Download or read book Holy Land written by D. J. Waldie and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-04-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describing childhood in suburban California, a poignant portrait of growing up in the grid of tract houses and carefully measured streets illustrates the good, the bad, and the difficulties found in being ordinary.
Download or read book Close to Home written by D. J. Waldie and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Siamese cat beneath a clotheslinethree women with linked arms standing on the front lawna man drying his hands on a dish towel in front of the kitchen stove. These scenes are part of Close to Home and the accompanying the Getty Museum exhibition held from October 12, 2004 to January 16, 2005, which celebrate snapshots--"found" photographs by anonymous photographers--that capture everyday life in all of its joy, banality, and mystery. Taken between 1930 and the mid-1960s, these photographs, most of them in black-and-white, create an unpretentious portrait of suburban American life by untrained photographers whose images can be unexpectedly lyrical and moving. Complementing the photographs is an essay by noted Southern California writer D. J. Waldie. The snapshot, Waldie writes, "depending on who's doing the looking, is horrifying, hilarious, pointless, or suffused with yearning." Waldie speculates on the meanings and implications of the snapshots in this book and of snapshots generally, which he sees as expressions of "the hunger of memory."
Download or read book Blue Sky Dream written by David Beers and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2012-05-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, award-winner David Beers offers a powerful, personal vision of the rise and fall of the American middle class. Here is a dazzling literary chronicle of a family, a people, and a nation: the “blue sky tribe” of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone. Blue Sky Dream is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of seeing the recent past with stunning clarity. David Beers explores issues that define our times—downsizing, middle-class anxiety, the profound anger with government, the sense that something has gone awry with the United States—with such skill, personal immediacy, and compassion that readers will see their own histories in his prose. Blue Sky Dream can rightly be called a communal memoir, because in telling his family’s tale—growing tensions and disillusionment in their suburban paradise, a son rejecting his parents’ values, one sudden and inexplicable moment of violence—Beers tells the story of his people, the blue sky tribe “who imagined ourselves to be living the inevitable future, and are very surprised today to discover we were but a strange and aberrant moment that is now receding into history.”
Download or read book Hiding Out written by Tina Alexis Allen and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Hiding Out] brims with drunkenness, sexuality and urgency...a “can’t-put-down” read." — Washington Post Actress and playwright Tina Alexis Allen’s audacious memoir unravels her privileged suburban Catholic upbringing that was shaped by her formidable father—a man whose strict religious devotion and dedication to his large family hid his true nature and a life defined by deep secrets and dangerous lies. The youngest of thirteen children in a devout Catholic family, Tina Alexis Allen grew up in 1980s suburban Maryland in a house ruled by her stern father, Sir John, an imposing, British-born authoritarian who had been knighted by the Pope. Sir John supported his large family running a successful travel agency that specialized in religious tours to the Holy Land and the Vatican for pious Catholics. But his daughter, Tina, was no sweet and innocent Catholic girl. A smart-mouthed high school basketball prodigy, she harbored a painful secret: she liked girls. When Tina was eighteen her father discovered the truth about her sexuality. Instead of dragging her to the family priest and lecturing her with tearful sermons about sin and damnation, her father shocked her with his honest response. He, too, was gay. The secret they shared about their sexuality brought father and daughter closer, and the two became trusted confidants and partners in a relationship that eventually spiraled out of control. Tina and Sir John spent nights dancing in gay clubs together, experimenting with drugs, and casual sex—all while keeping the rest of their family in the dark. Outside of their wild clandestine escapades, Sir John made Tina his heir apparent at the travel agency. Drawn deeper into the business, Tina soon became suspicious of her father’s frequent business trips, his multiple passports and cache of documents, and the briefcases full of cash that mysteriously appeared and quickly vanished. Digging deeper, she uncovered a disturbing facet beyond the stunning double-life of the father she thought she knew. A riveting and cinematic true tale stranger and twistier than fiction, Hiding Out is an astonishing story of self-discovery, family, secrets, and the power of the truth to set us free.
Download or read book The Opposite Field written by Jesse Katz and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a home. Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his home. While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors, and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a good woman. Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son, Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and, ultimately, a man. This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive.
Download or read book Real City written by D. J. Waldie and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an exploration of one of the most visited Real Cities in the world, photojournalist Marissa Roth has captured the heart of the City of Angels in photographs that at once capture its up sides and its down sides. More than just palm trees and sunsets, these black-and-white photos define the Real City, as only an artistic genius can. With lyrical text by the award-winning author D.J. Waldie, this is more than a photo book - it grabs a culture and exposes it to the world. Illustrated in duotone throughout.
Download or read book The Optimistic Decade written by Heather Abel and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Bighearted, wise, and beautifully written, this sharply observant exploration of idealism gone awry engages at every level.” —Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Archangel This entertaining and assured debut novel about a utopian summer camp and its charismatic leader asks smart questions about good intentions gone terribly wrong. Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it. There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and his son, Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb and who now want it back. There is Rebecca Silver, determined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of both Llamalo and new love; and there is David, a teenager who has turned Llamalo into his personal religion. Heather Abel’s novel is a brilliant exploration of the bloom and fade of idealism and how it forever changes one’s life.
