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Double Double
By Martha Grimes, Ken Grimes. 2013
"A thoughtful twist on the recovery memoir" (O, The Oprah Magazine) that explains the different ways bestselling author Martha Grimes…
and her son, Ken Grimes, recognized and overcame their addictions, now with two new chapters--one from each author.In this introspective and groundbreaking memoir of addiction, mystery writer Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, present two different, often intersecting points of view. Chapters alternate between Ken's and Martha's voices and experiences in 12-step program and outpatient clinics. Written with honesty, humor, a little self-deprecation, and a lot of self-evaluation, Double Double is "an honest, moving, and readable account of the drinking life and the struggle for recovery. This brave and engaging memoir is a gift" (Kirkus Reviews).one. For Ken, it was partying in bars and clubs. Each hit bottom. Martha spent time doing outpatient rehabilitation, once in 1990 and again two years later. Ken began twelve-step recovery. This candid memoir describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people--even two people who are mother and son. Double Double is an intensely personal and illuminating book, filled with insights, humor, a little self-deprecation, and a lot of self-evaluation. Anyone who has faced alcoholism will identify with parts of this book. All readers will find these pages revealing, moving, and compelling.Daybook, Turn, Prospect
By Audrey Niffenegger, Anne Truitt. 1961
All three of Anne Truitt's artist's journals in one e-volume, the illuminating, inspiring record of a woman's reconciliation of the…
call of creative work with the demands of daily life--with a new introduction by Audrey Niffenegger.Anne Truitt kept a journal throughout her adult life, from her early years as one of the rare, celebrated women artists in the early 60s, through her midlife as an established artist, and into older age when she was, for a time, the director of Yaddo, the premier artists' retreat in Saratoga. She was always a deep, astute reader, and a woman who grappled with a range of issues--moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual. While working intensely on her art, she watches her own daughters journey into marriage and motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find a balance in life. "Balance not stability is the source of security," she says. Anne Truitt re-creates a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.Daybook
By Audrey Niffenegger, Anne Truitt. 1921
A classic work for artists of all kinds, about reconciling the call of creative work with the demands of daily…
life, now with a new introduction by Audrey Niffenegger.Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Within its beautifully written pages, you will come to know a woman whose range of sensitivity--moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual--is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to making sculptures so finely painted that they would "set color free in three dimensions." She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughter's journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself--and us--through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art. A rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.The Fortress
By Danielle Trussoni. 2016
"A page-turner and a profound meditation on the nature of desire and freedom in the modern age." --Cheryl Strayed, bestselling…
author of WildThe critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Falling Through the Earth and Angelology returns with this much-anticipated memoir of love and transformation in the South of France. The Fortress is A Year in Provence meets Eat, Pray, Love by way of The Shining, a riveting account of one woman's journey to the other side of the romantic fairy tale. "If I had been another woman, I might have been skeptical. But I wasn't another woman. I was a woman ready to be swept away. I was a woman ready for her story to begin. As a writer, story was all that mattered. Rising action, dramatic complication, heroes and villains and dark plots. I believed I was the author of my life, that I controlled the narration." From their first meeting, writer Danielle Trussoni is spellbound by a brilliant, mysterious novelist from Bulgaria. The two share a love of music and books and travel, passions that intensify their whirlwind romance. Within months, they are married and embark upon an adventurous life together. Eight years later, their marriage in trouble, Trussoni and her husband move to the South of France, hoping to save their relationship. They discover Aubais (as in love, honor and . . . Aubais), a picturesque medieval village in the Languedoc, where they buy a thirteenth-century stone fortress. Aubais is a Mediterranean paradise of sun, sea, and vineyards, but they soon learn the fortress's secret history of subterranean chambers, Knights Templar, hidden treasure, Nazis, and ghosts. During her years in Aubais, Trussoni's marriage unravels with terrifying consequences, and she comes to understand that love is never the way we imagine it to be. Trussoni's time in France brings hard-won wisdom about authenticity, commitment, and family. Through her search for true happiness, Danielle Trussoni finds the strength to overcome her illusions and start again. Unflinching and bold, The Fortress is one woman's struggle to understand the complexities of her own heart. Trussoni's long-awaited return to memoir is a tour de force that changes the conversation about desire and freedom.From the Hardcover edition.Familie und belastete Generationenbeziehungen
