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Jim Christy: A Vagabond Life (Tramp Lit Series)
Par Ian Cutler. 2019
Jim Christy’s life and adventures began on the mobbed-up streets of South Philadelphia. Over his 73 years to date, Christy…
has asserted his freedom of spirit as a vagabond adventurer, latter-day hobo, journalist, private eye, actor, musician, and artist, in over 50 countries around the globe, and still found time to write over 30 books. His early adventures as a street fighter and child tramp provide a unique socio-cultural history of Philadelphia in the 50’s and 60’s before thebook moves on to recount his later exploits from some of the most remote and random corners of the world.What the taliban told me
Par Ian Fritz. 2023
A powerful, timely memoir of a young Air Force linguist coming-of-age in a war that is lost. When Ian Fritz…
joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He hadn't been accepted into college thanks to an indifferent high school career. He'd too often slept through his classes as he worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his trailer-dwelling family in Lake City, Florida. But the Air Force recognizes his potential and sends him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. By 2011, Fritz was an airborne cryptologic linguist and one of only a tiny number of people in the world trained to do this job on low-flying gunships. He monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This eavesdropping is critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops as you listen to people's most intimate conversations. Over the course of two tours, Fritz listens to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, all over the country night and day, in moments of peace and in the middle of battle. What he hears teaches him about the people of Afghanistan—Taliban and otherwise—the war, and himself. Fritz's fluency is his greatest asset to the military, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause. Both proud of his service and in despair that he is instrumental in destroying the voices that he hears, What the Taliban Told Me is a brilliant, intimate coming-of-age memoir and a reckoning with our twenty years of war in AfghanistanPresents Wright's complete autobiography for the first time, combining his childhood in the South (Black Boy) with his life as…
an adult in the North (American Hunger). Also contains his 1953 novel (The Outsider), a literary chronology, and extensive notes. Sequel to Richard Wright: Early Works (DB 41552, BR 10299). Violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sexTravels with Charley: in search of America
Par John Steinbeck. 1962
Feeling that as an American writer he has lost touch with his country, the author sets out on a swing…
around the United States to see what it is really like. He travels in a trailer with "an old French gentleman poodle." Here is the leisurely account of what he saw, whom he talked with, and his conclusions, hopeful and otherwiseGrumbles from the grave
Par Robert Heinlein. 1989
It was Heinlein's wish to have his letters published after his death. Virginia, his wife of forty years, has collected…
the letter, begun in 1939, to Heinlein's editors and to his longtime friend and agent Lurton Blassingame. The letters give us an insight into the psyche of the popular science fiction author. They show his thoughts on publishers, fan mail, writing material, travel, work habits, and even house buildingBio of an ogre: the autobiography of Piers Anthony to age 50
Par Piers Anthony. 1988
Fantasy writer Piers Anthony has, by his own admission, written a highly selective and subjective account of his first fifty…
years, attempting to write not only the "what" of his life but also the "why." Each of the five sections covers a decade of his lifeGator country: Deception, danger, and alligators in the everglades
Par Rebecca Renner. 2023
This program features a bonus conversation between the author and Officer Jeff Babauta (who led the undercover investigation known as…
Operation Alligator Thief) and an introduction read by the author. David Grann meets Susan Orlean in this page-turning true story of an underground operation into the mysterious world of alligator poaching and its larger than life Floridian characters To catch a Florida Man, you have to become one, and that's what Officer Jeff Babauta did. As his ponytailed, whiskey-soaked alter ego, he established Sunshine Alligator Farm. His goal? Infiltrate the shady world of illegal poachers in the Florida Everglades in order to protect the natural world. A head-spinning adventure soon unfolds. Jeff deals with glow-in-the-dark alligators and high-speed airboat rides, but quickly learns that not all poachers are villains. They're simply people trying to survive, fighting against the poverty and greed holding them down. Jeff wants to solve the mystery of alligator poachers, and in doing so he must venture deeper into a strange ecosystem where right is wrong, and justice comes at the cost of those who've welcomed him into their world. Gator Country is the twisting true story of the impossible choices individuals must make to stay afloat in this world. Through its wholly unique blend of reporting, nature writing, and personal narrative, this book transports listeners to vibrant and dangerous Florida landscapes and offers intimate portraits of those who call the region home. Broad in scope and vivid in detail, Gator Country is a fast paced tale of the risks people will take to survive in one of the world's most beautiful yet formidable landscapes and the undercover investigation that threatens to topple the whole scheme. A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron BooksEducation of a wandering man
Par Louis L'Amour. 1989
A personal reflection by the prolific and beloved writer of westerns. At fifteen Louis L'Amour left school, trusting his education…
to his own curiosity and the world's vastness. Armed with books, he roamed the world, cow-punching, working as a circus roustabout, mining, prize-fighting, hoboing, and serving as a merchant seaman. He shares the richness and variety of his education with the readerFyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer's life
Par Geir Kjetsaa. 1987
A leading Norwegian scholar quotes extensively from Dostoyevsky's notebooks and from his letters to wives and lovers. Kjetsaa chronicles the…
great Russian novelist's personal life and development as a writer and provides a stirring portrait of a driven manLives of the wives: Five literary marriages
Par Carmela Ciuraru. 2023
"The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in Lives of the Wives provide such delightfully gossipy pleasure that we have…
