Download or read book Running in the Family written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
Download or read book Michael Ondaatje written by Lee Spinks and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work. The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer. As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.
Download or read book Running the Family Firm written by Laura Clancy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. This book argues that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain today without talking about the monarchy. Running the Family Firm explores the postwar British monarchy in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – it contends that The Firm’s power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. In so doing, it extends conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why it matters.
Download or read book Believers written by Lisa Wells and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An essential document of our time." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live? Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead. Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.
Download or read book Run Like a Mother written by Dimity McDowell and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two elite runners share inspirational advice and practical strategies to help multitasking women make running part of their busy lives. Dimitry McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea understand how the forces of everyday life—both external and internal—can keep a wife, mother, or working woman from lacing up her shoes and going for a run. As multihyphenates themselves, they have faced the same challenges. In Run Like a Mother, they share their running expertise and real-world experience in ensuring that running is part of their lives. More than a simple running guide, Run Like a Mother is like a friendly conversation aimed at strengthening a woman's inner athlete. Real achievement is a healthy mix of inspiration and perspiration, which is why the authors have grounded Run Like a Mother in a host of practical tips on shoes, training, racing, nutrition, and injuries, all designed to help women balance running with their professional and personal lives./
Download or read book Running with Scissors written by Augusten Burroughs and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture! Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.... Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.
Download or read book In The Shadow Of The Banyan written by Vaddey Ratner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday
Download or read book Magic Lessons written by Alice Hoffman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1600s, Maria was abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, who recognizes that Maria has a gift, she learns about the 'Unnamed Arts.' When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. She invokes a curse that will haunt her family for generations. And she learns the lesson that she will carry with her for the rest of her life: Love is the only thing that matters.
Download or read book Antagony written by Luis Goytisolo and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 1579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This potent drama, a collected volume of Goytisolo's famed tetralogy following a Catalan family, is widely regarded as one of the most profound inquiries ever undertaken on literary creation. Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo’s crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one’s artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.
Download or read book The Cat s Table written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator’s elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself “with a distant eye” for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat’s Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy’s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story—by turns poignant and electrifying—about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.
Download or read book Divisadero written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory.
Download or read book Sins of the Father written by Nick Taylor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of how Sal Polisi—a member of a New York crime family and author of The Sinatra Club—turned his back on the mob and spoke out against organized crime. As a wiseguy for some of New York’s biggest crime families, “Crazy Sal” Polisi couldn’t imagine another way of life—until the day he was busted and faced life behind bars. Then he decided it was time to talk, not so much for himself, but for the sake of his two teenaged sons. Forced to assume a new identity and moving from town to town in the middle of the night, his sons chose to stand by their father. In exchange for federal protection, Polisi took a huge gamble—he decided to testify against John Gotti, the reputed head of New York’s powerful Gambino family. As packed with shocking insider details as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy and as gripping as The Godfather—only true—Sal Polisi’s story marks his captivating transformation from ruthless criminal to devoted father and crusader against organized crime.
Download or read book Anil s Ghost written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winning a Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Anil’s Ghost is another award-winning novel from Michael Ondaatje. Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged in the late twentieth century by bloody civil war. Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by an international human rights group to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders in her homeland. Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton whose identity takes Anil on a fascinating journey that involves a riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock the hidden past—like a handful of soil analyzed by an archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse the farther we reach into history. A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding as a detective story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a cast of solitary strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed against the ancient, complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Running Out of Time written by Margaret Peterson Haddix and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1995-10 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a diphtheria epidemic hits her 1840 village, thirteen-year-old Jessie discovers it is actually a 1996 tourist site under unseen observation by heartless scientists, and it's up to Jessie to escape the village and save the lives of the dying children.
Download or read book Michael Ondaatje written by Ed Jewinski and published by Canadian Biography. This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ondaatje's life is as intense—and at times as dramatic—as his poetry and fiction. His writing is usually inspired by a single persistent image or vision—and no wonder, for as Ed Jewinski's biography reveals, much of Ondaatje's life has been a series of intense moments followed by ruptures and dislocations. This illustrated biography links Ondaatje's relationships with his family to the later mature works, such as Running in the Family and The English Patient (for which he won the Booker Prize).
Download or read book Run the Mile You re In written by Ryan Hall and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journey with Olympian and American half marathon record holder Ryan Hall as he reflects on the joys and trials of running and, along the way, shows you how he found God in every step. Ryan Hall is an Olympic athlete and American record holder in the half marathon, but as a kid, Ryan hated running. He wanted nothing to do with the sport until one day, he felt compelled to run the fifteen miles around his neighborhood lake. He was hooked. From that day forward, Ryan felt a God-given purpose in running. He knew he could, and would, race with the best runners in the world and that his talent was a gift to serve others. These two truths launched Ryan's twenty-year athletic career and guided him through epic failures and exceptional breakthroughs to competing at the highest level. Now a coach, speaker, and nonprofit partner, Ryan shares the powerful faith behind his athletic achievements and the lessons he learned that helped him push past his limits, make space for relationships that enrich his life on and off the running trails, and cultivate a positive mindset. As you learn more about Ryan and his incredible path, you'll gain the tools you need to: Focus on your purpose and say no to distractions Select and strive for the right goals--goals for the heart and the body Deal with defeat and disappointment Endure immense pain and build resilience Run like you've already won Ryan's story is one of encouragement and inspiration for readers of any age and level of running ability--or none at all. It's a story that shows that you, too, can change your outlook, see God's hand in your life, and run the race that really matters. Praise for Run the Mile You’re In: "Run the Mile You're In is not about winning races and setting running records. It's about always moving forward. Moving outward is an act of courage. The reward is living the lifestyle and embracing the dream." --Bart Yasso, newly retired chief running officer, Runner's World "Ryan's journey on and off the course is touching and a meaningful way to live by helping others. This is an uplifting book of joy and finding your sense of purpose." --Meb Keflezighi, Olympic silver medalist; Boston Marathon and NYC Marathon champion
Download or read book Running Like a Girl written by Alexandra Heminsley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiring, hilarious memoir of a “Bridget Jones-like writer” (The Washington Post) who transforms her life by learning to run, with stories of miserable defeat, complete victory, and learning to choose the right shoes. When Alexandra Heminsley decided to take up running, she had hopes for a blissful runner’s high and immediate physical transformation. After eating three slices of toast with honey and spending ninety minutes creating the perfect playlist, she hit the streets—and failed spectacularly. The stories of her first runs turn on its head the common notion that we are all “born to run”—and exposes the truth about starting to run: it can be brutal. Running Like a Girl tells the story of getting beyond the brutal part, how Alexandra makes running a part of her life, and reaps the rewards: not just the obvious things, like weight loss, health, and glowing skin; but self-confidence and immeasurable daily pleasure, along with a new closeness to her father—a marathon runner—and her brother, with whom she ultimately runs her first marathon. But before her first marathon, she has to figure out the logistics of running: the intimidating questions from a young and arrogant sales assistant when she goes to buy her first running shoes, where to get decent bras for the larger bust, how not to freeze or get sunstroke, and what (and when) to eat before a run. She’s figured out what’s important (pockets) and what isn’t (appearance), and more. For any woman who has ever run, wanted to run, tried to run, or failed to run (even if just around the block), Heminsley’s funny, warm, and motivational personal journey from nonathlete extraordinaire to someone who has completed five marathons is inspiring, entertaining, practical, and fun.