Download or read book Au Paris written by Rachel Spencer and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the success of The Nanny Diaries and the super-hot trend of blogging, Spencer brings together the hilarious misadventures and bitter-sweet stories of self-discovery that made Rachel Spencer's Houston Chronicle blog so popular. A sweet and humorous memoir charting one young woman's personal adventure - a story of self-discovery, independence and the once-in-a-lifetime chance to realise a dream. Rachel Spencer's honest and insightful writing allows readers a peek at Paris - and at life - from a fresh and heart-warming perspective.
Download or read book The Diary of an American Au Pair written by Marjorie Leet Ford and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After losing her advertising job in San Francisco and canceling her wedding (though not her engagement) an unencumbered Melissa, who harbors grand illusions about life in England, heads off to a new job as au pair to the family of a Member of Parliament. But the minorly aristocratic Haig-Ereildouns’ household falls far short of Melissa’s imaginings. Mrs. Haig-Ereildoun refers to Melissa as "her American girl" with a mixture of pride and contempt, expects her to share the children’s bathwater and, most importantly, entreats Melissa to " try to speak as we do." Heaven forbid the children pick up an American accent! But then there is Nanny, the gloriously eccentric octogenarian who raised Mrs. H-E, who offers comfort, and much comic relief; nine-year-old Trevor, Melissa’s charge, whose wisdom and companionship redeem many a lonely day; and her budding friendship with a mysterious Englishman who is miles from her fiancé in every way. Melissa converses with Scotish fishermen, breakfasts with a French Minister of Culture, frequents island castles and sixteenth century manor houses, all the while straddling her ill-defined role (somewhere between houseguest and servant) with humor and grace. Melissa’s immersion in this unforgettable world teaches her more than she could possibly have imagined not only about the culture she has come to inhabit but, most importantly, about herself.
Download or read book French Illusions written by Linda Kovic-Skow and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1979 and twenty-one-year-old Linda Kovic needs to learn a language fast in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a flight attendant. Broke yet determined, she chooses French immersion and contracts to become an au pair for a wealthy family in the Loire Valley. Yielding to poor judgment, she lies on her application and claims to speak basic French, confident she'll be forgiven once she arrives at the Chateau de Montclair. As she struggles to adapt to her challenging new environment with the hard-to-please Madame Dubois and her two incomprehensible children, Linda signs up and attends language classes at the local university. When she encounters, Adam, a handsome young student, her life becomes more complicated-much more complicated-adding fuel to her internal battle for independence. French Illusions: My Story as an American Au Pair in the Loire Valley is the first of two books based on the author's diaries.
Download or read book Salvaged Pages written by Alexandra Zapruder and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of youth “Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.”—Publishers Weekly “These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken heart for many days and many nights.”—Elie Wiesel This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust. The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact. Simultaneously, a multimedia edition incorporates a wealth of new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in middle- and high-school classrooms.
Download or read book Of Love and Paris written by John Baxter and published by Museyon Inc.. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French may not have invented love but they perfected it, and the laboratory in which they did so was Paris. James Joyce called the city "a lamp for lovers, hung in the wood of the world." From the Middle Ages, Paris has drawn those who wish to experience the limits of love – intellectual, spiritual, carnal. In Of Love and Paris, John Baxter turns the spotlight on some of them, from the medieval troubadours who seduced court ladies with flowery verse to Man Ray, whose camera conferred immortality on his lover and model Kiki, and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, who turned their moans of sexual pleasure into music. The grandes horizontales of the belle epoque, accomplished technicians of eroticism who drew the rich and powerful of both sexes to Paris, had their modern incarnation in Gala, who left the bed she shared with poet Paul Éluard and painter Max Ernst to seduce the young Salvador DalÍ. Love in Paris, however, can take unexpected forms. Was the devotion to Marcel Proust of his housekeeper CÉleste Albaret any less passionate than that of Anne Desclos to Jean Paulhan, for whom she composed "the strangest love letter any man ever received"—the notorious novel Story of O, the predecessor of Fifty Shades of Grey? Love has a multitude of faces, and some of the most mysterious and surprising are unveiled in Of Love and Paris.
Download or read book Daddy written by Emma Cline and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Girls comes a “brilliant” (The New York Times) story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience. “Daddy’s ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent.”—Esquire NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY An absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest. In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one’s choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy, Emma Cline’s sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives.
Download or read book The Character of Rain written by Amelie Nothomb and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. In Amelie Nothomb's new novel, The Character of Rain, we learn that divinity is a difficult thing from which to recover, particularly if, like the child in this story, you have spent the first tow and a half years of life in a nearly vegetative state. "I remember everything that happened to me after the age of two and one-half," the narrator tells us. She means this literally. Once jolted out of her plant-like , tube-like trance (to the ecstatic relief of her concerned parents), the child bursts into existence, absorbing everything that Japan, where her father works as a diplomat, has to offer. Life is an unfolding pageant of delight and danger, a ceaseless exploration of pleasure and the limits of power. Most wondrous of all is the discovery of water: oceans, seas, pools, puddles, streams, ponds, and, perhaps most of all, rain-one meaning of the Japanese character for her name. Hers is an amphibious life. The Character of Rain evokes the hilarity, terror, and sanctity of childhood. As she did in the award-winning, international bestesller Fear and Trembling, Nothomb grounds the novel in the outlines of her experiences in Japan, but the self-portrait that emerges from these pages is hauntingly universal. Amelie Nothomb's novels are unforgettable immersion experiences, leaving you both holding your breath with admiration, your lungs aching, and longing for more.
