Download or read book Tom Cruise written by Andrew Morton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-01-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Morton uncovers the true story of the biggest celebrity of our age. Everyone knows Tom Cruise—or at least what he wants us to know. We know that the man behind the smile overcame a tough childhood to star in astonishing array of blockbusters: Top Gun, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire, several Mission: Impossible movies, and more. We know he has taken artistic chances, too, earning him three Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. But beyond that, the picture becomes a bit less clear... We know that Tom is a devoted follower of the Church of Scientology. We know that, despite persistent rumors about his sexuality, he has been married to Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman, and Katie Holmes. But it was not until he jumped on Oprah's couch to proclaim his love for Katie and denounced Brooke Shields for turning to the "Nazi science" of psychiatry that we began to realize how much we did not know about the charming, hardworking star. For all the headlines and the rumors, the real Tom Cruise has remained surprisingly hidden—until now.

Download or read book Gold Dust Woman written by Stephen Davis and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stevie Nicks is a legend of rock, but her energy and magnetism sparked new interest in this icon. At 68, she's one of the most glamorous creatures rock has known, and the rare woman who's a real rock ‘n' roller. Gold Dust Woman gives "the gold standard of rock biographers" (The Boston Globe) his ideal topic: Nicks' work and life are equally sexy and interesting, and Davis delves deeply into each, unearthing fresh details from new, intimate interviews and interpreting them to present a rich new portrait of the star. Just as Nicks (and Lindsay Buckingham) gave Fleetwood Mac the "shot of adrenaline" they needed to become real rock stars—according to Christine McVie—Gold Dust Woman is vibrant with stories and with a life lived large and hard: —How Nicks and Buckingham were asked to join Fleetwood Mac and how they turned the band into stars —The affairs that informed Nicks' greatest songs —Her relationships with the Eagles' Don Henley and Joe Walsh, and with Fleetwood himself —Why Nicks married her best friend's widower —Her dependency on cocaine, drinking and pot, but how it was a decade-long addiction to Klonopin that almost killed her — Nicks’ successful solo career that has her still performing in venues like Madison Square Garden —The cult of Nicks and its extension to chart-toppers like Taylor Swift and the Dixie Chicks

Download or read book Resurrection written by Jim Dent and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Dent, author of the New York Times bestselling The Junction Boys returns with the remarkable and inspiring story of one of the biggest comebacks in college football history. In the 1960's, Notre Dame's football program was in shambles. Little did anyone know, help was on its way in the form of Ara Parseghian, a controversial choice for head coach—the first one outside of the Notre Dame "family." It was now his responsibility to rebuild the once-proud program and teach the Fighting Irish how to win again. But it was no small task. The men of Notre Dame football were a bunch of unlikelies and oddballs, but Parseghian transformed them into a team: a senior quarterback who would win the Heisman Trophy; a five-foot-eight walk-on who would make first team All-American; an exceptionally rare black player, who would overcome much more than his quiet demeanor to rise to All-American, All-Pro, Hall of Famer, and to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Parseghian would change everything, from the uniforms and pads to the offensive strategy. It would be a huge gamble against great obstacles. But Ara Parseghian had that look in his eye.... New York Times bestselling author Jim Dent chronicles one of the greatest comeback seasons in the history of college football. Once again confirming his position as one of the top sports writers in the country, Dent brings the legends of Notre Dame football to life in an unforgettable story of second chances, determination, and unwavering spirit.

Download or read book Theft written by James Boyle and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A tale of law and music that leads through the gates of time!"

Download or read book Reckless Daughter written by David Yaffe and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music. Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country. A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances,” she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell’s life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “Both Sides, Now” to “A Case of You”—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable. In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell’s youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

Download or read book Songs in the Key of Z written by Irwin Chusid and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outsider musicians can be the product of damaged DNA, alien abduction, drug fry, demonic possession, or simply sheer obliviousness. This book profiles dozens of outsider musicians, both prominent and obscure—figures such as The Shaggs, Syd Barrett, Tiny Tim, Jandek, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Harry Partch, and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy—and presents their strange life stories along with photographs, interviews, cartoons, and discographies. About the only things these self-taught artists have in common are an utter lack of conventional tunefulness and an overabundance of earnestness and passion. But, believe it or not, they're worth listening to, often outmatching all contenders for inventiveness and originality. A CD featuring songs by artists profiled in the book is also available.

