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So Happiness to Meet You: A Memoir
By Karin Esterhammer. 2017
“A lighthearted memoir of new friends, delicious food, and culture shock . . . A brisk chronicle of a family’s…
(mis)adventures in Vietnam” (Kirkus Reviews). During the 2008 recession, Karin Esterhammer was laid off from her job as a travel writer for the Los Angeles Times. No longer able to afford their comfortable lifestyle, she and her husband sold everything they had, rented out their house, and took their young autistic son to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. They thought that teaching English and living cheap for a year would help get them back on their feet. Boy, were they wrong . . . So Happiness to Meet You is the funny, inspiring, and eye-opening true account of one family’s quest to regain their financial footing while living anything but the high life. Esterhammer tells of her family’s trials, adventures, and victories in adapting to a foreign culture, overcoming the language barrier, and enduring the kind of heat and humidity that could drive a soul insane. She also paints an endearing portrait of neighbors who unabashedly stared into windows, kept cockroaches for luck, taught Karin how to shop and cook, and ultimately helped her find joy without Western trappings. Full of love, laughter—and a surprising amount of barbecued rat—this is a “loopy adventure and charming cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever dreamed of packing it in and starting over somewhere new” (Mark Haskell Smith, author of Naked at Lunch and Baked).Landslide: True Stories
By Minna Zallman Proctor. 2017
Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open-hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct.…
Its timeless subjectsgrief, storytelling, the giving up of childish thingsare rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read. Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone Minna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These €œtrue stories explore the authors complicated relationship with her motherwho was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-seven and died fifteen years laterand the ways in which their connection was long the prime mover of Proctors life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of Proctors own lifeshifting between America and Italy (and loving €œbeing a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her €œJewish, not quite Jewish mother. Proctor has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite lifes mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. €œNot having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory, she writes. €œ[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin. The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.Limber: Essays
By Angela Pelster. 2014
"What a strange and unexpected treasure chest this is, filled with all manner of quirky revelations, all about the mundane…
sublime and the ineffable extraordinary. Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, through, is the haunting perfection, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, of the writing itself. Who is this Angela Pelster and where has she been all our lives?"-Lawrence WeschlerAngela Pelster's startling essay collection charts the world's history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the "Loneliest Tree in the World" once grew. A squirrel's decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which nature programs us to consume ourselves. Beautiful, deeply thoughtful, and wholly original, Limber valiantly asks what it means to sustain life on this planet we've inherited.Angela Pelster's essays have appeared in Granta, the Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, the Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine, and others. Her children's novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children's Choice award in 2006. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program and lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Towson University.Who Was Marie Antoinette? (Who was?)
By John O'Brien, Dana Meachen Rau. 2015
From the palaces of Austria to the mirrored halls of Versailles, Marie Antoinette led a charmed life. She was born…
into royalty in 1755 and married the future king of France at age 15. By 21 she ascended to the throne and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle of masquerade balls, sky-high wigs, and extravagant food. But her taste for excess ruffled many feathers. The poor people of France blamed Marie Antoinette for their poverty. Her spending helped incite the French Revolution. And after much public outcry, in 1793 she quite literally lost her head because of it. Whether she was blameless or guilty is debatable, but Marie Antoinette remains woven into the fabric of history and popular culture.The Promised Land
By Mary Antin.