Download or read book Do Try to Speak as We Do written by Marjorie Leet Ford and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-03-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It seems like the perfect job: an upper middle class English family desperately needs a nanny. The father is an aspiring novelist, the children are well-heeled, and the mother's accent radiates with charm over the transatlantic phone. So young Melissa jumps at the chance to travel overseas and live an aristocratic life of tea and crumpets. But her romantic notions are shattered when she becomes an unwitting target of the family's genteel snobbery, icy wrath, and ridiculous misunderstandings. Melissa's letters home cast a sharp eye and quick wit on the family's bizarre cast of friends and relatives, but she eventually learns that a little bit of understanding and tolerance can go a long way - and can even teach her more about herself.
Download or read book Women and the City in French Literature and Culture written by Siobhán McIlvanney and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interdisciplinarity: this book covers a range of media and genres from cinema to journalism to novels and a range of disciplines from feminism, film studies, Francophone studies, history, etc., which allows readers to access a particularly extensive range of disciplines within one volume and to make informed comparisons. Transhistoricism: the chronological range of essays included in this journal from the medieval period through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present demonstrates that women have always managed to access their own territory within the masculinised urban environment and this encourages readers to rethink previous gendered assumptions about women and the city. Feminism: the essays here form part of the wider movement in academic research to redress the gendered imbalance of perspectives on a range of subjects: here allowing us to look anew at French and Francophone culture and history as part of this feminist rewriting.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography 3 Volume Set written by Lynne Warren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 1849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography explores the vast international scope of twentieth-century photography and explains that history with a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary manner. This unique approach covers the aesthetic history of photography as an evolving art and documentary form, while also recognizing it as a developing technology and cultural force. This Encyclopedia presents the important developments, movements, photographers, photographic institutions, and theoretical aspects of the field along with information about equipment, techniques, and practical applications of photography. To bring this history alive for the reader, the set is illustrated in black and white throughout, and each volume contains a color plate section. A useful glossary of terms is also included.
Download or read book Sarah s Key written by Tatiana de Rosnay and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-06-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American journalist researches the notorious roundup of Parisian Jews and uncovers her French family's war-era secrets.
Download or read book Vivian Maier written by Pamela Bannos and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. When the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives, Maier shot to stardom almost overnight. Bannos contrasts Maier's life has been created, mostly by the men who have profited from her work. Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it.
Download or read book Uneasy Street written by Rachel Sherman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising and revealing look at how today’s elite view their wealth and place in society From TV’s “real housewives” to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers—from hedge fund financiers and artists to stay-at-home mothers—to examine their lifestyle choices and understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us.
Download or read book The Perfect Parents Handbook written by Jennifer Conlin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest must-have companion for any parent who has ever yearned for a Bugaboo or forked over five figures for preschool tuition, this is the "preppy handbook," complete with 70 hilarious photos and graphics.
Download or read book Catalogue of Books in English French and German written by Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book No Promise for Tomorrow written by Thomas E. Simmons and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the third volume of the Quinn family saga, Ansel Quinn is caught in an international scandal with reverberations across two world wars. In 1916, the world waits with bated breath to see if the United States will enter the Great War raging in Europe. Meanwhile, President Wilson campaigns for reelection on his record of keeping America out of the fray. Caught in the middle is Maj. Ansel Quinn of Mississippi, assigned to the French army headquarters in Paris as a neutral observer. At home, Ansel’s wife, Isabel, has been left to manage the family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi as well as their sugar plantation in Cuba. It is a trial to be without her husband, but only the beginning of the hardships she will face. When Ansel is wounded on the frontlines of the Somme—far from where any neutral observer should be—it sets off international intrigue that could change the course of history. In No Promise for Tomorrow, the Quinn family struggles across the decades between World War I and World War II—a period that includes the influenza epidemic, the Roaring Twenties, prohibition, and the Great Depression.
Download or read book The Nanny Diaries written by Emma McLaughlin and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-02-06 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by two former nannies, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries deftly punctures the glamour of Manhattan's upper class. Now a major motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson and Laura Linney. Wanted: One young woman to take care of four-year-old boy. Must be cheerful, enthusiastic and selfless--bordering on masochistic. Must relish sixteen-hour shifts with a deliberately nap-deprived preschooler. Must love getting thrown up on, literally and figuratively, by everyone in his family. Must enjoy the delicious anticipation of ridiculously erratic pay. Mostly, must love being treated like fungus found growing out of employers Hermès bag. Those who take it personally need not apply. Who wouldn't want this job? Struggling to graduate from NYU and afford her microscopic studio apartment, Nanny takes a position caring for the only son of the wealthy X family. She rapidly learns the insane amount of juggling involved to ensure that a Park Avenue wife who doesn't work, cook, clean, or raise her own child has a smooth day. When the Xs' marriage begins to disintegrate, Nanny ends up involved way beyond the bounds of human decency or good taste. Her tenure with the X family becomes a nearly impossible mission to maintain the mental health of their four-year-old, her own integrity and, most importantly, her sense of humor. Over nine tense months, Mrs. X and Nanny perform the age-old dance of decorum and power as they test the limits of modern-day servitude.