Download or read book Last Chance Texaco written by Rickie Lee Jones and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A candid and colorful memoir by the singer, songwriter, and “Duchess of Coolsville” (Time). This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song . . . Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner and Rickie Lee Jones in her own words (Hilton Als). It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music. With candor and lyricism, she takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, her years as a teenage runaway, her legendary love affair with Tom Waits, and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee’s stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs—“Chuck E’s in Love,” “Weasel and the White Boys Cool,” “Danny’s All-Star Joint,” and “Easy Money”—but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, and a pimp with a heart of gold, and tales of her fabled ancestors. This intimate memoir by one of the most trailblazing and tenacious women in music is filled with never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, whose songs defied categorization and inspired American pop culture for decades. “A striking, distinctive self-portrait.” —The New York Times “Terrific . . . Jones is as fearless in prose as she is on stage.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart . . . but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[The] premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation.” —Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winner and author of White Girls

Download or read book The Last Chance Texaco written by Brent Hartinger and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The guy looked at me with a stare that would have frozen antifreeze. "You the new groupie, huh?" "Yeah," I said. "So?" "So no one wants you here. Why don't you go back where you came from?" I can't go back, I wanted to say. That was the thing about living in a group home. There was nowhere for me to go but forward. Brent Hartinger's second novel, a portrait of a subculture of teenagers that many people would like to forget, is as powerful and provocative as his first book, Geography Club.

Download or read book Last Chance Texaco written by Christine Pountney and published by London : Faber and Faber. This book was released on 2000 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John is a sensitive and wary 15-year-old. Born in Canada, but raised in California by a neglectful father, he finds solace in a relationship with the new girl in town. Their intensely romantic world is shattered by an experience that marks the first stop to an emotional and geographical journey.

Download or read book Breathing Fire written by Jaime Lowe and published by MCD. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires. Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire. California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.

Download or read book Endpapers written by Alexander Wolff and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerfully told story of family, honor, love, and truth . . . the beautiful and haunting stories told in this book transcend policy and politics.” —Beto O’Rourke A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. After fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.

Download or read book Our Unforming written by Cindy S. Lee and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian spiritual formation resources and teachings have primarily come from Western spiritual traditions. Our current approach to formation comes out of that way of thinking and being, communicating that the white experience of God is the norm and authority. In Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation, Cindy S. Lee proposes that we as the church need a new way to engage in spiritual formation. To thrive in our increasingly diverse contexts, we need an unforming and a reforming of our souls. We need to unform the ways Western-dominated church leaders have understood formation. We need to reform--to imagine and create a more intricate spirituality that includes diverse experiences of God. Our Unforming is organized into three cultural orientations and eight postures. Lee proposes that when we consider non-Western cultural ways of being--turning from linear to cyclical, from cerebral to experiential, and from individual to collective--the formation journey shifts. We live out these movements through postures, ways of entering into deeper spiritual transformation. The eight postures reflect our experience of time, generations, imagination, uncertainty, language, work, dependence, elders, and harmony. Lee offers a more robust spirituality to hold the complexities of a multicultural God and the God-human relationship. Our Unforming is sure to inspire further conversation as it shifts how we approach formation in our diverse communities.

Download or read book Beeswing written by Richard Thompson and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2021 “Thompson is a master showman . . . [Beeswing is] everything you’d hope a Richard Thompson autobiography would be . . . It’s both major and minor, dirge and ditty, light on its feet but packing a punch.” —The Wall Street Journal Now Featuring an Interview with Elvis Costello In this moving, immersive, and long-awaited memoir, beloved international music legend Richard Thompson recreates the spirit of his early years, where he found, and then lost, and then found his way again. Considered one of the top twenty guitarists of all time, Thompson also belongs in the songwriting pantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Randy Newman. Here the British folk musician takes us back to the late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity for both him and the world at large. During the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, just as he was discovering his passion for music, he formed the band Fairport Convention with some schoolmates and helped establish the genre of British folk rock. It was a thrilling period of massive tours, where Thompson was on the road in both the UK and the US, crossing paths with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix, as well as a time of heady and explosive creativity for Thompson, who wrote some of his most famous songs during this time. But as Thompson reveals, those eight years were also marked by upheaval and tragedy. Honest, moving, and compelling, Beeswing vividly captures the life of a remarkable man and musician during a period of artistic intensity, in a world on the cusp of change. “An absorbing, witty, often deliciously biting read, as all rock memoirs should be.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Download or read book The World of Bob Dylan written by Sean Latham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features 27 integrated essays that offer access to the art, life, and legacy of one of the world's most influential artists.