"A unique contribution to our modern literature and to our modern history." — The New York TimesThis classic of the…
Jewish-American immigrant experience was an instant critical and popular success upon its 1912 publication. Author Mary Antin arrived in the United States from Russia in the 1890s at the age of 12. Her memoir vividly recaptures scenes from both Old and New World cultures, chronicling the poverty and oppression of Czarist Russia as well as the excitement and challenges of her assimilation into American life at the turn of the twentieth century.Although she arrived without knowing a word of English, Antin wholeheartedly embraced her new home. "A kingdom in the slums," her Boston neighborhood afforded freedom and intellectual riches in the forms of a secular education, public library, and cultural activities at the local settlement house. This moving narrative articulates Antin's dreams as well as her stark realities, offering modern readers authentic and enduring perspectives of immigrant life.Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2: The Defining Years, 1933-1938
By Blanche Wiesen Cook. 1999
The central volume in the definitive biography of America's most important First Lady. "Engrossing" (Boston Globe).Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Three, 1938-1962,…
will be published in November. Volume Two covers tumultuous era of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the gathering storms of World War II, the years of the Roosevelts' greatest challenges and finest achievements. In her remarkably engaging narrative, Cook gives us the complete Eleanor Roosevelt-- an adventurous, romantic woman, a devoted wife and mother, and a visionary policymaker and social activist who often took unpopular stands, counter to her husband's policies, especially on issues such as racial justice and women's rights. A biography of scholarship and daring, it is a book for all readers of American history.From the Trade Paperback edition.Who Are Venus and Serena Williams (Who Was?)
By Andrew Thomson, James Buckley. 2017
The dynamic story of the Williams sisters, both top-ranked professional tennis players.Venus and Serena Williams are two of the most…
successful professional American tennis players of all time. Coached at an early age by their parents, the sisters have both gone on to become Grand Slam title winners. They have both achieved the World Number One ranking in both singles and doubles! Although completely professional and fiercely competitive, the sisters remain close. Who Are Venus and Serena Williams? follows the pair from their early days of training up through the ranks and to the Summer Olympic Games, where they have each won four gold medals—more than any other tennis players.This title in the New York Times best-selling series has eighty illustrations that help bring the exciting story of tennis champs Venus and Serena Williams to life.Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China
By Red Pine. 2010
In the spring of 2006, Bill Porter traveled through the heart of China, from Beijing to Hong Kong, on a…
pilgrimage to sites associated with the first six patriarchs of Zen. Zen Baggage is an account of that journey. He weaves together historical background, interviews with Zen masters, and translations of the earliest known records of Zen, along with personal vignettes. Porter's account captures the transformations taking place at religious centers in China but also the abiding legacy they have somehow managed to preserve. Porter brings wisdom and humor to every situation, whether visiting ancient caves containing the most complete collection of Buddhist texts ever uncovered, enduring a six-hour Buddhist ceremony, searching in vain for the ghost in his room, waking up the monk in charge of martial arts at Shaolin Temple, or meeting the abbess of China's first Zen nunnery. Porter's previously published Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits has become recommended reading at Zen centers and universities throughout America and even in China (in its Chinese translation), and Zen Baggage is sure to follow suit.Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
By Wendell Berry. 2000
[A] scathing assessment . . . Berry shows that Wilson's much-celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of…
knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science . . . Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today. The Washington Post€œI am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself . . . A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism.The Christian Science MonitorIn Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries
By Shunryu Suzuki, Eihei Dogen, Sojun Mel Weitsman, Kazuaki Tanahasi, Shohaku Okamura, Michael Wenger, Uchiyama Kosho, Nishiari Bokusan. 2011
One of the greatest religious practitioners and philosophers of the East, Eihei Dogen Zenji (1200-1253) is today thought of as…
the founder of the Soto school of Zen. A deep thinker and writer, he was deeply involved in monastic methods and in integrating Zen realization into daily life. At times The Shobogenzo was profoundly difficult, and he worked on it over his entire life, revising and expanding, producing a book that is today thought to be one of the highest manifestations of Buddhist thought ever produced. Dogen's Genjo Koan is the first chapter in that book, and for many followers it might be thought to contain the gist of Dogen's work-it is one of the groundwork texts of Zen Buddhism, standing easily alongside The Diamond Sutra, The Heart Sutra, and a small handful of others.Our unique edition of Dogen's Genjo Koan (Actualization of Reality) contains three separate translations and several commentaries by a wide variety of Zen masters. Nishiari Bokusan, Shohaku Okamura, Shunryu Suzuki, Kosho Uchiyama. Sojun Mel Weitsman, Kazuaki Tanahashi, and Dairyu Michael Wenger all have contributed to our presentation of this remarkable work. There can be no doubt that understanding and integrating this text will have a profound effect on anyone's life and practice.Full Disclosure
By Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti. 2018
Instant New York Times bestseller"Standing up to bullies is my kind of thing."How did Stormy Daniels become the woman willing…
to take on a president? In this book, Stormy Daniels tells her whole story for the first time: what it's like to be a leading actress and director in the adult film business, the full truth about her journey from a rough childhood in Louisiana onto the national stage, and everything about her interaction with Donald Trump that led to the nondisclosure agreement and the behind-the-scenes attempts to intimidate her.Stormy is funny, sharp, warm, and impassioned by turns. Her story is a thoroughly American one, of a girl who loved reading and horses and who understood from a very young age what she wanted?and who also knew she'd have to get every step of the way there on her own.People can't stop talking about Stormy Daniels. And they won't be able to stop talking about her fresh, surprising, completely candid, nothing-held-back book.The Jewish People and the Holy Land: A Zondervan Digital Short
By Henry H. Halley. 2007
Derived from Halley’s Bible Handbook, a world-renowned, accessible guide to the Bible now in its 25th edition, this digital short…
sketches the history of the Jewish people in the Holy Land from the time of Jesus until the present day. Useful for students of the Bible and church history, The Jewish People and the Holy Land will also fascinate readers wanting to better understand the historic roots of the modern state of Israel.You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek): (The Golden Greek)
By Eleni Sikelianos. 2014
This is the tale of Melena, five times married, mother of three, burlesque dancer, and "the toughest, hardest-assed woman to…
ever eat wood and bite nails." Located in history and memory, her life cracks open questions of identity at the heart of an American immigrant woman's experience and becomes an argument that no existence is ever truly marginal.Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Sikelianos directs the creative writing program at the University of Denver.Half In Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate
By Judith Kitchen. 2012
"Judith Kitchen has written a book that is at once clear and accessible and at the same time insistently complex.…
Her effortlessly constructed hybrids make Half in Shade part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration of the interactive art of seeing, and finally for me, a beautifully sustained meditation. It is at that meditative level that the book's potent, unsentimental emotive power gathers."--Stuart DybekWhen Judith Kitchen discovered boxes of family photos in her mother's closet, it sparked curiosity and speculation. Piecing together her memories with the physical evidence in the photos, Kitchen explores the gray areas between the present and the past, family and self, certainty and uncertainty. The result is a lyrical, ennobling anatomy of a heritage, family, mother-daughter relationships, and the recovery from an illness that captures with precision the forces of the heart and mind when "none of us knows what lies beyond the moment, outside the frame."Judith Kitchen is the award-winning author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has won the Lillian Fairchild Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the S. Mariella Gable Fiction Prize. She has served as judge for the AWP Nonfiction Award, the Pushcart Prize in poetry, the Oregon Book Award, and the Bush Foundation fellowships, among others. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Kitchen lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and serves on the faculty and as codirector of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.History vs Women: The Defiant Lives that They Don't Want You to Know
By T S Abe, Ebony Adams, Anita Sarkeesian. 2018
Rebels, rulers, scientists, artists, warriors and villainsWomen are, and have always been, all these things and more. Looking through the…
ages and across the globe, Anita Sarkeesian, founder of Feminist Frequency, along with Ebony Adams PHD, have reclaimed the stories of twenty-five remarkable women who dared to defy history and change the world around them. From Mongolian wrestlers to Chinese pirates, Native American ballerinas to Egyptian scientists, Japanese novelists to British Prime Ministers, History vs Women will reframe the history that you thought you knew. Featuring beautiful full-color illustrations of each woman and a bold graphic design, this standout nonfiction title is the perfect read for teens (or adults!) who want the true stories of phenomenal women from around the world and insight into how their lives and accomplishments impacted both their societies and our own.For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics
By Veronica Chambers, Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, Minyon Moore. 2018
The four most powerful African American women in politics share the story of their friendship and how it has changed…
