourself.

Download or read book Fire Shut Up in My Bones written by Charles M. Blow and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A respected journalist describes the abuse he suffered at the hands of a close family relative, the effect this had on his formative years and how he overcame the anger and self-doubt it left behind.

Download or read book Mincemeat written by Leonardo Lucarelli and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the wit and pace of Anthony Bourdain, Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli sketches the exhilarating life behind the closed doors of restaurants, and the unlikely work ethics of the kitchen. In Italy, five-star restaurants and celebrity chefs may seem, on the surface, a part of the landscape. In reality, the restaurant industry is as tough, cutthroat, and unforgiving as anywhere else in the world--sometimes even colluding with the shady world of organized crime. The powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli takes us through the underbelly of Italy's restaurant world. Lucarelli is a professional chef who for almost two decades has been roaming Italy opening restaurants, training underpaid, sometimes hopelessly incompetent sous-chefs, courting waitresses, working long hours, riding high on drugs, and cursing a culinary passion he inherited as a teenager from his hippie father. In his debut, Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, Lucarelli teaches us that even among rogues and misfits, there is a moral code in the kitchen that must, above all else, always be upheld.

Download or read book A Drinking Life written by Pete Hamill and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2008-12-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bestselling memoir from a seasoned New York City reporter is "a vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-destruction" (New York Times). !--StartFragment-- As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In A Drinking Life, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker. !--EndFragment--"Magnificent. A Drinking Life is about growing up and growing old, working and trying to work, within the culture of drink." --Boston Globe

Download or read book Heads in Beds written by Jacob Tomsky and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.

Download or read book On the Edge of Darkness written by Kathy Cronkite and published by Delta. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I was ashamed. It was a confession of weakness. For years, depression meant the crazy house. As I look back at it, [my shame] just seems damned foolishness, which is one reason I talk about it now." --Mike Wallace "Toward the end I couldn't get up. I just physically couldn't." --Kitty Dukakis They have made the impossible climb into the spotlight and attained their brightest dreams. But for Mike Wallace, Kitty Dukakis, William Styron, Joan Rivers, and countless other people struggling against the debilitating effects of depression, life's most challenging battle is waged not in the public eye, but in the darkest recesses of the mind. In her brilliant new work, Kathy Cronkite gives voice to dozens of celebrated professionals who have endured--and conquered--the hopelessness of chronic depression. Most of all, this courageous book brings a ray of hope to the 24 million Americans who live in the shadows of this misunderstood disease, yet bravely seek a path toward the light. You will learn: What to do when the sadness won't go away. Why women are most vulnerable to unipolar disorder. How substance abuse can mask the symptoms of depression. The latest therapeutic options for children who are affected by their own--or a parent's--illness. Which effective new treatments can lift the burden of depression--for up to 90 percent of people who suffer from it!

Download or read book So Here s the Thing written by Alyssa Mastromonaco and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? comes a fun, frank book of reflections, essays, and interviews on topics important to young women, ranging from politics and career to motherhood, sisterhood, and making and sustaining relationships of all kinds in the age of social media. Alyssa Mastromonaco is back with a bold, no-nonsense, and no-holds-barred twenty-first-century girl's guide to life, tackling the highs and lows of bodies, politics, relationships, moms, education, life on the internet, and pop culture. Whether discussing Barbra Streisand or The Bachelor, working in the West Wing or working on finding a wing woman, Alyssa leaves no stone unturned...and no awkward situation unexamined. Like her bestseller Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, SO HERE'S THE THING... brings a sharp eye and outsize sense of humor to the myriad issues facing women the world over, both in and out of the workplace. Along with Alyssa's personal experiences and hard-won life lessons, interviews with women like Monica Lewinsky, Susan Rice, and Chelsea Handler round out this modern woman's guide to, well, just about everything you can think of.

Download or read book The Morning Star written by Karl Ove Knausgaard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 "Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times The international bestseller from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes. Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding. Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead? The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates our world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.

Download or read book Notes from No Man s Land written by Eula Biss and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."

Download or read book Yours Cruelly Elvira written by Cassandra Peterson and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The woman behind the icon known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the undisputed Queen of Halloween, reveals her full story filled with intimate bombshells—told by the bombshell herself. On Good Friday in 1953, at only 18 months old, 25 miles from the nearest hospital in Manhattan, Kansas, Cassandra Peterson reached for a pot on the stove and doused herself in boiling water. Third-degree burns covered 35% of her body, and the prognosis wasn't good. But she survived. Burned and scarred, the impact stayed with her and became an obstacle she was determined to overcome. Feeling like a misfit led to her love of horror. While her sisters played with Barbie dolls, Cassandra built model kits of Frankenstein and Dracula, and idolized Vincent Price. Due to a complicated relationship with her mother, Cassandra left home at 14, and by age 17 she was performing at the famed Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. Run-ins with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tom Jones helped her grow up fast. Then a chance encounter with her idol Elvis Presley, changed the course of her life forever, and led her to Europe where she worked in film and traveled Italy as lead singer of an Italian pop band. She eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she joined the famed comedy improv group, The Groundlings, and worked alongside Phil Hartman and Paul "Pee-wee" Reubens, honing her comedic skills. Nearing age 30, a struggling actress considered past her prime, she auditioned at local LA channel KHJ as hostess for the late night vintage horror movies. Cassandra improvised, made the role her own, and got the job on the spot. Yours Cruelly, Elvira is an unforgettably wild memoir. Cassandra doesn't shy away from revealing exactly who she is and how she overcame seemingly insurmountable odds. Always original and sometimes outrageous, her story is loaded with twists, travails, revelry, and downright shocking experiences. It is the candid, often funny, and sometimes heart-breaking tale of a Midwest farm girl's long strange trip to become the world's sexiest, sassiest Halloween icon. Instant New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, USA Today Bestseller, Publishers Weekly Bestseller A New York Times Best Books to Give This Season selection

Download or read book Inside the Third Reich written by Albert Speer and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES

Download or read book A Memoir of My Former Self written by Hilary Mantel and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERS In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,” on our endless fascination with the current royal family. From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.” Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.

Download or read book American Bloomsbury written by Susan Cheever and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-18 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.