Download or read book Alpine Apprentice written by Sarah Gorham and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys--so, too, the languages she's obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic. Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes's faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.
Download or read book Alpine Destiny written by Henry Melton and published by Wire Rim Books. This book was released on 2022-03-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centuries after the Plague on terraformed Luna, recovering humanity faces its greatest threat, an orbiting asteroid colony prepared to destroy them. Using his beamship to explore the far reaches of the forested world of Luna was a joy for Charles—being on the other side of the world put him out of the reach of the people who were trying to kill him. But duties at home called him back to Stampz, where a new Alpine refugee had appeared with a bad attitude and a ready blade when she felt threatened. Plus, he really didn’t mind making deliveries for Duke James who had provided a safe refuge for his people, but getting back into the public eye put him back in danger, and when he barely escaped destruction again, it seemed a great idea to play dead. But was that wise, or was letting his enemies think they had succeeded actually the worst thing he could have done? Alpine Destiny is the third and final book of the Lunar Alpine trilogy. Henry Melton has been crafting the Project history line since the 70s, building an alternate history of mankind that stretches from the current day to a new destiny among the stars.
Download or read book Your Eyes Will Be My Window written by Jodi Varon and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your Eyes Will Be My Window reclaims the two erasures of Esta Plat. Murdered in Ukraine by Nazi troops in 1942, evidence of the life of Esta Plat was preserved in a bundle of her letters until the letters were tossed into a dumpster and destroyed. Haunted by the inheritance of survivor's guilt and shame in a family that kept no Old World keepsakes except her grandmother's one-sentence memory of Esta Plat, Jodi Varonis compelled to sift through records of Europe's genocidal past. Pitting grandiose Holocaust memorials against the act of bearing witness, Varon confronts the limitations of history, folklore, archival data, and survivor testimonies. Seeking solace in ritual, she challenges her upbringing as an outlier Jew in the Rocky Mountain West to provide a window to the meaning of cultural displacement in immigrant communities. When an ethnic German woman's corpse was discarded across from Varon's rented flat in Baden-Württemberg, the homemade memorial for Nadine E. prompts a meditation on violence against women and girls as a weapon of suppression and war. The record of unfiltered emotions among Kindertransport survivors in Europe, journalists in Ludwigsburg, and archivists and guides in Jerusalem, Your Eyes Will Be My Window is a defiant exercise in honoring the lost.
Download or read book Nola Face written by Brooke Champagne and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2024-04 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in Brooke Champagne’s childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother Lala (half bruja, half santa) strictly circumscribed the girl’s present and future: become beautiful but know precisely when to use it; rationalize in English but love in God’s first language, the superior Spanish; and if you must write, Dios help you, at least make a subject of me. Champagne’s betrayal of these confounding dictates began before they were even spoken, and she soon started both writing and hiding the truth about whom she was becoming. The hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection trace the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. In these essays, Champagne and members of her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts, poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other’s secrets—first face-to-face, then on the page. They believe and doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves and where they come from, finally becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.
Download or read book Prodigals written by Sarah Beth Childers and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prodigals, a memoir inessays, explores the life of Sarah Beth Childers’swildly creative brother, who committed suicide at twenty-two, and her life with him and after him, through the lens of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. This book examines the ways Childers’s brother’s story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the archetype of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences.Childers foregrounds the Appalachian landscape in her narrative, depicting its hardwood forests, winding roads, mining-stained creeks and rivers, hill-clinging goats and cows, neighborhoods and trailer parks tucked between mountains. The Childers family’s fervent religious faith and resistance to medical intervention seemsnormal in this world, as doestheir conflicting desires to both escape from Appalachia and to stay forever at home. Weaving in the stories of other famous prodigals, including Branwell Brontë, the alcoholic brother of the Brontë sisters; Jimmy Swaggart, the fallen televangelist;Robert Crumb, her brother’s beloved author of sexist and racist comic books; and even herself, Childers examines the role of the prodigalwithin the intimate tapestry of family life and beyond—to its larger sociocultural meanings.
Download or read book My Father Frank written by Tony Smythe and published by Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2015-02-05 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Biography of a seminal, but often unheralded, figure in high-altitude climbing • Written by his son, Tony, Frank Smythe was himself a prolific author • Important addition to Mountaineer Books’ Legends and Lore series Frank Smythe, like Eric Shipton, is associated with early Everest explorations and was a member of three expeditions to the mountain. At a time when it was ungentlemanly to make a living by climbing, Smythe wrote more than a dozen popular books based upon his travels to high places -- one of them being the first ascent of Kamet (25,447 feet) in 1931, which was the first time any climber had gone beyond 25,000 feet. Two years later, he reached the highest point climbed on Everest (28,200 feet). He also climbed in Britain, the Alps, Canada, and Alaska. He and Graham Brown established two new routes on the Brevna face of Mont Blanc. In short, he has serious climbing credentials. As the title hints, this is a biography by Frank’s son Tony, but it isn’t based solely on personal memories; Frank was away from home for long periods and died when Tony was only fourteen. Instead, this book is based on thirteen years of research: Frank’s parents’ meeting and marriage, Frank’s early school years, his first climbs, his training for various jobs, his gradual rise to fame and fortune, his friendships, his war years, and his sudden death are all covered. Like his father, Tony has a strong understanding of how to tell a story that appeals to both climbers and general lovers of nonfiction adventures.
Download or read book Hoop written by Brian Doyle and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?" “‘Why don’t you write one?’ said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase." And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.
