Download or read book Memoirs of a Tortoise written by Devin Scillian and published by Sleeping Bear Press. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oliver the tortoise has had his human, Ike, for a very, very long time now. In fact, they're the same age--80 years old--and practically twins. They both enjoy the slowness of the garden, cool water from the hose on a hot day, and a nice slice of honeydew melon. But when Ike stops visiting the garden, Oliver wonders why his pet has left him so soon. So he makes the long journey to see his mother ten gardens away--she will certainly have the answer. This tender story from the author and illustrator that brought us Memoirs of a Goldfish reminds us to cherish all the days we have with our pets and loved ones.
Download or read book My Old Man and the Mountain written by Leif Whittaker and published by Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • A fresh perspective on a famous father and a legacy forged on the icy slopes of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak In 1963, the world followed the first American Mount Everest Expedition, and watched as “Big Jim” Whittaker became the first American to stand on top of the world. He returned home a hero. My Old Man and the Mountain is Leif Whittaker’s engaging and humorous story of what it was like to “grow up Whittaker”—the youngest son of Jim Whittaker and Dianne Roberts, in an extended family of accomplished climbers. He shares glimpses of his upbringing and how the pressure to climb started early on. Readers learn of his first adventures with family in the Olympic Mountains and on Mount Rainier; his close yet at times competitive relationship with his brother Joss; his battle with a serious back injury; and his efforts to stand apart from his father’s legacy. With wry honesty he depicts being a recent college grad, still living in his parents’ home and trying to find a purpose in life—digging ditches, building houses, selling t-shirts to tourists—until a chance encounter leads to the opportunity to climb Everest, just like his father did. Leif heads to Nepal with all the excitement, irony, boredom, and trepidation that are part of high-altitude climbing. Well-known guides Dave Hahn and Melissa Arnot figure prominently in his story, as does “Big Jim.” But Leif’s story is not his father’s story. It’s a unique coming of age tale on the steep slopes of Everest and a climbing adventure that lights the imagination and fills an emotional human endeavor with universal meaning.
Download or read book Little Failure written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Newsday • Salon • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • Esquire (UK) • GQ (UK) After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor wrote his first novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page. In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly. As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being. Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world. Praise for Little Failure “Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times Book Review “A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary Karr “Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “Literary gold . . . bruisingly funny.”—Vogue “A giant success.”—Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Memoirs of a Rugby Playing Man written by Jay Atkinson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart-thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, bestselling author Jay Atkinson describes his thirty-five year odyssey in the sport-from his rough and rowdy days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. Jay has played in more than 500 matches, for which he's suffered three broken ribs, a detached retina, a fractured cheekbone and orbital bone, four deadened teeth, and a dislocated ankle. Written in the style of Siegried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Atkinson's book explains why it was all worth it--the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insights he has gained from them.
Download or read book The Home Place written by J. Drew Lanham and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic
Download or read book Memoirs of an Invisible Man written by Harry F. Saint and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memoirs of a Man s Maiden Years written by N. O. Body and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first translation into English of a startling 1907 memoir of a writer who was born a boy, was raised as a girl, and who lived as a man. Who was the real N.O. Body, and why did he go to such lengths to hide not just his name but his Jewish identity?
Download or read book Education of a Wandering Man written by Louis L'Amour and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his decision to leave school at fifteen to roam the world, to his recollections of life as a hobo on the Southern Pacific Railroad, as a cattle skinner in Texas, as a merchant seaman in Singapore and the West Indies, and as an itinerant bare-knuckled prizefighter across small-town America, here is Louis L'Amour's memoir of his lifelong love affair with learning—from books, from yondering, and from some remarkable men and women—that shaped him as a storyteller and as a man. Like classic L'Amour fiction, Education of a Wandering Man mixes authentic frontier drama--such as the author's desperate efforts to survive a sudden two-day trek across the blazing Mojave desert--with true-life characters like Shanghai waterfront toughs, desert prospectors, and cowboys whom Louis L'Amour met while traveling the globe. At last, in his own words, this is a story of a one-of-a-kind life lived to the fullest . . . a life that inspired the books that will forever enable us to relive our glorious frontier heritage.