By Dieter Karrer. 2015
Familiäre Beziehungen sind doppelgesichtig: Es sind Liebes- und Machtbeziehungen, Beziehungen ohne Berechnung und doch wird aufgerechnet, persönliche Beziehungen, die einer…
starken Moralisierung unterliegen. Wie äußert sich der ,,Eigensinn des Familialen", wenn die Generationenbeziehungen in einer Krise unter Druck geraten: Wenn erwachsene Söhne und Töchter (wieder) bei den Eltern leben und von ihnen unterstützt werden müssen, weil sie erwerbslos sind und nicht in der Lage, auf eigenen Beinen zu stehen. Oder wenn Eltern pflegebedürftig werden und die Kinder, die ihr eigenes Leben haben, mit der Aufgabe konfrontiert sind, sich um sie zu kümmern. Wie erleben die betroffenen Eltern und Kinder die Situation, wie gehen sie damit um und welche Probleme und Konflikte sind damit verbunden. Diese Fragen stehen im Mittelpunkt des Buches, das sich auch als ein Beitrag zur Erforschung familialer Beziehungen versteht, ein Thema, das in den letzten Jahren etwas aus dem Blickfeld der Soziologie geraten ist.Foreign Correspondents in Japan
By Charles Pomeroy. 1998
Since its founding in 1945, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) has been a haven for working journalists. From…
its origins at "No. 1 Shimbun Alley" in the ruins of Tokyo immediately after World War II, the club quickly took on a life of its own. At times it became like a miniature United Nations, meeting the needs of hundreds of foreign journalists from around the world, who used it as a working press center as well as a social oasis.Club members, who include several Pulitzer Prize winners, have personally witnessed and reported on some of the most momentous events of the last half century-the end of World War II and the occupation of Japan; the revolution in China; the Korean War; Vietnam and the student riots of the 1960s; the height of the Cold War; Japan's economic miracle and the subsequent collapse of the "bubble" economy; the death of Emperor Hirohito; and much more.Foreign Correspondents in Japan gives an intimate and colorful look at these journalists who covered Asia for the rest of the world during five decades of sweeping change, and provides first-person accounts of history as it was being written.Huxley: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)
By Kieron O'Hara. 2012
Author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, and inventor of the term 'psychedelic', Aldous Huxley was a…
global trend-setter ahead of his time. In this new biography Kieron O'Hara explores the life of this great visionary, charting his transformation from society satirist to Californian guru-mystic through an insightful analysis of his life's work. Combining thoughtful biography, expansive reading notes, and an exploration of Huxley's continuing legacy, Huxley: A Beginner's Guide is the definitive introduction to one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. Dr Kieron O'Hara is a Senior Researcher at Southampton University, England.Meet William Shakespeare - An eStory
By Charles Margerison. 2011
Meet William Shakespeare in this personal audio story from The Amazing People Club. You will hear how he married a…
girl called Anne Hathaway and then left home to pursue his dreams of becoming a playwright in London. Experience the journey he made which would lead him to write great plays such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and in turn become one of the greatest, and most influential writers of all time. Shakespeare's story comes to life through BioViews®. These are short biographical narratives, similar to interviews. They provide an easy way of learning about amazing people who made major contributions and changed our world.The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt
By Jon-Jon Goulian. 2011
The vibrant, funny, and heartwarming story of an outcast who becomes an odd man in If you have ever felt…
like a misfit in school or been paralyzed by your family's imposing expectations, if you have ever obsessed about your appearance or panicked about choosing a career path, if you have ever wondered if every single thing to which your body is exposed, from egg yolks to X-rays, might harm you, then you may be surprised to find a kindred spirit in The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt.Growing up in sunny La Jolla, California, Jon-Jon Goulian was a hyperneurotic kid who felt out of place wherever he turned, and who, in his own words, was forever on the verge of "caving in beneath the pressures of modern life." From his fear of competition to his fear of pimples, from his fear of sex to his fear of saturated fat, the range and depth of Jon-Jon's phobias were seemingly boundless. With his two older brothers providing a sterling example he believed he could never live up to, and his stern grandfather, the political philosopher Sidney Hook, continually calling him to account for his intellectual failure, Jon-Jon, feeling pressed against the wall, wracked with despair, and dizzy with insecurity, instinctively resorted, for reasons that became clear to him only many years later, to a most ingenious scheme for keeping conventional expectations at bay: women's clothing! Ingenious, perhaps, but woefully ineffective, as Jon-Jon discovers, again and again, that behind his skirt, leggings, halter top, and high heels, he's still as wildly neurotic, and as wracked with anxiety, as he's always been.In this hilarious and heartfelt memoir, Jon-Jon Goulian's witty and exuberant voice shines through, as he comes to terms with what it means to truly be yourself.From the Hardcover edition.Departures
