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Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant
By Mashama Bailey, John O. Morisano. 2020
A story about the trials and triumphs of a Black chef from Queens, New York, and a White media entrepreneur…
from Staten Island who built a relationship and a restaurant in the Deep South, hoping to bridge biases and get people talking about race, gender, class, and culture. &“Black, White, and The Grey blew me away.&”—David Chang In this dual memoir, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano take turns telling how they went from tentative business partners to dear friends while turning a dilapidated formerly segregated Greyhound bus station into The Grey, now one of the most celebrated restaurants in the country. Recounting the trying process of building their restaurant business, they examine their most painful and joyous times, revealing how they came to understand their differences, recognize their biases, and continuously challenge themselves and each other to be better. Through it all, Bailey and Morisano display the uncommon vulnerability, humor, and humanity that anchor their relationship, showing how two citizens commit to playing their own small part in advancing equality against a backdrop of racism.Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother's) Lifetime
By Maggie Downs. 2020
Newly married and established in her career as an award–winning newspaper journalist, Maggie Downs quits her job, sells her belongings,…
and embarks on the solo trip of a lifetime: Her mother’s.As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. “You are braver than you think,” her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries―visiting all the places her mother, struck with early–onset Alzheimer’s disease, could not visit herself―encountering some of the world’s most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother. Interweaving travelogue with family memories, Braver Than You Think takes the reader hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, white–water rafting on the Nile, volunteering at a monkey sanctuary in Bolivia, praying at an ashram in India, and fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt.By embarking on an international journey, Downs learned to make every moment count―traveling around the globe and home again, losing a parent while discovering the world. Perfect for fans of adventure memoirs like Wild and Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, Braver Than You Think explores grief and loss with tenderness, clarity, and humor, and offers a truly incredible roadmap to coping with the unimaginable.Churchill's Colonel: The War Diaries of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Barne
By Anthony Barne. 2019
A British officer&’s day-to-day observations throw &“interesting light on life and soldiering during the Second World War.&” —The NYMAS Review…
Anthony Barne started his diary in August 1939 as a young, recently married captain in the Royal Dragoons stationed in Palestine. He wrote an entry for every day of the war, often with great difficulty, sometimes when dog-tired or under fire, sometimes when things looked dark and desperate, but more often in sunshine and optimism—&“surrounded by good fellows who kept one cheerful and helped one through the sad and difficult times.&” His diary ends in July 1945, by which time he was commanding officer of the 4th Hussars, having recently visited Downing Street for lunch alone with the Churchills. The diaries have an enormous scope, covering time in Palestine and Egypt before he joins the Eighth Army, describing the retreat back to El Alamein, the battle and its aftermath. He ends the campaign commanding his regiment. He often graphically details the physical realities of war: the appalling conditions in the desert, the bombardments of the regiment from the air, the deaths and serious injuries of fellow soldiers. In 1943, he flies down to Rhodesia to see his wife and infant son before returning to Cairo to join Churchill&’s regiment, the 4th Hussars. Arriving in Italy in 1944, he recounts the campaign as the Allies push north. With a tone that varies wildly—often witty, sometimes outrageous, but also poignant and philosophical—this is not just a memoir of war but a portrait of another time that showcases the author&’s warmth and keen eye for the absurd.Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology: A Memoir
By Sands Hall. 2018
"With its keen attention to the language and tactics of the church, Hall’s memoir is unique among the assortment of…
Scientology reports and exposés, offering insight into the certainties that its subjects gain." —The NationIn the secluded canyons of 1980s Hollywood, Sands Hall, a young woman from a literary family, strives to forge her own way as an artist. But instead, Hall finds herself increasingly drawn toward the certainty that Scientology appears to offer. Her time in the Church includes the secretive illness and death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and the ascension of David Miscavige. In this compelling memoir, Hall reveals what drew her into the religion—with its intrigues and unique contemporary vision—and how she came to confront its darker sides and finally escape."Some of the most penetrating, illuminating prose about how an educated and skeptical person could get so deeply into, and then struggle to escape, what everyone around her warned was a dangerous cult . . . brilliant." —The Underground Bunker"If it is Scientology's offer of a life with meaning that hauls her in . . . it is its approach to meaning that keeps her . . . Hall's fascination with this is palpable." —Camille Ralphs, The Times Literary SupplementThe Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making
By Jared Yates Sexton. 2019
Based on the provocative and popular New York Times op–ed, this memoir alternates between the examination of a working–class upbringing…
