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Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness
By Stevan M. Weine. 2023
A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most…
powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century.Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother’s devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg’s showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revolutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain. Throughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization.In Best Minds, with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness.Best Minds examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy—using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s.In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achievements, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.
Donasses: Vint-i-dues dones de pes, protagonistes de la Catalunya moderna
By Marta Pessarrodona. 2023
Si Pla tenia homenots la Marta té donasses, una munió de dones admirables i admirades a les quals ella ha…
sabut atribuir-los expressament el mot que les defineix. El títol ha donat peu a l'entrada donassa [donása] al Diccionari Normatiu Valencià, «f. Dona que destaca per la seua gran aportació intel·lectual, artística o cívica». Dolors Montserdà, Carmen Karr, Caterina Albert, Francesca Bonnemaison, Margarita Xirgu, Clementina Arderiu, Aurora Bertrana, Lola Anglada, Conxita Badia, Hermínia Grau, Frederica Montseny, Paulina Pi de la Serra, Remedios Varo, Mercè Rodoreda, Irene Polo, Carme Serrallonga, Carme Leveroni, Aurora Díaz Plaja, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Maria Àngels Anglada, Mercè Vilaret i Montserrat Roig: descobrim les vides de les protagonistes de la Catalunya moderna des d'una perspectiva informativa molt entretinguda i divertida que capta la complicitat del lector i hi dialoga.Un clàssic de les lletres catalanes revisat i actualitzat amb un epíleg en què s'inclouen totes les donasses que ens han deixat d'ençà de la primera edició de l'any 2006 a Destino.
White Out
By Michael W. Clune. 2013
A classic of addiction and recovery.How do you describe an addiction in which your drug of choice creates a hole…
in your memory, a &“white out,&” so that every time you use it is the first time—new, fascinating, vivid? Michael W. Clune&’s story takes us straight inside such an addiction—what he calls &“the memory disease.&” With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune&’s account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life—between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature—we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge. After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.
The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening
By Ari Shapiro. 2023
“The Best Strangers in the World is a witty, poignant book that captures Ari Shapiro’s love for the unusual, his…
pursuit of the unexpected, and his delight at connection against the odds.”—Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times-bestselling author of Catch and Kill and War on PeaceFrom the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, a stirring memoir-in-essays that is also a lover letter to journalism.In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad.As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Ari Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human. The Best Strangers in the World is a testament to one journalist’s passion for Considering All Things—and sharing what he finds with the rest of us.
The Mercenary: A Story of Brotherhood and Terror in the Afghanistan War
By Jeffrey E Stern. 2023
A thrilling and emotional story about the bonds forged in war and good intentions gone wrong. In the early days…
of the Afghanistan war, Jeff Stern was scouring the streets of Kabul for a big story. He was accompanied by a driver, Aimal, who had ambitions of his own: to get rich off the sudden infusion of foreign attention and cash. In this gripping adventure story, Stern writes of how he and Aimal navigated an environment full of guns and danger and opportunity, and how they forged a deep bond. Then Stern got a call that changed everything. He discovered that Aimal had become an arms dealer, and was ultimately forced to flee the country to protect his family from his increasingly dangerous business partners. Tragic, powerful, and layered, The Mercenary is more than a wartime drama. It is a Rashomon-like story about how politics and violence warp our humanity, and keep the most important truths hidden.
Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republic
By Mike Chinoy. 2023
Reporting on China has long been one of the most challenging and crucial of journalistic assignments. Foreign correspondents have confronted…
war, revolution, isolation, internal upheaval, and onerous government restrictions as well as barriers of language, culture, and politics. Nonetheless, American media coverage of China has profoundly influenced U.S. government policy and shaped public opinion not only domestically but also, given the clout and reach of U.S. news organizations, around the world.This book tells the story of how American journalists have covered China—from the civil war of the 1940s through the COVID-19 pandemic—in their own words. Mike Chinoy assembles a remarkable collection of personal accounts from eminent journalists, including Stanley Karnow, Seymour Topping, Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Melinda Liu, Nicholas Kristof, Joseph Kahn, Evan Osnos, David Barboza, Amy Qin, and Megha Rajagopalan, among dozens of others. They share behind-the-scenes stories of reporting on historic moments such as Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit in 1972, China’s opening up to the outside world and its emergence as a global superpower, and the crackdowns in Tiananmen Square and Xinjiang. Journalists detail the challenges of covering a complex and secretive society and offer insight into eight decades of tumultuous political, economic, and social change.At a time of crisis in Sino-American relations, understanding the people who have covered China for the American media and how they have done so is crucial to understanding the news. Through the personal accounts of multiple generations of China correspondents, Assignment China provides that understanding.
The Burden of Exile: A Banned Journalist's Flight from Dictatorship
By Aaron Berhane. 2022
A memoir of danger, oppression, and international politics by a survivor of the Eritrean dictatorship. A view into a secretive…
country and the uneasy alliances of Africa, and a story of family resilience.
Jane Austen, Early and Late
By Freya Johnston. 2021
A reexamination of Austen’s unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels—and that challenges distinctions between her “early”…
and “late” workJane Austen’s six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen’s first biographer described them as “childish effusions.” Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot.Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austen’s regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen’s work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all.Jane Austen, Early and Late offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things.
Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler
By Ibi Zoboi. 2022
From the New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist, a biography in verse and prose of science…
fiction visionary Octavia Butler, author of Parable of the Sower and Kindred.Acclaimed novelist Ibi Zoboi illuminates the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose. Born into the Space Race, the Red Scare, and the dawning Civil Rights Movement, Butler experienced an American childhood that shaped her into the groundbreaking science-fiction storyteller whose novels continue to challenge and delight readers fifteen years after her death.
Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward
By Oliver Soden. 1994
'This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves'DAILY TELEGRAPHThe voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in…
its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the world. Phrases from Noël Coward's songs - "Mad About The Boy", "Mad Dogs and Englishman" - are forever lodged in the public consciousness. He was at one point the most highly paid author in the world. Yet some of his most striking and daring writing remains unfamiliar. As T.S. Eliot said, in 1954, "there are things you can learn from Noël Coward that you won't learn from Shakespeare".Coward wrote some fifty plays and nine musicals, as well as revues, screenplays, short stories, poetry, and a novel. He was both composer and lyricist for approximately 675 songs. Louis Mountbatten's famous tribute argued that, while there were greater comedians, novelists, composers, painters and so on, only "the master" had combined fourteen talents in one. So central was he to his age's theatre that any account of his career is also a history of the British stage. And so daring was Coward's unorthdoxy in his closest relationships, obliquely reflected throughout his writing, that it must also be a history of sexual liberation in the twentieth century. In Oliver Soden's sparkling, story-packed new Life, the Master finally gets his due.
Ignite your students' passion for history through the use of intriguing primary sources! The Primary Source Reader series features purposefully…
leveled text to increase comprehension for different learner types. Students will learn about the fascinating life and times of Phillis Wheatley and her important contributions to history. This informational text includes captions, a glossary, an index, and other text features that will increase students' reading comprehension. It aligns with state standards including NCSS/C3, McREL, and WIDA/TESOL and prepares students for college and career readiness.
The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery
By Adam Gopnik. 2023
Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn—and master—a new skill?…
For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real Work—the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up—of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection—as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who—in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written—helps him master his own demons. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life—and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.