Download or read book Reading Stephen King written by Brenda Miller Power and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays grew out of the "Reading Stephen King Conference" held at the University of Maine in 1996. Stephen King's books have become a lightning rod for the tensions around issues of including "mass market" popular literature in middle and high school English classes and of who chooses what students read. King's fiction is among the most popular of "pop" literature, and among the most controversial. These essays spotlight the ways in which King's work intersects with the themes of the literary canon and its construction and maintenance, censorship in public schools, and the need for adolescent readers to be able to choose books in school reading programs. The essays and their authors are: (1) "Reading Stephen King: An Ethnography of an Event" (Brenda Miller Power); (2) "I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie" (Stephen King); (3) "King and Controversy in Classrooms: A Conversation between Teachers and Students" (Kelly Chandler and others); (4) "Of Cornflakes, Hot Dogs, Cabbages, and King" (Jeffrey D. Wilhelm); (5) "The 'Wanna Read' Workshop: Reading for Love" (Kimberly Hill Campbell); (6) "When 'IT' Comes to the Classroom" (Ruth Shagoury Hubbard); (7) "If Students Own Their Learning, What Do Teachers Do?" (Curt Dudley-Marling); (8) "Disrupting Stephen King: Engaging in Alternative Reading Practices" (James Albright and Roberta F. Hammett); (9) "Because Stories Matter: Authorial Reading and the Threat of Censorship" (Michael W. Smith); (10) "Canon Construction Ahead" (Kelly Chandler); (11) "King in the Classroom" (Michael R. Collings); (12) "King's Works and the At-Risk Student: The Broad-Based Appeal of a Canon Basher" (John Skretta); (13) "Reading the Cool Stuff: Students Respond to 'Pet Sematary'" (Mark A Fabrizi); (14) "When Reading Horror Subliterature Isn't So Horrible" (Janice V. Kristo and Rosemary A. Bamford); (15) "One Book Can Hurt You...But a Thousand Never Will" (Janet S. Allen); (16) "In the Case of King: What May Follow" (Anne E. Pooler and Constance M. Perry); and (17) "Be Prepared: Developing a Censorship Policy for the Electronic Age" (Abigail C. Garthwait). Appended are a joint manifesto by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and International Reading Association (IRA) concerning intellectual freedom; an excerpt from a teacher's guide to selected horror short stories of Stephen King; and the conference program. Contains a 152-item reference list of literary works.(NKA)

Download or read book My Son Marshall My Son Eminem written by Debbie Nelson and published by Phoenix Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To this day Debbie Nelson is asked why she abandoned her son Marshall as a boy, beat him repeatedly, and then had the audacity to dog him with lawsuits when he became rich and famous. My Son Martial, My Son Eminem is her rebuttal to these widely believed lies-a poignant story of a single mother who wanted the world for her son, only to see herself defamed and shut out when he got it. Debbie Nelson encouraged her talented son to chase success-even when Eminem hijacked her good name in his lyrics and press for "street cred," a movie that ultimately alienated them from each other by the notoriety and bitterness it spawned. In My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem, Debbie Nelson details the real story of Eminem's life from his earliest days in a small town in Missouri and his teenage years in Detroit, to his rise to stardom and very public mom-bashing.

Download or read book Poison written by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2006 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An embittered third wife, two children, a sister, and the friends and would-be biographer of a late writer and womanizer find themselves drawn into painful encounters as they each seek to appropriate the man's estate for their own purposes.

Download or read book Cocaine written by Dominic Streatfeild and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-06-26 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history of cocaine from its first medical uses to the worldwide issues it presents today.

Download or read book Drifting House written by Krys Lee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction. Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present. In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants' unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter. In the tradition of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Drifting House is an unforgettable work by a gifted new writer.