and a cultural analysis of the historical, psychological, and sociological sources that make up the roots of toxic masculinity and its impact on society.As progressivism changes American society, and globalism shifts labor away from traditional manufacturing, the roles that have been prescribed to men since the Industrial Revolution have been rendered obsolete. Donald Trump's campaign successfully leveraged male resentment and entitlement, and now, with Trump as president and the rise of the #MeToo movement, it’s clear that our current definitions of masculinity are outdated and even dangerous.Deeply personal and thoroughly researched, the author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore has turned his keen eye to our current crisis of masculinity using his upbringing in rural Indiana to examine the personal and societal dangers of the patriarchy. The Man They Wanted Me to Be examines how we teach boys what’s expected of men in America, and the long–term effects of that socialization―which include depression, shorter lives, misogyny, and suicide. Sexton turns his keen eye to the establishment of the racist patriarchal structure which has favored white men, and investigates the personal and societal dangers of such outdated definitions of manhood."By carefully and soberly examining his own story, Sexton deconstructs American life and gives many examples of how pervasive toxic masculinity is in our culture." ―Henry Rollins, Los Angeles Times"This book is critically important to our historical moment . . . Crackles with intensity and absolutely refuses to allow the reader to look away for even a moment from the blight that toxic masculinity in America has wrought." ―Nicholas Cannariato, NPRThe Library: A Catalogue of Wonders
By Stuart Kells. 2018
""Excellent . . . Tracks the history of that greatest of all cultural institutions." —The Washington PostLibraries are much more…
than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern–day “Library Tourists.” Kells discovered that all the world’s libraries are connected in beautiful and complex ways, that in the history of libraries, fascinating patterns are created and repeated over centuries. More important, he learned that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama.The Library is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It’s a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.A House with No Roof: After My Father's Assassination, A Memoir
By Rebecca Wilson. 2011
In 1966, Rebecca Wilson's father, a Union Leader and civil rights activist, was assassinated on the street in San Francisco.…
Rebecca—known throughout as "Becky"—was three years old. A House with No Roof is Wilson's gripping memoir of how the murder of her father propelled her family into a life–long search for solace and understanding.Following her father's death, Becky's mother, Barbara, desperate for closure and peace, uproots the family and moves to Bolinas, California. In this small, coastal town of hippies, artists, and "burnouts," the family continues to unravel. To cope, Barbara turns to art and hangs a banner that loudly declares, "Wilsons are Bold." But she still succumbs to her grief, neglecting her children in her wake. Becky's brother turns to drugs while her beautiful sister chooses a life on the road and becomes pregnant. As Becky fumbles and hurtles toward adulthood herself, she comes to learn the full truth of her father's death—a truth that threatens to steal her sanity and break her spirit.Told with humor and candor—and with love and family devotion at its heart—A House with No Roof is a brave account of one daughter's struggle to survive.Not Now but Now: A Novel
By M. F. Fisher. 1984
Those who court danger are often the most circumspect. In this stylish novel, M. F. K. Fisher traces the course…
of Jennie, a willful wandering woman, a lovely enchantress calculating the havoc caused by her life of danger and license. Jennie's path is devastating to those around her, a sinister invasion. But Jennie, more Lilith than Eve, survives unscathed.First published in 1947, Not Now But Now traces the subtleties and nuances of a woman's mind. Jennie is not controlled by others, nor by time, and we follow her through separate eras and beautifully drawn settings. Whether in San Francisco, Chicago, Lausanne, or Paris, Jennie is surrounded by sensuality, fine food and furniture, and beautiful clothes.Those not yet familiar with Fisher's style will delight in her careful, exact prose. She is the author of several books, including How to Cook a Wolf, A Considerable Town, The Cooking of Provincial France, and As They Were.The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides
By John West. 2010
A husband and wife, both medical professionals, are gravely ill. Rather than living in pain, they choose to end their…
lives, and they turn to their son for help. Despite the legal risks and certain emotional turmoil, he agrees—and ultimately performs an act of love more difficult than any other.The Last Goodnights provides a unique, powerful, and unflinching look inside the reality of one of the most galvanizing issues of our time: assisted suicide. Told with intensity and bare honesty, John West's account of the deaths of two brave people is gritty and loving, frightening and illuminating, nerve–wracking and even, at times, darkly humorous. As West's story places him in one of the most difficult experiences anyone can endure, it also offers a powerful testament to the act of death by choice, and reveals the reasons why end–of–life issues are far too personal for government intrusion.Intimately told, The Last Goodnights points out the unnecessary pain and suffering that is often forced upon dying people and their families, and honors the choice to die with purpose and dignity. In the end, this story is not just about death—it is also about love, courage, and autonomy.O / Exorcismos de esti(l)o