to remind ourselves that these were real people whose often stormy relationships must surely have been less fun to experience than they are for us to read about."—Francine Prose, author of The Vixen A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships. "With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life—dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp." The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude. Author Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. The legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author and critical success. In the early years of their marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being the breadwinner, and being more famous than he was. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and devote herself to her own writing. ("I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him," she once recalled, "because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.") Surprisingly, the most traditional partnership in Lives of the Wives is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs. As this erudite and entertaining work shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power. The Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were never sexually compatible, and it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly admired his wife's talents and championed her work. Theirs was an unhappy union, yet it fueled them creatively and enabled both to become two of Italy's most important postwar writers. These are stories of vulnerability, loneliness, infidelity, envy, sorrow, abandonment, heartbreak, and forgiveness. Above all, Lives of the Wives honors the women who have played the role of muses, agents, editors, proofreaders, housekeepers, gatekeepers, amaneunses, confidantes, and cheerleaders to literary trailblazers throughout history. In revisiting the lives of famous writers, it is time in our #MeToo era to highlight the achievements of their wives—and the price these women paid for recognition and freedom. Lives of the Wives is an insightful, humorous, and poignant exploration of the intersection of life and art and creativity and loveThe rigor of angels: Borges, heisenberg, kant, and the ultimate nature of reality
Par William Egginton. 2023
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas…
in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world "[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written." — The New York Times "A remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced." —John Banville, The Wall Street Journal Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality "out there" and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself. As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanityWaiting for First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD
Par Romeo Dallaire. 2023
Longlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize: In this piercing memoir, Roméo Dallaire, retired general and former senator, the author of…
the bestsellers Shake Hands with the Devil andThey Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, and one of the world's leading humanitarians, delves deep into his life since the Rwandan genocide.At the heart of Waiting for First Light is a no-holds-barred self-portrait of a top political and military figure whose nights are invaded by despair, but who at first light faces the day with the renewed desire to make a difference in the world. Roméo Dallaire, traumatized by witnessing genocide on an imponderable scale in Rwanda, reflects in these pages on the nature of PTSD and the impact of that deep wound on his life since 1994, and on how he motivates himself and others to humanitarian work despite his constant struggle. Though he had been a leader in peace and in war at all levels up to deputy commander of the Canadian Army, his PTSD led to his medical dismissal from the Canadian Forces in April 2000, a blow that almost killed him. But he crawled out of the hole he fell into after he had to take off the uniform, and he has been inspiring people to give their all to multiple missions ever since, from ending genocide to eradicating the use of child soldiers to revolutionizing officer training so that our soldiers can better deal with the muddy reality of modern conflict zones and to revolutionizing our thinking about the changing nature of conflict itself. His new book is as compelling and original an account of suffering and endurance as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and William Styron's Darkness Visible.The pigeon tunnel: Stories from my life
Par John Carré. 2016
DON’T MISS THE PIGEON TUNNEL DOCUMENTARY—IN SELECT THEATERS AND STREAMING ON AppleTV+ OCTOBER 20TH! "Recounted with the storytelling élan of…
a master raconteur—by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy." – Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carré, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ; and The Night Manager , now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth; visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year’s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People ; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener , le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer’s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional charactersExplorateur d'océans: la vie, un vaste territoire d'incertitudes et autant de promesses à explorer
Par Jean-Louis Etienne, Jean-Louis Etienne. 2021
A partir de son expérience d'explorateur et des nombreuses expéditions scientifiques et océanographiques auxquelles il a participé et qu'il retrace…
dans cet ouvrage, J.-L. Etienne exprime son amour de l'océan et rappelle qu'il s'agit de l'un des deux poumons de la planète, dont la préservation est indispensable pour réguler le climat et nourrir les hommes.Gamelin: la tragédie de l'ambition (Biographies)
Par Max Schiavon. 2021
Biographie de l'officier Maurice Gamelin (1872-1958). L'auteur tente de comprendre pourquoi cet homme a conduit les armées alliées au désastre…
en 1940. Il analyse ses choix tactiques et stratégiques, son comportement et ses failles. Il examine également les motivations de ceux qui l'ont désigné à ce poste. Il évoque sa vie publique et privée, ainsi que ses expériences.Je n'étais pas la bienvenue
Par Nathalie Guibert. 2022
L'auteure est la première femme autorisée à entrer dans un sous-marin nucléaire d'attaque de la Marine française. Elle fait part…
du trajet parcouru pour obtenir l'autorisation d'embarquer à bord d’un tel bâtiment pendant un mois. Puis elle présente son expérience de l'enfermement, seule parmi un équipage masculin, sous l'eau et sans nouvelles du monde extérieur.Stalin's library: a dictator and his books
Par Geoffrey Roberts. 2022
This engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator explores the books Stalin read, how he read them,…
and what they taught him. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Adult. UnratedDear Delia: the Civil War letters of Captain Henry F. Young, Seventh Wisconsin Infantry
Par Henry Falls Young. 2019
Union soldier Henry F. Young candidly documented his experiences on the front lines of the Civil War through extensive letters…
sent home to his family in Wisconsin. Dear Delia presents his writings faithfully, along with comprehensive notes providing historical context throughout. Adult. UnratedIsland home: a landscape memoir
Par Tim Winton. 2017
A beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir of Australia's unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped Tim Winton…
and his writing. From boyhood, Winton's relationship with the world around him--rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp--has been as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets, walking in high rocky desert, diving in reefs, bobbing in the sea between surfing sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, and learned to see landscape as a living process. In Island Home, Winton brings this landscape--and its influence on the island nation's identity and art--vividly to life through personal accounts and environmental history. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted--in language as unexpected and wild as the landscape it describes--Island Home is a brilliant, moving portrait of Australia from one of its finest writers. Provided by publisher Adult. UnratedTopgun: an American story
Par Dan Pedersen. 2019
The founder of the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons program, aka "TOPGUN," shares the untold story of how he and eight…
other young pilots revolutionized the art of aerial combat and created the center for excellence and incubator of leadership that thrives to this day. Provided by publisher. Adult. Unrated