politics in America.The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years—Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore—a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls. Like many people who have spent their careers in public service, they view their lives in four-year waves where presidential campaigns and elections have been common threads. For most of the Colored Girls, their story starts with Jesse Jackson’s first campaign for president. From there, they went on to work on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Over the years, they’ve filled many roles: in the corporate world, on campaigns, in unions, in churches, in their own businesses and in the White House. Through all of this, they’ve worked with those who have shaped our country’s history—US Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, well-known political figures such as Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean, and legendary activists and historical figures such as Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is filled with personal stories that bring to life heroic figures we all know and introduce us to some of those who’ve worked behind the scenes but are still hidden. Whatever their perch, the Colored Girls are always focused on the larger goal of “hurrying history” so that every American — regardless of race, gender or religious background — can have a seat at the table. This is their story.Choose Your Own Disaster
By Dana Schwartz. 2018
A hilarious, quirky, and unflinchingly honest memoir about one young woman's terrible and life-changing decisions while hoping (and sometimes failing)…
to find herself, in the style of Never Have I Ever and Adulting. Join Dana Schwartz on a journey revisiting all of the terrible decisions she made in her early twenties through the internet's favorite method of self-knowledge: the quiz. Part-memoir, part-VERY long personality test, CHOOSE YOUR OWN DISASTER is a manifesto about the millennial experience and modern feminism and how the easy advice of "you can be anything you want!" is actually pretty fucking difficult when there are so many possible versions of yourself it seems like you could be. Dana has no idea who she is, but at least she knows she's a Carrie, a Ravenclaw, a Raphael, a Belle, a former emo kid, a Twitter addict, and a millennial just trying her best.Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life
By Amanda Stern. 2018
In the vein of bestselling memoirs about mental illness like Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon, Sarah Hepola's Blackout, and Daniel Smith's…
Monkey Mind comes a gorgeously immersive, immediately relatable, and brilliantly funny memoir about living life on the razor's edge of panic.The world never made any sense to Amanda Stern--how could she trust time to keep flowing, the sun to rise, gravity to hold her feet to the ground, or even her own body to work the way it was supposed to? Deep down, she knows that there's something horribly wrong with her, some defect that her siblings and friends don't have to cope with.Growing up in the 1970s and 80s in New York, Amanda experiences the magic and madness of life through the filter of unrelenting panic. Plagued with fear that her friends and family will be taken from her if she's not watching-that her mother will die, or forget she has children and just move away-Amanda treats every parting as her last. Shuttled between a barefoot bohemian life with her mother in Greenwich Village, and a sanitized, stricter world of affluence uptown with her father, Amanda has little she can depend on. And when Etan Patz disappears down the block from their MacDougal Street home, she can't help but believe that all her worst fears are about to come true. Tenderly delivered and expertly structured, Amanda Stern's memoir is a document of the transformation of New York City and a deep, personal, and comedic account of the trials and errors of seeing life through a very unusual lens.Take Cover: Finding Peace in God's Protection
By Philip De Courcy. 2018
Pastor and former police officer Philip De Courcy calls on Christians to take refuge in God (Psalm 46:1), drawing on…
lessons he learned in law enforcement to affirm that true security is not the absense of danger, but the presence of God. Identifying the major dangers today's Christian faces—including crime, North Korea, Islamic terror, aggressive secularism, and spiritual warfare—De Courcy shows us how we can take cover in God-given promises and protections.Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls' Rights
By Sarah J. Robbins, Malala Yousafzai. 2014
A chapter book edition of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai's bestselling story of courageously standing up for girls' education.…
Malala's memoir of a remarkable teenage girl who risked her life for the right to go to school is now abridged and adapted for chapter book readers. Raised in a changing Pakistan by an enlightened father from a poor background and a beautiful, illiterate mother, Malala was taught to stand up for what she believes. Her story of bravery and determination in the face of extremism is more timely than ever. In this edition, Malala tells her story in clear, accessible language perfect for children who are too old for Malala's Magic Pencil and too young for her middle-grade memoir. Featuring line art and simplified back matter, Malala teaches a new audience the value of speaking out against intolerance and hate: an inspiring message of hope in Malala's own words.