Happy Landings: Emilie Loring's Life, Writing, and Wisdom
By Patti Bender. 2023
Rom coms, meet cutes, mystery men, courageous women, and the happy endings of today draw a direct line to the…
words between the covers of Emilie Loring&’s romance novels.With a career spanning 40 years, Emilie Baker Loring saw millions of her books sold during her lifetime. Happy Landings: Emilie Loring's Life, Writing and Wisdom shares this best-selling author&’s uplifting story for the first time. Loring&’s books brimmed with intricate plot twists, intense imagery, and page-turning excitement, setting her works apart from the drugstore novels of the early- to mid-20th century. Her oft-quoted phrases are part of the American lexicon. Her readership has continued long after her passing. Now with generations of readers, Loring&’s books have sold more than thirty-seven million copies in a dozen languages. And now Emilie&’s own compelling life story is finally told in full. With never-before-published photographs, privileged access to the Loring family archives, and twenty years of meticulous research, Patti Bender reveals a woman who lived as she wrote, with intelligence, humor, and wisdom. "After all, living is the greatest thing we'll ever do. Why not make an art of it?" (Emilie Loring) Emilie Loring lived through two World Wars, a pandemic, the Great Depression, and deep, personal loss with her optimism intact and thirty best-selling novels to show for it. This is a woman&’s story in swiftly changing times for women; a charming story with little-known anecdotes about prominent authors; and the story of a writer in the making, with advice and encouragement for aspiring authors. "I am personally grateful to Patti for filling out a dim, long-ago picture of my grandmother. Her skillful, sensitive portrait brings Emilie alive for me and adds many new dimensions--hard working, organized, feminist--with an extraordinary sense of optimism, and faith that things would turn out all right." --Valentine Loring Titus, Emilie Loring's granddaughter
How to live: Or A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer
By Sarah Bakewell. 2010
A portrait of the philosopher Montaigne, using the content of his many essays that served as free-roaming explorations of his…
thoughts and experiences. Examines topics Montaigne discusses, such as how to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, adjusting to loss, and the ultimate question--how should one live? 2010
La vida brava: Los amores de Horacio Quiroga
By Helena Corbellini. 2007
La voz de María Helena Bravo ofrece una mirada amorosa, crítica, descarnada de la vida de su marido, el escritor…
Horacio Quiroga La voz de María Helena Bravo ofrece una mirada amorosa, crítica, descarnada de los últimos años de Horacio Quiroga. Estas memorias de su esposa son un retrato minucioso de una cotidianidad signada por la avaricia, el carácter egoísta, los celos, la violencia, la lujuria, la irritabilidad y el aspecto desaliñado del escritor, de un día a día, por momentos pintoresco, que habla del afán de Quiroga por la modernidad y de sus emprendimientos en medio de su aventura selvática.
Diarios
By Franz Kafka. 2022
Este volumen nos muestra el lado más íntimo del padre de la literatura del siglo XX. Este volumen invita al…
lector a conocer el lado más íntimo del padre de la literatura del siglo XX a través de sus diarios, legajos y cuadernos de viaje, editados por orden cronológico y respetando fielmente los manuscritos originales del escritor checo, sin las supresiones y censuras de Max Brod. Estas páginas ofrecen una panorámica de la vida de Kafka, sus paseos por Praga, sus sueños, sus sentimientos hacia el padre idolatrado y la mujer con la que no lograba casarse, su contienda personal con la culpa y la percepción de sí mismo como un paria, en una rendición de cuentas de una intensidad casi insoportable. Reseñas:«Hay dos escritores que fueron esenciales en mis comienzos. Uno de ellos es Kafka.»Ian McEwan «El mundo de Kafka es, en verdad, un universo indecible donde el hombre se da el lujo torturante de pescar en una bañera, sabiendo que no saldrá nada.»Albert Camus «Creo que ha sido el más perceptivo de los escritores del siglo XX. O sea, el hombre que vio hacia dónde evolucionaría la distancia entre estado e individuo, máquina de poder e individuo, singularidad y colectividad, masa y ser ciudadano.»Jordi Llovet
Tríptico del cangrejo
By Álvaro Uribe. 2023
«Nadie sabe a ciencia cierta cuando algo sucederá por última vez.» Entre enero de 2008 y marzo de 2022, Álvaro…
Uribe enfrentó el cáncer en tres ocasiones. La primera vez fue en el pulmón derecho; la segunda, en 2018, en la próstata, y la tercera, nuevamente en el pulmón, ahora del lado izquierdo. Álvaro venció al íntimo invasor en los primeros dos enfrentamientos. En el tercero, perdió la batalla. En cada ocasión llevó un diario en el que no sólo registró los avatares de laenfermedad, sino que también asentó el lúcido inventario de sus esperanzas y desasosiegos. Este libro reúne los cuadernos de esa triple bitácora. Álvaro Uribe escribe con transparente honestidad acerca del miedo, la tristeza y el enojo, el cansancio y el insomnio. Escribe sobre la condición de otredad a la que lo relegó la enfermedad, con respecto a los otros, pero, sobre todo, con respecto a sí mismo, al que era. Escribe también sobre los reencuentros con los prodigios de la vida cotidiana, sobre la amistad, sobre los libros que leía y, más que nada, sobre el amor y la existencia compartida con su esposa, Tedi López Mills. Tríptico del Cangrejo es la constancia de que para Álvaro Uribe vida y escritura estaban unidas de forma indisoluble. Escribió hasta el final; estaba convencido de que el mismo azar que lo había puesto en el peor de los predicamentos le había concedido asimismo "el inalienable alivio de escribir".