By Paul Zweig, Adam Gopnik. 1986
Departures is Paul Zweig's celebration of life and love. Zweig thought of himself as a sojourner, a contemporary Wandering Jew,…
a man with "a loose wire in his genes." He led a number of distinct lives: as a Jewish child in Brooklyn and on a farm in the Catskills; as a literature student at Columbia; as a young exile who spent a decade in Paris transforming himself into a French intellectual, absorbing the language, sex, culture, and leftist politics; and as an American man-of-letters who produced a steady stream of poems, essays, and wide-ranging works of literary scholarship and criticism. In 1978, at the age of forty-three, he abruptly entered a new life--"the life of the dying"--which he inhabited for the next six years. His writing was guided by a steely determination to hold the more pressing and distorting sentiments-- self-pity, regret, anger, fear--at bay for the sake of his lucidity, which became his way through the world of cancer. This memoir stands as a testament to the passion and spirit with which Zweig lived and to the dignity that he brought to his final years.Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s
By William Weintraub. 2001
With letters from Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore, Getting Started is a wonderful memoir, a collection of extraordinary…
letters, and a brilliant recreation of a time when Canadian writers were set to make their mark in the world for the first time. Writer Brian Moore emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the late 1940s and found work at the Montreal Gazette, where he also found William Weintraub embarking upon a career as a freelance journalist. When he travelled to Paris, Weintraub saw an old friend and former Gazette writer, Mavis Gallant, who filled him in on the tribulations of the expatriate writer's life ("My room is enormous and the radiator very small indeed"). Gallant introduced Weintraub to another Montreal writer, Mordecai Richler, also pursuing a career as a novelist while living a gloriously Bohemian life. Weintraub joined Richler for a while in Ibiza (he later introduced him to Brian Moore), and later they kept in touch. ("Dear Bill: I got your highly unintellectual letter yesterday and it confirmed my suspicions that you slipped a chair under your arse in the Deux Magots as soon as you arrived in Paris and probably haven't moved since.")In these years, Gallant had her short stories published for the first time in the New Yorker, Moore methodically churned out money-making thrillers while working on The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, and Richler wrote his first acclaimed book, The Acrobats. Weintraub, meanwhile, returned to Montreal, where he saw published his brilliant comic novel, Why Rock the Boat? William Weintraub weaves together his own memories of the 1950s with letters both to and from his literary colleagues. The letters and his recollections are always fascinating, often hilarious, and provide intimate insight into the lives and work of some of Canada's finest contemporary writers.My Secret History
By Paul Theroux. 1989
"Theroux's best novel in years."CHICAGO TRIBUNEMY SECRET HISTORY is Paul Theroux's tour de force. It is the story of Andre…
Parent, a writer, a world traveler, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead. From his days as an altar boy, to his job as a teenaged lifeguard, and then as a youth caught between the attentions of a beautiful young student and an amorous older woman. And as the boy becomes a man he turns his attention to writing, which brings him fame, and a wife, who may finally bring him to know himself. But not before he sets up his most dangerous secret life, one that any man might envy, but that could cost Andre Parent the delicate balance that makes him who he is....From the Paperback edition.The Great Charles Dickens Scandal
By Michael Slater. 2012
Charles Dickens was regarded as the great proponent of hearth and home in Victorian Britain, but in 1858 this image…
was nearly shattered. With the breakup of his marriage that year, rumors of a scandalous relationship he may have conducted with the young actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan flourished. For the remaining twelve years of his life, Dickens managed to contain the gossip. After his death, surviving family members did the same. But when the author's last living son died in 1934, there was no one to discourage rampant speculation. Dramatic revelations came from every corner—over Nelly's role as Dickens's mistress, their clandestine meetings, and even about his possibly fathering an illegitimate child by her. This book presents the most complete account of the scandal and ensuing cover-up ever published. Drawing on the author's letters and other archival sources not previously available, Dickens scholar Michael Slater investigates what Dickens did or may have done, then traces the way the scandal was elaborated over succeeding generations. Slater shows how various writers concocted outlandish yet plausible theories while newspapers and book publishers vied for sensational revelations. With its tale of intrigue and a cast of well-known figures from Thackeray and Shaw to Orwell and Edmund Wilson, this engaging book will delight not only Dickens fans but also readers who appreciate tales of mystery, cover-up, and clever detection.Black Fire