Download or read book The Age of Clear Profit written by John Griswold and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what’s left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is “clear profit,” John Griswold was starting over—-again—-in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends. What they found instead was a society “organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name,” which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism, gun love, and environmental degradation foretold the heightened problems of the United States in an era of deepening political division. Taking his cue from classical Asian poets such as Basho, Griswold begins to journey, to gain perspective, and to find his own narrow road. He travels around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and to writers’ homes in Russia and New Mexico; attends the protests at Standing Rock; walks the Basho Trail in Japan; and reports on the wholesale slaughter of a Texas rattlesnake roundup and the cruel weirdness of the Angola Prison Rodeo. Over eight years, Griswold bears witness, pays homage, and finds he is able to define and speak with gratitude about what is most important to him: his children, wholeheartedness, and the act of trying. In the gap between complexity and a little peace and quiet, there is a way to profit anew.
Download or read book Pandora s Garden written by Clinton Crockett Peters and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pandora's Garden profiles invasive or unwanted species in the natural world and examines how our treatment of these creatures sometimes parallels in surprising ways how we treat each other. Part essay, part nature writing, part narrative nonfiction, the chapters in Pandora's Garden are like the biospheres of the globe; as the successive chapters unfold, they blend together like ecotones, creating a microcosm of the world in which we sustain nonhuman lives but also contain them. There are many reasons particular flora and fauna may be unwanted, from the physical to the psychological. Sometimes they may possess inherent qualities that when revealed help us to interrogate human perception and our relationship to an unwanted other. Pandora's Garden is primarily about creatures that humans don't get along with, such as rattlesnakes and sharks, but the chapters also take on a range of other subjects, including stolen children in Australia, the treatment of illegal immigrants in Texas, and the disgust function of the human limbic system. Peters interweaves these diverse subjects into a whole that mirrors the evolving and interrelated world whose surprises and oddities he delights in revealing.
Download or read book My Withered Legs and Other Essays written by Sandra Gail Lambert and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2024-03 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a collection of personal essays by Sandra Gail Lambert that reflects upon her experience becoming a writer alongside discussions of disability, queerness, and aging. A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life. The essays chronicle times of interruption and then adaptation as the disability skill of always just figuring it out becomes tested with age and with illness. Throughout the book, Lambert engages with topics of ageism and ableism through storytelling rich with wit and contemplation. From childhood Lambert believed as a disabled person she was “ice floe material” rife for abandonment, and during the pandemic she ticks off the additional comorbidities—age, fatness, cancer, a heart attack—that groups her with the expendable. In the essay "Gimp Humor," she is threatened with a ticket for not coming to a full stop while strolling along in her wheelchair. Underpinning the humor is an analysis of whiteness and the wariness that can be lodged, or not, in a body. Other essays reimagine the meaning of "Old Lady Dabbler," recount kayaking among a hundred alligators, and tell the romantic, laden-with-power-dynamics tale of two lesbians in their sixties who fall in love. Another essay explores the family story, truth embellished with fiction, of Lambert’s mother finding an unexploded bomb nestled in her parents' bed. This tale of the London Blitz delves into the increasingly common experience of "emergence" after a disaster and the necessity of becoming, especially for marginalized communities, our own first responders.
Download or read book Southbound written by Anjali Enjeti and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult. The twenty essays of her debut collection, Southbound, tackle white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media’s role in political accountability, evangelical Christianity’s marriage to extremism, and the rise of nationalism worldwide. In our current era of great political strife, this timely collection by Enjeti, a journalist and organizer, paves the way for a path forward, one where identity drives coalition-building and social change.
Download or read book The Sum of Trifles written by Julia Ridley Smith and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Julia Ridley Smith’s parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her parents’ possessions? Smith’s wise and moving memoir in essays, The Sum of Trifles, peels back the layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned, from an eighteenth-century miniature to her father’s prosthetics. A vintage hi-fi provides a view of her often tense relationship with her father, whose love of jazz kindled her own artistic impulse. A Japanese screen embodies her mother’s principles of good taste and good manners, while an antebellum quilt prompts Smith to grapple with her family’s slaveholding legacy. Along the way, she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. The Sum of Trifles offers up dark humor and raw feeling, mixed with an erudite streak. It’s a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go.
Download or read book Exploded View written by Dustin Parsons and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Exploded View "graphic" essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. This mixture of the machine-like and the lyrical helps the reader engage with the author's mind and imagination more fully.
Download or read book It Takes a Worried Woman written by Debra Monroe and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book One by One the Stars written by Ned Stuckey-French and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2022-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book High Yella written by Steve Majors and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They called him “pale faced or mixed race.” They called him “light, bright, almost white.” But most of the time his family called him “high yella.” Steve Majors was the white passing, youngest son growing up in an all-Black family that struggled with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. High Yella is the poignant account of how he tried to leave his troubled childhood and family behind to create a new identity, only to discover he ultimately needed to return home to truly find himself. And after he and his husband adopt two Black daughters, he must set them on their own path to finding their place in the world by understanding the importance of where they come from. In his remarkable and moving memoir, Majors gathers the shards of a broken past to piece together a portrait of a man on an extraordinary journey toward Blackness, queerness, and parenthood. High Yella delivers its hard-won lessons on love, life, and family with exceptional grace.
Download or read book Made Holy written by Emily Arnason Casey and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-09 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In haunting prose that will follow you for days to come, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing. The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach. “I know this feeling,” she writes. “We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place.” Casey’s willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of “guardian to the lost.”