Los recuerdos sin povenir
By Laura Ramos. 2023
Retratos de dolor, rabia y añoranza de los últimos años de una escritora inolvidable Pasan los años y la figura…
de Elena Garro crece por su grandeza literaria, por sus personajes apasionados y llenos de ternura inscritos en historias memorables con enorme carga histórica y existencial; por su inigualable mirada al deseo, al dolor, al abismo. Gracias a los estudiosos de la literatura hispanoamericana sabemos de su vida, sus amores, sus reclamos… y gracias a Laura Ramos sabemos cómo vivió los últimos años, cómo soportó la soledad y el olvido con su hija Helena Paz,cómo recordaban y conjuraban estas mujeres coléricas, furiosas, lastimadas, luminosas, ensoñadoras, llenas de lumbre y ternura. Elena Garro: los recuerdos sin porvenir es una obra única por su acercamiento frontal a la escritora y su hija por una editora que convivió con ellas los últimos años de su vida. Recorre las horas de penuria y rencor de estas mujeres, los momentos lamentables de hambre y vicio, el asedio de la enfermedad, el alcohol, la violencia doméstica y sus amados gatos: testigos de esta tragedia que sóloatemperaba la contemplación del cielo de México, las postales de París, las fotografías de Madrid, los anhelos de Buenos Aires. Entrar en estas páginas nos permite conocer detalles íntimos de Elena Garro y sus evocaciones de Bioy Casares, Rufino y Olga Tamayo, Pablo Picasso, Ernst Jünger y el eternamente amado/odiado Octavio Paz. Laura Ramos no juzga ni condena, sólo comparte sumaravillosa experiencia con la escritora magistral y sus intentos por ayudarla a sobrellevar el pantano donde vivió sus últimos tiempos; el libro es una aportación a la biografía de Elena Garro, condenada con su hija a ser un personaje maldito y perseguido, las páginas descubren vivencias totalmente inéditas de la escritora, una voz candorosa y furibunda que dejó siempre su sangre ardiente, rebelde y amorosa en cada uno de sus actos y sus escritos.
The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir
By Priscilla Gilman. 2023
An exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity. Growing up on…
the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations—about her parents’ hollow marriage, her father’s double life and tortured sexual identity—fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him. A wrenching story about what it means to be the daughter of a demanding parent, a revelatory window into the impact of divorce, and a searching reflection on the nature of art and criticism, The Critic’s Daughter is an unflinching account of loss and grief—and a radiant testament of forgiveness and love.
Quiet Fire: Emily Dickinson's Life and Poetry
By Carol Dommermuth-Costa, Anna Landsverk. 2022
When Emily Dickinson died at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1886, she left a locked chest with hand-sewn notebooks…
and papers filled with nearly 1,800 unpublished poems. Four years later, her first collection was published and became a singular success. Today Dickinson is revered as one of America’s greatest and most original poets. Using primary source materials, including the poet’s own letters and poems, Quiet Fire presents the life and art of Emily Dickinson to a new generation.