Download or read book How I Became Hettie Jones written by Hettie Jones and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation). Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry African American poet LeRoi Jones. This is her reminiscence of life in the awakening East Village in the era of the Beats, Black Power, and bohemia. “As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, NY, plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children’s book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Rememberings written by Sinéad O'Connor and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song. Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O'Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world famous--living a rock star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II's photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions. In Rememberings, O'Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother's Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U." Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad's memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.

Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Download or read book Wish You Were Dead written by Todd Strasser and published by Carolrhoda Lab ®. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I'll begin with Lucy. She is definitely first on the list. You can't believe how it feels to be in the cafeteria and turn around and there she is staring at me like I'm some disgusting bug or vermin. Does she really think I WANT to be this way? I hate you, Lucy. I really hate you. You are my #1 pick. I wish you were dead. The day after anonymous blogger Str-S-d wishes the popular girl would die, Lucy vanishes. The students of Soundview High are scared and worried. Especially frightened and wracked with guilt is Madison Archer, Lucy's friend and the last person to see her the night she disappeared. As days pass with no sign of the missing girl, even the attention of Tyler, an attractive new student, is not enough to distract Madison from her growing sense of foreboding. When two more popular students disappear after their names are mentioned on Str-S-d's blog, the residents of Soundview panic. Meanwhile, Madison receives anonymous notes warning that she could be next. Desperate to solve the mystery before anyone else disappears, Madison turns to Tyler, but can she trust him when it becomes clear that he knows more than he's sharing? The clock is ticking. Madison must uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearances . . . before her name appears in Str-S-d's blog. In the spirit of stories like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Todd Strasser updates the teen thriller for the techno age with Wish You Were Dead.

Download or read book Corrections to My Memoirs written by Michael Kun and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the fabrications of the misguided autobiographer in the title story to the unusual encounter of the narrator in "The Last Chance Texaco," the characters in this collection slowly learn the truth about the world. Kun reveals the hidden side of human existence and shows that the difference between what is perceived and what is real is often more significant than people like to admit.

Download or read book The Order of the Poison Oak written by Brent Hartinger and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powerful sequel to "Geography Club" is a humorous, hip, and thoroughly engaging story filled with skinny-dipping, making out, Indian legends, and the mystery of a secret society called The Order of the Poison Oak.

Download or read book Decoding Despacito written by Leila Cobo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behind the scenes look at the music that is currently the soundtrack of the globe, reported on and written by Leila Cobo, Billboard's VP of Latin Music and the world's ultimate authority on popular Latin music. Decoding "Despacito" tracks the stories behind the biggest Latin hits of the past fifty years. From the salsa born and bred in the streets of New York City, to Puerto Rican reggaetón and bilingual chart-toppers, this rich oral history is a veritable treasure trove of never-before heard anecdotes and insight from a who's who of Latin music artists, executives, observers, and players. Their stories, told in their own words, take you inside the hits, to the inner sanctum of the creative minds behind the tracks that have defined eras and become hallmarks of history. FEATURING THE STORIES BEHIND SONGS BY: José Feliciano • Los Tigres Del Norte • Julio Iglesias • Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine • Willie Colón • Juan Luis Guerra • Selena • Los Del Río • Carlos Vives • Elvis Crespo • Ricky Martin • Santana • Shakira • Daddy Yankee • Marc Anthony • Enrique Iglesias with Descemer Bueno and Gente De Zona • Luis Fonsi with Daddy Yankee • J Balvin with Willy William • Rosalía

Download or read book The Lincoln Highway written by Amor Towles and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than ONE MILLION copies sold A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bill Gates and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year “Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth.” —The New York Times Book Review “A classic that we will read for years to come.” —Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club “Fantastic. Set in 1954, Towles uses the story of two brothers to show that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.” —Bill Gates “A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable.” —NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. “Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes. Towles is not a one-trick pony. Like all the best storytellers, he has range. He takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men. He seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as an interstate highway. But, he suggests, when something (or someone) tries to steer us off course, it is possible to take the wheel.” – Bill Gates

Download or read book Texaco written by Patrick Chamoiseau and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1997 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature." --Milan Kundera Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us "Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience. A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, "Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.