By Robert Graysmith. 2012
The first biography of the little-known real-life Tom Sawyer (a friend of Mark Twain during his brief tenure as a…
California newspaper reporter), told through a harrowing account of Sawyer's involvement in the hunt for a serial arsonist who terrorized mid-nineteenth century San Francisco.When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved ninety lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his proposed book about a local girl firefighter, and began to envision a novel of wider scope. Twain learned that a dozen years earlier the then eighteen-year-old New York-born Sawyer had been a "Torch Boy," one of the youths who raced ahead of the volunteer firemen's hand-drawn engines at night carrying torches to light the way, always aware that a single spark could reduce the all-wood city of San Francisco to ashes in an instant. At that time a mysterious serial arsonist known by some as "The Lightkeeper" was in the process of burning San Francisco to the ground six times in eighteen months - the most disastrous and costly series of fires ever experienced by any American metropolis.Black Fire is the most thorough and accurate account of Sawyer's relationship with Mark Twain and of the six devastating incendiary fires that baptized one of the modern world's favorite cities. Set amid a scorched landscape of burning roads, melting iron warehouses, exploding buildings, and deadly gangs who extorted and ruled by fear, it includes the never-before-told stories of Sawyer's heroism during the sinking of the steamship Independence and the crucial role Sawyer and the Torch Boys played in solving the mystery of the Lightkeeper. Drawing on archival sources such as actual San Francisco newspaper interviews with Sawyer and the handwritten police depositions of the arrest of the Lightkeeper, bestselling author Robert Graysmith vividly portrays the gritty, corrupt, and violent world of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, overrun with gunfighters, hooligans, hordes of gold prospectors, crooked politicians, and vigilantes. By chronicling how Sawyer took it upon himself to investigate, expose, and stop the arsonist, Black Fire details - for the first time - Sawyer's remarkable life and illustrates why Twain would later feel compelled to name his iconic character after his San Francisco buddy when he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.Assessing Policies for Retirement Income: Needs for Data, Research, and Models
By Panel on Retirement Income Modeling. 1997
The retirement income security of older Americans and the cost of providing that security are increasingly the subject of major…
debate. This volume assesses what we know and recommends what we need to know to estimate the short- and long-term effects of policy alternatives. It details gaps in data and research and evaluates possible models to estimate the impact of policy changes that could affect retirement income from Social Security, pensions, personal savings, and other sources.Assessing the Impact of Severe Economic Recession on the Elderly: Summary of a Workshop
By National Research Council of the National Academies. 2011
The economic crisis that began in 2008 has had a significant impact on the well-being of certain segments of the…
population and its disruptive effects can be expected to last well into the future. The National Institute on Aging (NIA), which is concerned with this issue as it affects the older population in the United States, asked the National Research Council to review existing and ongoing research and to delineate the nature and dimensions of potential scientific inquiry in this area. The Committee on Population thus established the Steering Committee on the Challenges of Assessing the Impact of Severe Economic Recession the Elderly to convene a meeting of experts to discuss these issues. The primary purpose of the workshop was to help NIA gain insight into the kinds of questions that it should be asking, the research that it should be supporting, and the data that it should be collecting. Attendees included invited experts in the fields of economics, sociology, and epidemiology; staff from NIA and the Social Security Administration (SSA); and staff from the National Academies. This report highlights the major issues that were raised in the workshop presentations and discussion.Death in Slow Motion
By Eleanor Cooney. 2003
Azheimer's is death in slow motion," says Eleanor Cooney in this jarring and unsentimental memoir about caring for her mother,…
