This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power do spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou's latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth on every page. "From the Paperback edition."

    In this delightful mix of recipes, advice, and anecdotes, she writes about often overlooked food items such as beets, pears, black beans, and chutney. With down-to-earth charm and wit, Colwin also discusses the many pleasures and problems of cooking at home in essays such as "Desserts That Quiver," "Turkey Angst," and "Catering on One Dollar a Head." As informative as it is entertaining, More Home Cooking is a delicious treat for anyone who loves to spend time in the kitchen.

    But while their music evoked a Southern mythology, only their Arkansawyer drummer, Levon Helm, was the genuine article. From the cotton fields to Woodstock, from seeing Sonny Boy Williamson and Elvis Presley to playing for President Clinton, This Wheel’s on Fire replays the tumultuous history of our times in Levon’s own unforgettable folksy drawl. This edition is expanded with a new afterword by the authors.

    A gripping story of adventure and a modern-day Walden, this contemporary classic established Fromm as one of the West's premier voices.

    They saw their father, who was born into slavery, become America's first black Episcopal bishop. They saw their mother--a woman of mixed racial parentage who was born free--give birth to ten children, all of whom would become college-educated, successful professionals in a time when blacks could scarcely expect to receive a high school diploma. They saw the post-Reconstruction South, the Jim Crow laws, Harlem's Golden Age, and the Civil Rights movement--and, in their own feisty, wise, inimitable way, they've got a lot to say about it.More than a firsthand account of black American history, "Having Our Say" teaches us about surviving, thriving, and embracing life, no matter what obstacles are in our way.

    A gifted writer and teacher, Lamott (Crooked Little Heart) is a single mother and ex-alcoholic with a pleasingly warped social circle and a remarkably tolerant religion to lean on. She responds to the changes, exhaustion, and love Sam brings with aplomb or outright insanity. The book rocks from hilarious to unbearably poignant when Sam's burgeoning life is played out against a very close friend's illness. No saccharine paean to becoming a parent, this touches on the rage and befuddlement that dog sweeter emotions during this sea change in one's life.

    In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. She also came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute—men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing. Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Here Sister Helen confronts both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the fears of a society shattered by violence and the Christian imperative of love. On its original publication in 1993, Dead Man Walking emerged as an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty. Now, some two decades later, this story—which has inspired a film, a stage play, an opera and a musical album—is more gut-wrenching than ever, stirring deep and life-changing reflection in all who encounter it.

    What they found was Kim Hyun Hee, an idealistic young woman who had been transformed by her country into an obedient killing machine. The Tears of My Soul is her poignant, shocking, and utterly compelling story. Kim Hyun Hee grew up in a country obsessed by the loss of South Korea, an Orwellian world where right and wrong, good and evil, slavery and freedom meant nothing but what the North Korean Communist Party said they did. At sixteen, she was singled out by the Party for her intelligence and beauty and given special training in languages. At nineteen she was honored to be chosen for the North Korean Army's secret and elite espionage school. There she was trained to kill with everything from her hands and feet to grenades and assault rifles, enduring years of grueling physical and psychological conditioning designed to make her an effective and utterly obedient tool of the Party's spy masters. And in 1987, at age twenty-five, she was sent on the mission that would, she was told, reunify her divided country forever. Kim and her control agent, a man she considered her spiritual father, were captured only hours after the explosion. They were provided with suicide capsules, but hers failed and, for the first time in her life, Kim was outside the control of her masters. After more than a year of soul-wrenching questioning and deprogramming by the South Korean police, Kim realized the full enormity of her crimes, made a full confession, and waited for execution. But in a remarkable decision that sparked national outrage, the South Korean president gave her a full pardon, declaring that she was as much a victim of North Korea as the passengers. Kim Hyun Hee has devoted the rest of her life to atoning for the 115 lives lost on flight 858.

    Two years later, he wa s arrested as an ultra-rightest. This illuminating narrative tells Wu's story over the next 30 years--the harrowing tale of a "class enemy" and a remarkable testament to a family's love and perseverance.

    Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.

    The author of Writing Down the Bones recounts her journey awakening from the profound sleep of a suburban childhood, describing her fifteen years as a student of Zen Buddhism, her writing, and resistance to change.Reprint.

    Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests and then watched with increasing fear as gang life claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and the power of words and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation. Achieving success as an award-winning poet, he was sure the streets would haunt him no more—until his young son joined a gang. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in Always Running, a vivid memoir that explores the motivations of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants.At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.

    Frank, revealing, touching--Days of Grace is the story of a man felled to soon. It remains as his legacy to us all....

    It will remain with me always."—Louis Begley, The New York Times"A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall's particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form."—Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times"Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall's Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work--as distinguished from labor--as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm."—Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe“Donald Hall’s Life Work has been strangely gripping, what with his daily to do lists, his ruminations on the sublimating power of work. Hall has written so much about that house in New Hampshire where he lives that I’m beginning to think of it less as a place than a state of mind. I find it odd that a creative mind can work with such Spartan organization (he describes waiting for the alarm to go off at 4:45 AM, so eager is he to get to his desk) at such a mysterious activity (making a poem work) without getting in the way of itself.”—John Freeman’s blog (National Book Critics Circle Board President)

    Soumitra Chatterjee tells the stories of his life with Satyajit Ray, recounting his experiences on and off the sets, revealing unknown facts, and offering intimate glimpses into his relationship with the film-maker he revers. As much about Ray as it is about Chatterjee, this is a unique artistic as well as personal journey along the path walked by the director and his most beloved actor. Soumitra Chatterjee was originally rejected for the role of Apu in Apur Sansar by Satyajit Ray. How did he get it back? Did Soumitra Chatterjee advise Satyajit Ray to change the ending of Charulata? How did Satyajit Ray influence Soumitra Chatterjees career on the stage? For 35 years, Bengals most accomplished actor Soumitra Chatterjee was a constant presence in the artistic and personal life of Indias foremost film director Satyajit Ray. Not only did he act in 14 of the maestros films, he was also the film- makers most faithful student and one of his closest friends. Soumitra Chatterjee tells the stories of his life with Satyajit Ray, recounting his experiences on and off the sets, revealing unknown facts, and offering intimate glimpses into his relationship with the film-maker he revers. As much about Ray as it is about Chatterjee, this is a unique artistic as well as personal journey along the path walked by the director and his most beloved actor. My life would never be the same again. It wasnt just that he had given me the chance to act in so many of his films, but also the fact that what I had got from my relationship of thirty-five years with him was no different from what I got from my parents or my wife. It was woven into my life, into the development of my character, and will remain with me till I die

    Mankiller's life unfolds against the backdrop of the dawning of the American Indian civil rights struggle, and her book becomes a quest to reclaim and preserve the great Native American values that form the foundation of our nation. Now featuring a new Afterword to the 2000 paperback reissue, this edition of Mankiller completely updates the author's private and public life after 1994 and explores the recent political struggles of the Cherokee Nation.

    W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry.Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

    . . .They have a primal quality against their background of jungle hammock, moss-hung against the tremendous silence of the scrub country. The only ingredients of their lives are the elemental things."--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, March 1930, in a letter to Alfred S. Dashiell of Scribner's Magazine Except for one extended black family and "one writer from up north," folks from Cross Creek were ornery, independent Crackers, J. T. Glisson writes in this memoir of growing up in the backwoods of north-central Florida. The time spanned the late twenties to the early fifties, and isolation and an abundance of mosquitoes and snakes were their claim to fame. The writer was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In her 25 years at the Creek, Miz Rawlings was regarded as "That Woman"--warm, high-strung, and simply eccentric. She drove recklessly, smoked in public, and had "black spells." A Pulitzer Prize did little to change her status. In Cross Creek everyone had space to be a character and every character had a title: the meanest, laziest, most pregnant, or best cat fisherman. Describing day-to-day life in unaffected prose, Glisson's portraits include Charley, the fisherman who did his banking in a Prince Albert tobacco can nailed to a tree; Bernie Bass, who spoke "perfect Florida Cracker without polish"; Old Blue, young Jake Glisson's nuisance hog; Aunt Martha Mickens, the matriarch of all the blacks at the Creek (including Henry, the first critic to pass judgment on Jake's drawings); and especially Jake's father, Tom, the man whose wisdom, boundless optimism, and colorful speech figure prominently in Rawlings's Cross Creek. (Of his famous neighbor, Tom once commented that "when she gets her tail up above her head, her brain don't work.") Glisson's own finely detailed pencil and pen-and-ink drawings illustrate these vignettes, and he explains that the idea of earning his living as an artist first came to him when he saw Rawlings's books illustrated with such vivid pictures that he could smell the sawgrass, sweat, and gunpowder of the Creek. No wonder: One edition of The Yearling--the story of a deer and a boy Jake's own age--was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, who visited Cross Creek and chatted about drawing ("it's a matter of seeing and practice") while eleven-year-old Jake watched him sketch. Tom Glisson died while his son was enrolled in art school in Sarasota; three years later Miz Rawlings died, and an era ended. Today J. T. Glisson lives four and a half miles from the house where he grew up. When there's a breeze from the south, he writes, he sits on his porch and listens to the soft rustling of palmetto fronds, almost embarrassed by the beauty of his memories. J. T. Glisson has been an illustrator, publisher, and businessman