Download or read book How to Make Friends with the Dark written by Kathleen Glasgow and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces comes a novel about love and loss and learning how to continue when it feels like you're surrounded by darkness. "A rare and powerful novel." --Karen M. McManus, New York Times bestselling author of One of Us Is Lying and Two Can Keep a Secret Tiger's life changed with a simple phone call. Her mother has died. That's when darkness descended on her otherwise average life. Tiger's mother never talked about her father, and with no grandparents or aunts or uncles, her world is packed into a suitcase and moved to a foster home. And another. And another. Until hope surfaces in the shape of . . . a sister? Sometimes family comes in forms you don't recognize. But can Tiger learn to make friends with the darkness before it swallows her whole? "Stunning and beautifully written."-HelloGiggles "Breathtaking and heartbreaking." --Jennifer Niven, New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places

Download or read book A History of African American Autobiography written by Joycelyn Moody and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

Download or read book Patterns for College Writing written by Laurie G. Kirszner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 837 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurie Kirszner and Stephen Mandell, authors with nearly thirty years of experience teaching college writing, know what works in the classroom and have a knack for picking just the right readings. In Patterns for College Writing, they provide students with exemplary rhetorical models and instructors with class-tested selections that balance classic and contemporary essays. Along with more examples of student writing than any other reader, Patterns has the most comprehensive coverage of active reading, research, and the writing process, with a five-chapter mini-rhetoric; the clearest explanations of the patterns of development; and the most thorough apparatus of any rhetorical reader, all reasons why Patterns for College Writing is the best-selling reader in the country. And the new edition includes exciting new readings and expanded coverage of critical reading, working with sources, and research. It is now available as an interactive Bedford e-book and in a variety of other e-book formats that can be downloaded to a computer, tablet, or e-reader. Read the preface.

Download or read book The Lost Supreme written by Peter Benjaminson and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the months before she died, Florence Ballard, the spunky teenager who founded the most successful female vocal group in history--the Supremes--told her own side of the story. Recorded on tape, Flo shed light on all areas of her life, including the surprising identity of the man by whom she was raped prior to her entering the music business, the details of her love-hate relationship with Motown Records czar Berry Gordy, her drinking problem and pleas for help, a never-ending desire to be the Supremes' lead singer, and her attempts to get her life back on track after being brutally expelled from the group. This is a tumultuous and heartbreaking story of a world-famous performer whose life ended at the age of 32 as a lonely mother of three who had only recently recovered from years of poverty and despair.

Download or read book Mick written by Christopher Andersen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “He’s a smart little mother******,I’ll give him that.” —KEITH RICHARDS on MICK JAGGER IS he Jumpin’ Jack Flash? A Street Fighting Man? A Man of Wealth and Taste? All this, it turns out, and far more. By any definition, Mick Jagger is a force of nature, a complete original—and undeniably one of the dominant cultural figures of our time. Swaggering, strutting, sometimes elusive, always spellbinding, he grabbed us by our collective throat a half-century ago and—unlike so many of his gifted peers—never let go. For decades, Mick has jealously guarded his many shocking secrets—until now. As the Rolling Stones mark their 50th anniversary, journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author Christopher Andersen tears the mask from rock’s most complex and enigmatic icon in a no-holds-barred biography as impossible to ignore as Jagger himself. Based on interviews with friends, family members, fellow music legends, and industry insiders—as well as wives and legions of lovers—MICK sheds new light on a man whose very name defines an era and candidly reveals: —New details about Jagger’s jaw-dropping sexual exploits with more than four thousand women (including Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Uma Thurman, and France’s First Lady Carla Bruni)—as well as his encounters with several of rock’s biggest male stars. Also, the day Mick’s wife Jerry Hall and Keith Richards pleaded with Jagger to seek treatment for sex addiction. —The backstage drama surrounding Mick’s knighthood, and Jagger’s little-known ties to Britain’s Royal Family, including Prince William and Kate Middleton. —What he really thinks of today’s superstars—including Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, and Justin Bieber. —Never-before-revealed, behind-the-scenes accounts of his often turbulent relationships—from his band-mates, ravenous groupies, and rabid fans to such intimates as Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Bill Clinton, and others. —Cocaine, LSD, hashish, and speed—the flabbergasting truth about the extent of Jagger’s substance abuse, and how long it really went on. —A rare glimpse into Mick’s business dealings and the killer instinct that has enabled him to amass a personal fortune well in excess of $400 million. —The stormy “marriage” between Mick and Keith that nearly ran aground over Keith’s searing comments—and all the scandal, mayhem, excess, madness, and genius that went into making the Rolling Stones “the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band.” Like its subject, this book is explosive and riveting—the definitive biography of a living legend who has kept us thrilled, confounded, and astounded. THIS IS MICK.

Download or read book How Music Got Free written by Stephen Witt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet."--