Download or read book My Crazy Century written by Ivan Klíma and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Waiting for the Dark traces his life under the totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Communism, describing his four-year imprisonment in the Terezin concentration camp, the revolt of young writers against socialist realism and his awareness-raising travels through free regions of Europe.
Download or read book My Crazy Century written by Ivan Klíma and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-11-04 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate, politically vital memoir by the acclaimed Czech author “of enormous power and originality” explores his life under Nazi and Communist regimes (The New York Times Book Review). In the 1930s on the outskirts of Prague, Ivan Klíma was unaware of his concealed Jewish heritage until the invading Nazis transported him and his family to the Terezín concentration camp. Miraculously, most of them survived. But they returned home to a city that was falling into the grip of another totalitarian ideology: Communism. Along this harrowing journey, Klíma discovered his love of literature and matured as a writer. But as the regime further encroached on daily life, arresting his father and censoring his work, Klíma recognized the party for what it was: a deplorable, colossal lie. The true nature of oppression became clear to him and many of his peers, among them Josef Škvorecký, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel. From the brief hope of freedom during the Prague Spring of 1968 to Charter 77 and the eventual collapse of the regime in 1989’s Velvet Revolution, Klíma’s revelatory account provides a profoundly rich personal and national history. Klima’s memoir provides “a sweeping, revealing look at one man’s personal struggle as writer and individual, set against the backdrop of political turmoil” (Booklist) and a “searching exploration of a warped era . . . rich in irony—and dogged hope.” (Publishers Weekly).
Download or read book My Crazy Century written by Ivan Klima and published by . This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book My Crazy Beautiful Life written by Ke$ha and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pop singer explores her life and career.
Download or read book An Abbreviated Life written by Ariel Leve and published by Harper. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mesmerizing... A portrait of something familiar gone wildly, tragically awry." —The New York Times “Sometimes, a child is born to a parent who can’t be a parent, and, like a seedling in the shade, has to grow toward a distant sun. Ariel Leve’s spare and powerful memoir will remind us that family isn’t everything—kindness and nurturing are.” —Gloria Steinem Ariel Leve grew up in Manhattan with an eccentric mother she describes as “a poet, an artist, a self-appointed troublemaker and attention seeker.” Leve learned to become her own parent, taking care of herself and her mother’s needs. There would be uncontrolled, impulsive rages followed with denial, disavowed responsibility, and then extreme outpourings of affection. How does a child learn to feel safe in this topsyturvy world of conditional love? Leve captures the chaos and lasting impact of a child’s life under siege and explores how the coping mechanisms she developed to survive later incapacitated her as an adult. There were material comforts, but no emotional safety, except for summer visits to her father’s home in South East Asia-an escape that was terminated after he attempted to gain custody. Following the death of a loving caretaker, a succession of replacements raised Leve—relationships which resulted in intense attachment and loss. It was not until decades later, when Leve moved to other side of the world, that she could begin to emancipate herself from the past. In a relationship with a man who has children, caring for them yields a clarity of what was missing. In telling her haunting story, Leve seeks to understand the effects of chronic psychological maltreatment on a child’s developing brain, and to discover how to build a life for herself that she never dreamed possible: An unabbreviated life.
Download or read book Tree of Smoke written by Denis Johnson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date. Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.
Download or read book The Third Reconstruction written by Peniel E. Joseph and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol. America’s first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last—an opportunity to choose hope over fear.
Download or read book In Love written by Amy Bloom and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir of a love that leads two people to find a courageous way to part—and a woman’s struggle to go forward in the face of loss—that “enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude” (The Washington Post) “A pleasure to read . . . Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life. . . . Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.”—USA Today ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace. In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing—its ending. Written in Bloom’s captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.