Download or read book Drinking with Men written by Rosie Schaap and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NPR “Best Books of 2013” BookPage Best Books of 2013 Library Journal Best Books of 2013: Memoir Flavorwire 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2013 A vivid, funny, and poignant memoir that celebrates the distinct lure of the camaraderie and community one finds drinking in bars. Rosie Schaap has always loved bars: the wood and brass and jukeboxes, the knowing bartenders, and especially the sometimes surprising but always comforting company of regulars. Starting with her misspent youth in the bar car of a regional railroad, where at fifteen she told commuters’ fortunes in exchange for beer, and continuing today as she slings cocktails at a neighborhood joint in Brooklyn, Schaap has learned her way around both sides of a bar and come to realize how powerful the fellowship among regular patrons can be. In Drinking with Men, Schaap shares her unending quest for the perfect local haunt, which takes her from a dive outside Los Angeles to a Dublin pub full of poets, and from small-town New England taverns to a character-filled bar in Manhattan’s TriBeCa. Drinking alongside artists and expats, ironworkers and soccer fanatics, she finds these places offer a safe haven, a respite, and a place to feel most like herself. In rich, colorful prose, Schaap brings to life these seedy, warm, and wonderful rooms. Drinking with Men is a love letter to the bars, pubs, and taverns that have been Schaap’s refuge, and a celebration of the uniquely civilizing source of community that is bar culture at its best.
Download or read book Old In Art School written by Nell Painter and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is “a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age” (Essence). Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school––in her sixties––to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this "glorious achievement––bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives" (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).
Download or read book The Man I Never Met written by Adam Schefter and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful true story of loss and hope by one of the biggest names in sports media, Adam Schefter's The Man I Never Met. On September 11, 2001, Joe Maio went to work in the north tower of the World Trade Center. He never returned, leaving behind a wife, Sharri, and 15-month old son, Devon. Five years later, Sharri remarried, and Devon welcomed a new dad into his life. For thousands, the whole country really, 9/11 is a day of grief. For Adam and Sharri Maio Schefter and their family it’s not just a day of grief, but also hope. This is a story of 9/11, but it’s also the story of 9/12 and all the days after. Life moved on. Pieces were picked up. New dreams were dreamed. The Schefters are the embodiment of that. The Man I Never Met will give voice to all those who have chosen to keep living. It’s gratifying and beautiful. But also messy and hard. Like most families. Except that one day every year history comes roaring back. How do you embrace that? How do you honor that? This book is also a peek at Adam Schefter ("Schefty"), the man behind the headlines and injury reports; a real person who has a real family. It will follow in the path of other ESPN books by Tom Rinaldi and the late Stuart Scott – books that have transcended sport to examine the raw emotion of life.
Download or read book Based on a True Story written by Norm Macdonald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Driving, wild and hilarious” (The Washington Post), here is the incredible “memoir” of the legendary actor, gambler, raconteur, and Saturday Night Live veteran. When Norm Macdonald, one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, was approached to write a celebrity memoir, he flatly refused, calling the genre “one step below instruction manuals.” Norm then promptly took a two-year hiatus from stand-up comedy to live on a farm in northern Canada. When he emerged he had under his arm a manuscript, a genre-smashing book about comedy, tragedy, love, loss, war, and redemption. When asked if this was the celebrity memoir, Norm replied, “Call it anything you damn like.”
Download or read book Apropos of Nothing written by Woody Allen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Annie and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.
Download or read book Hold Still written by Sally Mann and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.
Download or read book Stargazing written by Peter Hill and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Peter Hill, a student at Dundee College of Art, answered an advert in The Scotsman seeking lighthouse keepers, little did he imagine that within a month he would be living with three men he didn't know in a lighthouse on Pladda, a small remote island off the west coast of Scotland. Hill was nineteen, it was 1973 and, with his head fed by Vietnam, Zappa, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Watergate and Coronation Street, he spent six months on various lighthouses, "keeping" with all manner of unusual and fascinating people. Within thirty years this way of life was to have disappeared entirely. The resulting book is a charming and beautifully written memoir that is not only a heartfelt lament for Hill's own youth and innocence but also for a simpler and more honest age.
Download or read book This Old Man written by Roger Angell and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Angell, the acclaimed New Yorker writer and editor, steps up with a selection of writings that celebrate a view from the tenth decade of an engaged, vibrant life. Whether it’s a Fourth of July in rural Maine, the opening game of the 2015 World Series, editorial exchanges with John Updike, a letter to a son, or his award-winning essay on aging, “This Old Man,” what links the pieces is Angell’s unique perceptions and humor, his utter absence of self-pity, and his appreciation of friends and colleagues encountered over a fruitful career unlike any other.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man written by Albert Jay Nock and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2007 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albert Jay Nock, perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers, set out to write his autobiography but he ended up doing much more. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture, and does so almost inadvertently. His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic.