"and it has the ability to kill love while the person you love still breathes. " When it was all but certain that her once-glamorous and witty novelist-mother had Alzheimer's, Cooney moved her from her beloved Connecticut home to California in order to care for her. In tense, searing prose, punctuated with the blackest of humor, Cooney documents the slow erosion of her mother's mind, of the powerful bond the two shared, and her own descent into drink and despair. "She was always my favorite person," says Eleanor, "hip, cool, brilliant, funny, sane -- my ultimate confidante and sympathizer. " Now, overwhelmed by the Chinese water torture of endless small worries, endlessly repeated, that dementia thrusts on victim and caregiver, Cooney resorts to booze, tranquilizers, and gallows wit to blunt the edges of the relentless loss and the demands of ministering to thisdevastating disease. But the coping mechanism that finally serves this eloquent writer best is writing, the ability to bring to vivid life the memories her mother is losing. As her mother gropes in the gathering darkness for a grip on the world she once loved, succeeding only in conjuring sad fantasies of places and times with her dead husband, Cooney revisits their true past. "Death in Slow Motion becomes the mesmerizing story of Eleanor's actual childhood, straightWalter Pater
By Denis Donoghue. 1995
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY intellectual of the first rank presents the case for the nineteenth-century aesthetician whose elegant subversions delivered us to…
modernism. Walter Pater (1839-1894) was an obscure Oxford don until 1873, when his first book, The Renaissance, exposed his argument favoring sensation over though and, in doing so, ignited a hard, gem-like flame. "Say not what it is but what it makes you see--or feel" is not something Pater ever said, but it will suffice as an encapsulation of an attitude that moved the authority of a work of art from the object to the subject, subsequently outraging the defenders of perceived truth of his time and making Pater himself a figure of controversy and even ridicule. Substituting sensationalism for sensation and reading Pater's claim for hedonism, or pleasures the soul might savor, as outright decadence, Pater's detractors far outnumbered and outranked his followers (including his fellow Oxonian and most notorious devotee, Oscar Wilde). But ever since Pater has proved, at least in the high arts, the decisive victor of the revolutions he set into motion. Denis Donoghue presents what will stand as the premier inquiry into Walter Pater's life and ideas: a work of compelling erudition unrivaled in intuitive and intellectual force, revealing with eloquence, charm, and abundant yet measured discourse Pater's centrality to the entire modernist movement. "Pater is audible," Donoghue writes, "in virtually every attentive modern writer--in Hopkins, Wilde, James, Yeats, Pound, Ford, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Aiken, Hart Crane, Fitzgerald, Forster, Borges, Stevens." Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls is both an education and an inspiration for anyone at all concerned with the changing character of latter-day Western culture. Here, without question, is a classic: a critical biography that lays open the very making of the culture that both assails and sustains us.Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt
By Saul Friedlander. 2013
Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame…
and guilt that left traces in his daily existenceâ "in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafkaâ TMs personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world.In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafkaâ TMs life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafkaâ TMs dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafkaâ TMs closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the authorâ TMs novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafkaâ TMs letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of â œsainthoodâ ? frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality.Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson
By Blake Bailey. 2013
From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author…
of The Lost Weekend--a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other. Charles Jackson's novel The Lost Weekend--the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam--was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Library. The actor Ray Milland, who would win an Oscar for his portrayal of Birnam, was coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel's author--a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man who had been sober since 1936 and had no intention of going down in history as the author of a thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk. But The Lost Weekend was all but entirely based on Jackson's own experiences, and Jackson's valiant struggles fill these pages. He and his handsome gay brother, Fred ("Boom"), grew up in the scandal-plagued village of Newark, New York, and later lived in Europe as TB patients, consorting with aristocratic café society. Jackson went on to work in radio and Hollywood, was published widely, lived in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, and knew everyone from Judy Garland and Billy Wilder to Thomas Mann and Mary McCarthy. A doting family man with two daughters, Jackson was often industrious and sober; he even became a celebrated spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet he ultimately found it nearly impossible to write without the stimulus of pills or alcohol and felt his devotion to his work was worth the price. Rich with incident and character, Farther & Wilder is the moving story of an artist whose commitment to bringing forbidden subjects into the popular discourse was far ahead of his time.