Download or read book Just as I Am written by Cicely Tyson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history.” –President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony “Just as I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and a mother, a sister and a friend. I am an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by his hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.” –Cicely Tyson
Download or read book Blood Crazy written by Simon Clark and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a quiet, uneventful Saturday in Doncaster. Nick Aten, and his best friend Steve Price – troubled seventeen year olds – spend it as usual hanging around the sleepy town, eating fast food and planning their revenge on Tug Slatter, a local bully and their arch-enemy. But by Sunday, Tug Slatter becomes the last of their worries because somehow overnight civilization is in ruins. Adults have become murderously insane – literally. They're infected with an uncontrollable urge to kill the young. Including their own children. As Nick and Steve try to escape the deadly town covered with the mutilated bodies of kids, a group of blood-thirsty adults ambushes them. Just a day before they were caring parents and concerned teachers, today they are savages destroying the future generation. Will Nick and Steve manage to escape? Is their hope that outside the Doncaster borders the world is 'normal' just a childish dream? Blood Crazy, first published in 1995, is a gripping, apocalyptic horror from Simon Clark.
Download or read book A Fan s Notes written by Frederick Exley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1988-08-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.
Download or read book Why Read Moby Dick written by Nathaniel Philbrick and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Something New Under the Sun An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World The Global Century Series written by J. R. McNeill and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-04-17 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of those rare books that’s both sweeping and specific, scholarly and readable…What makes the book stand out is its wealth of historical detail." —Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker The history of the twentieth century is most often told through its world wars, the rise and fall of communism, or its economic upheavals. In his startling book, J. R. McNeill gives us our first general account of what may prove to be the most significant dimension of the twentieth century: its environmental history. To a degree unprecedented in human history, we have refashioned the earth's air, water, and soil, and the biosphere of which we are a part. Based on exhaustive research, McNeill's story—a compelling blend of anecdotes, data, and shrewd analysis—never preaches: it is our definitive account. This is a volume in The Global Century Series (general editor, Paul Kennedy).
Download or read book Primary Colors written by Joe Klein and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and penetrating look behind the scenes of modern American politics, Primary Colors is a funny, wise, and dramatic story with characters and events that resemble some familiar, real-life figures. When a former congressional aide becomes part of the staff of the governor of a small Southern state, he watches in horror, admiration, and amazement, as the governor mixes calculation and sincerity in his not-so-above-board campaign for the presidency.
Download or read book Arthur Vandenberg written by Hendrik Meijer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that a Senator would put the greater good of the country ahead of his party seems nearly impossible to imagine in our current political climate. Originally the editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, Vandenberg was elected to the Senate in 1928, and became an outspoken opponent of the New Deal and a leader among the isolationists who resisted FDR's efforts to aid European allies at the onset of World War II. Meijer shows that Vandenberg worked closely with Democratic administrations to build the strong bipartisan consensus that established the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and NATO.
Download or read book The Whole World s Crazy written by Jimmy Gownley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Amelia Louise McBride. She's nine years old, a former New Yorker who's now living in a small town after her parents decided to get divorced, and dealing with everything from being the new kid in school to getting her first kiss. But you know what? She's got her mom and her aunt Tanner (who happens to be an ex-rock star) and her friends Reggie, Rhonda, and Pajamaman, and everything's going to be okay. Except, of course, when it isn't. In this first book of Amelia's adventures, Amelia and her friends take on bullies (and Santa!), barely survive gym class, and receive a disgustingly detailed explanation of the infamous Sneeze Barf.
Download or read book The Totally Awesome Book of Crazy Stories written by Bill O'Neill and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When you learn about topics like history, Shakespeare, science, and politics at high school, the problem is that quite often some of the weirdest and most interesting stories are left out of the textbooks and exam papers. Pick up The Totally Awesome Book of Crazy Stories, your ultimate source of interesting facts about a wide range of diverse topics. What follows are some of the craziest, weirdest, funniest, wackiest, and most awesome stories that you'll have hopefully never heard before. This book is truly a quick read packed with information from cover to cover. In this amazing trivia book, you will find out:?How an impaled stork helped in our understanding of the natural world.?How you might be able to fool your doctor into believing you've given birth to a litter of rabbits ?How much Bach liked coffee, and how much Frederick the Great hated coffee.?How important pee was to the Ancient Romans, and how important farts were to 17th-century plague-fearing Londoners.?And so many more curiosities!Gathered in The Totally Awesome Book of Crazy Stories, you will find some of the craziest, weirdest, wackiest, and most awesome stories we could ever have told you. And what makes it even more awesome, is that there are a lot more crazy stories out there to tell! Grab your copy right now and start having fun!