Download or read book Metropolis written by Ben Wilson and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.
Download or read book Galileo s Daughter written by Dava Sobel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics- indeed of modern science altogether." Galileo's Daughter also presents a stunning portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me." Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Dava Sobel's previous book Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story
Download or read book The Elements of San Joaquin written by Gary Soto and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award nominee Gary Soto's first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California's fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences—of the poet as a young man, his friends, family, and neighbors—the poems are spare but expansive, with Soto's voice as important as ever. This welcome new edition has been expanded with a crucial selection of complementary poems (some previously unpublished) and a new introduction by the author.
Download or read book Where We are Now written by D. J. Waldie and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles is the second book by D. J. Waldie, one of the most gifted writers on the American scene. As Patt Morrison notes in her foreword, "The suburb is America's lifeline and its punchline, and Waldie is its bard." Few observers can present the facts of everyday life with the texture and emotion of a symphony, the way Waldie does.
Download or read book Holy Water written by James P. Othmer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Tuhoe is the quintessential twenty-first-century man. He has a vague, well-compensated job working for a multinational conglomerate. He has a beautiful wife and an idyllic home in the suburbs. But things change when Henry's boss offers him a choice: go to the tiny, about-to-be-globalized Kingdom of Galado to oversee the launch of a new customer-service call center for a bottled water company, or lose the job with no severance, Henry takes the transfer. Once in Galado, a land both spiritual and corrupt, Henry wrestles with first-world moral conundrums, the attention of a megalomaniacal monarch, and a woman intent on redeeming both his soul and her country.
Download or read book Crabgrass Frontier written by Kenneth T. Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1987-04-16 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.
Download or read book The 7th Man written by Melanie Rae Thon and published by New Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In stark, fevered, poetic lines, Valen Arnoux confesses his intimate participation in 131 executions. As a prison guard and member of the strap down team, he is compelled to rehearse, to perfect his timing and skills, to synchronize his movements with the precise choreography of the team. Each member takes his turn playing the role of the condemned, "because no body is the same, and every man responds differently." These theatrical performances catalyze an uncanny sense of identification-any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother...
Download or read book California Romantica written by Diane Keaton and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California Romantica features the most important, yet rarely seen, residential exemplars of the California Mission and Spanish Colonial styles, by such noted architects as George Washington Smith, Wallace Neff, Richard Requa, Lilian Rice, and Paul R. Williams, among others. From whitewashed stucco walls and cloistered patios to tile roofs and sumptuous gardens, each house shown is a rare masterpiece, splendidly appointed with authentic Monterey furniture, California tile, and Navajo rugs. Among the magnificent seaside estates, canyon villas, and courtyard bungalows shown is Diane Keaton’s former home in Beverly Hills, which she thoughtfully restored with noted designer Stephen Shadley, and for which she has been recognized as a committed preservationist. She brings her cinematic eye, a keen sense of natural drama, and a profound appreciation for the nuances of shadow and light to the elucidation of these buildings, through the selection of specially commissioned photography. Authoritative text by D. J. Waldie lucidly explicates the architecture and provides an intimate tour of a historic and distinctly Californian lifestyle.
Download or read book The Age of Miracles written by Karen Thompson Walker and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY People ∙ O: The Oprah Magazine ∙ Financial Times ∙ Kansas City Star ∙ BookPage ∙ Kirkus Reviews ∙ Publishers Weekly ∙ Booklist NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A stunner.”—Justin Cronin “It’s never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass—it’s the ones you don’t expect at all,” says Julia, in this spellbinding novel of catastrophe and survival by a superb new writer. Luminous, suspenseful, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles tells the haunting and beautiful story of Julia and her family as they struggle to live in a time of extraordinary change. On an ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia awakes to discover that something has happened to the rotation of the earth. The days and nights are growing longer and longer; gravity is affected; the birds, the tides, human behavior, and cosmic rhythms are thrown into disarray. In a world that seems filled with danger and loss, Julia also must face surprising developments in herself, and in her personal world—divisions widening between her parents, strange behavior by her friends, the pain and vulnerability of first love, a growing sense of isolation, and a surprising, rebellious new strength. With crystalline prose and the indelible magic of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker gives us a breathtaking portrait of people finding ways to go on in an ever-evolving world. “Gripping drama . . . flawlessly written; it could be the most assured debut by an American writer since Jennifer Egan’s Emerald City.”—The Denver Post “Pure magnificence.”—Nathan Englander “Provides solace with its wisdom, compassion, and elegance.”—Curtis Sittenfeld “Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.
Download or read book Spirit Car written by Diane Wilson and published by Minnesota Historical Society. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A child of a typical 1950s suburb unearths her mother's hidden heritage, launching a rich and magical exploration of her own identity and her family's powerful Native American past.