By Guillermo Cabrera Infante. 1995
Dos libros experimentales reunidos en un volumen en el que brilla el inigualable talento lúdico de Guillermo Cabrera Infante En…
este volumen conviven dos libros próximos en el tiempo de Guillermo Cabrera Infante: la colección de artículos y ensayos O, publicada originalmente en 1975, y el libro de piezas experimentales Exorcismos de esti(l)o, aparecido en 1976. En el primero, el autor despliega su peculiar ingenio creador, en ocasiones satírico y burlón, para describir facetas de su cotidianidad y de la vida contemporánea, haciendo referencia a protagonistas tan diversos como su inigualable gato Offenbach y los miembros de la policía secreta. En Exorcismos, una colección repleta de saber clásico y sarcásticas investigaciones literarias, brilla el talento lúdico del Cabrera Infante, así como su obsesión por las sorpresas del lenguaje, plasmada en una serie de retruécanos, juegos de palabras multilingües e ingeniosas manipulaciones tipográficas que evocan a e.e. cummings y al OuLiPo. La crítica ha dicho:«Guillermo Cabrera Infante era un grandísimo escritor.»Mario Vargas Llosa «Uno de los mayores y mejores renovadores de la prosa en castellano, un clásico de vanguardia.»Fernando Savater «Su talento verbal era extraordinario, tanto de viva voz como por escrito, aunque esto último lo sepa cualquiera que haya leído sus libros.»Javier Marías «Cabrera Infante trajo al sector desarraigado a la fuerza de Cuba las virtudes de la parodia, la sátira y el humor.»José Miguel Oviedo, Letras LibresThe Baltimore Book of the Dead
By Marion Winik. 2018
“This book is both brief and miraculous, and it will be finished before you’re ready to let it go. Like…
life.” —Ann Patchett, author of CommonwealthWhen Cheryl Strayed was asked by The Boston Globe to name a book she finds herself recommending time and again, she chose The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Now, a decade later, that beloved book has a moving companion volume. The Baltimore Book of the Dead is a new collection of portraits of the dead, weaving an unusual, richly populated memoir of compressed narratives.Approaching mourning and memory with intimacy, humor, and an eye for the idiosyncratic, the story starts in the 1960s in Marion Winik’s native New Jersey, winds through Austin, Texas, and rural Pennsylvania, and finally settles in her current home of Baltimore.Winik begins with a portrait of her mother, the Alpha, introducing locales and language around which other stories will orbit: the power of family, home, and love; the pain of loss and the tenderness of nostalgia; the backdrop of nature and public events. From there, she goes on to create a highly personal panorama of the last half century of American life.Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
By Ben Ehrenreich. 2020
Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current…
moment and with the literal and figurative end of time.Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas&’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—unflinching, urgent—yet timeless and profound.Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria
By Noo Saro-Wiwa. 2012
Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to visit her father in Nigeria…
- a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was killed there, she didn't return for several years. Recently, she decided to come to terms with the country her father given his life for.Saro-Wiwa travels from the exuberant chaos of Lagos to the calm beauty of the eastern mountains; from the eccentricity of a Nigerian dog show to the decrepit kitsch of the Transwonderland Amusement Park. She explores Nigerian Christianity, delves into the country's history of slavery, examines the corrupting effect of oil, and ponders the huge success of Nollywood.She finds the country as exasperating as ever, and frequently despairs at the corruption and inefficiency she encounters. But she also discovers that it si far more beautiful and varied than she had ever imagined, with its captivating thick tropical rainforest and ancient palaces and monuments. Most engagingly of all, she introduces us to the many people she meets, and gives us hilarious insights into the African character, its passion, wit and ingenuity.The Big Book of the Dead
By Marion Winik. 2019
Marion Wink is esteemed for bringing humor and wit to that most unavoidable of subjects: death. At last, Winik's critically…
acclaimed, cult favorites, Glen Rock Book of the Dead and Baltimore Book of the Dead, have been carefully combined in their proper chronological order, revealing more clearly than ever before the character hidden throughout these stories: Winik herself. Featuring twelve additional vignettes along with a brand–new introduction, The Big Book of the Dead continues Winik's work as an empathetic, witty chronicler of life.These Are Strange Times, My Dear: Field Notes from the Republic
By Wendy Willis. 2019
"In these pointed and wide–ranging essays, Wendy Willis explores everything from personal resistance to the rise of political podcasts, civic…
loneliness to the exploitation of personal data, public outrage to the opioid crisis—all with a poet's gift for finding the sacred in the mundane, a hope in the dark.One of the country's sharpest observers of politics, art, and the American spirit, Willis returns often to the demanding question posed by Czech writer, activist, and politician Václav Havel: What does it mean to live in truth? Her view is honed by her place as a poet, as a mother, and, when necessary, as an activist. Together, the essays in These Are Strange Times, My Dear work within that largely unmapped place where the heartbreaks and uncertainties of one's inner life brush up against the cruelties and responsibilities of politics and government and our daily lives."Romance of Elsewhere: Essays
By Lynn Freed. 2017
"A marvelous collection." —The New York Times Book Review Traversing decades and continents, The Romance of Elsewhere captures the dilemma…
of the expat with Lynn Freed’s signature honesty and humor. She takes on subjects as disparate as Disneyland, lovers, ecotourism, shopping, serious illness, and the anomaly of writers who blossom into full power only in old age. Freed's new collection further establishes her as a renowned voice in memoir and the exploration of identity. "If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed—or, at least, the resulting book would be Lynn Freed’s essay collection, The Romance of Elsewhere . . . in equal turns funny, wise, and sardonic." —BustleEnough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography
By David Shields. 2009
What does it mean to construct a self? What does it mean to turn your life into a narrative? What’s…
gained? What’s lost? What lies inevitably get told? What deeper truths are reached or at least reached for? Enough About You has no answers to these questions, but it frames and asks these questions in a much more overt, honest, precise, and provocative way than any book has attempted yet, and tries to do so while also delivering the pleasures of narrative, of memoir, of search-for-self.With moving and often hilarious candor, Shields explores the connections between fiction and nonfiction, stuttering and writing, literary forms and literary contents, art and life; he confronts bad reviews of his earlier books; he examines why he read a college girlfriend’s journal; he raids a wide range of cultural figures (from Rousseau, Nabokov, and Salinger to Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, and Bobby Knight) for what they have to tell him about himself.Enough About You is a book about David Shields. But it is also a terrifically engrossing exploration and exploitation of self-reflection, self-absorption, full-blown narcissism, and the impulse to write about oneself. In a world awash with memoirs and tell-alls, Shields has created something unique: he invites the reader into his mind as he turns his life into a narrative.Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir
By Lynne Sharon Schwartz. 2010
Ever since the explorations of Marco Polo and the travels of Montaigne, a lively dialogue has persisted about the pros…
and cons of travel. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises both serious and amusing questions about travel, using her own experiences as vivid illustrations.Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel has shaped her sensibilities from childhood through adulthood. She makes an adolescent visit to Miami Beach, where she confronts the powerful sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to startling realizations of their own.Schwartz’s personal history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she shows us who she started out as and who she has become. Above all, this memoir exemplifies a mode of travel in and of itself: the mind on a journey or quest, pausing here and there, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, occasionally backtracking, but always on the move.Night Class: A Downtown Memoir
By Victor Corona. 2017
The playground of the rich and the beautiful, downtown New York's nightlife spectacles and power of self-invention incubated pop icons…
from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga. NYU sociologist Victor P. Corona sought a new education, where night classes held in galleries, nightclubs, bars, apartments, stoops, and all-night diners taught him about love, loss, and the living possibilities of identity. Transforming himself from dowdy professor to glitzy clubgoer, Victor immerses himself among downtown's dazzling tribes of artists and performers hungry for fame.Night Class: A Downtown Memoir investigates the glamour of New York nightlife. In interviews and outings with clubland revelers and influencers, including Party Monster and convicted killer Michael Alig, Night Class exposes downtown's perilous trappings of drugs, ambition, and power. From closeted, undocumented Mexican boy to Ivy League graduate to nightlife writer, Corona shares in Night Class the thrill and tragedy of downtown and how dramatically identities can change.The Middlepause: On Life After Youth
By Marina Benjamin. 2017
"In The Middlepause Benjamin deftly and brilliantly examines the losses and unexpected gains she experienced in menopause. Menopause is a…
mind and body shift as monumental and universal as puberty, yet far less often discussed, especially in public, which is what makes Benjamin's work here so urgently necessary." —Kate Tuttle, The Los Angeles TimesThe Middlepause offers a vision of contentment in middle age, without sentiment or delusion. Marina Benjamin weighs the losses and opportunities of our middle years, taking inspiration from literature, science, philosophy, and her own experience. Spurred by her surgical propulsion into a sudden menopause, she finds ways to move forward while maintaining clear–eyed acknowledgment of the challenges of aging. Attending to complicated elderly parents and a teenaged daughter, experiencing bereavement, her own health woes, and a fresh impetus to give, Benjamin emerges into a new definition of herself as daughter, mother, citizen, and woman.Among The Middlepause's many wise observations about no longer being young: ""I am discovering that I care less about what other people think."" ""My needs are leaner and my storehouse fuller."" ""It is not possible to fully appreciate what it means to age without attending to what the body knows. . . . I have always had a knee–jerk distaste for the idea that age is all in the mind."" ""You need a cohort of peers to go through the aging process with you. A cackle of crones! A cavalry!"" Marina Benjamin's memoir will serve as a comfort, a companion to women going through the too–seldom–spoken of physical and mental changes in middle age and beyond.