    “An indelible account...hallmarked by Paulsen’s sinewy writing” (Kirkus Reviews).

    It was a journey that began in 1933, when she was eight years old and witnessed the beginnings of Jewish persecution, a journey along which she suffered the horrible deaths of her father, mother and sister. Sustained by great courage and resourcefulness, Lucille Eichengreen emerged from her nightmare with the inner strength to build a new life for herself in the United States. Only in 1991 did she return to Germany and Poland to assess the Jewish situation there. Her story is a testament to the very thing the Holocaust sought to destroy: the regeneration of Jewish life. Blessed with a remarkable memory that made her one of the most effective witnesses in the postwar trial of her persecutors, Eichengreen has composed a memoir of exceptional accuracy. As important as its factual accuracy is its emotional clarity and truth. Simple and direct, Eichengreen's words compel with their moral authority.

    Col. Dean Ladd, USMC (Ret.), a combat veteran of the 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. Written with award-winning author Steven Weingartner, Col. Ladd s book chronicles his experiences as a junior officer in some of the fiercest fighting of the war, during the amphibious invasions of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian. Ladd's recollections and descriptions of life--and death--on the far-flung battlefronts of the Pacific War are vividly rendered, and augmented by the personal recollections of many of the men who served with and under him in his wartime journey across the Pacific.Dean Ladd grew up in the Marine Corps; and the Marine Corps grew up in World War II. Faithful Warriors tells the story of how both came of age in history s greatest conflict. The book presents Ladd's journey through eventful times and extraordinary circumstances: prewar training outside San Diego; awaiting attack on Samoa after the attack on Pearl Harbor; surviving Guadalcanal; rest and recuperation in New Zealand; savage fighting and terrible suffering on Tarawa; recovery in Hawaii; more fighting on Saipan and Tinian This vividly written memoir will stir the memories of those who lived during these trying times and will help future generations of readers to understand the realities of the Pacific War.

    In 1979, his wife sold her fattest pig to buy him a shortwave radio. He spent every spare moment listening to the BBC and VOA in order to improve the English he had learned at college between 1950 and 1953. For "further practice," he decided to write down his life story in English. Humorous and unfiltered by translation, his autobiography is direct and personal, full of richly descriptive images and phrases from his native Bai language.At the time of He Liyi's graduation, English was being vilified as the language of the imperialists, so the job he was assigned had nothing to do with his education. In 1958, he was labeled a rightist and sent to a "reeducation-through-labor farm." Spirited away by truck on the eve of his marriage, Mr. He spent years in the labor camp, where he schemed to garner favor from the authorities, who nevertheless shamed him publicly and told him that all his problems "belong to contradictions between the people and the enemy." After his release in 1962, the talented Mr. He had no choice but to return to his native village as a peasant. His stratagems for survival, which included stealing "nightsoil" from public toilets and extracting peach-pit oil from thousands of peaches, personify the peasant's universal struggle to endure those difficult years.He Liyi's autobiography recounts nearly all the major events of China's recent history, including the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the experience of labor camps, changes brought about by China's dramatic re-opening to the world after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, and the recent social and economic changes occurring in the post-Deng China. No other book so poignantly reveals the travails of the common person and village life under china's tempestuous Communist government, which He Liyi ironically refers to as "Mr. China." Yet he describes his saga of poverty and hardship with humor and a surprising lack of bitterness. And rarely has there been such an intimate, frank view of how a Chinese man thinks and feels about personal relationships, revealed in dialogue and letters to his two wives.He Liyi's autobiography stands as perhaps the most readable and authentic account available in English of life in rural China.

    In 113 short chapters, Ron Padgett's precision prose travels back over the twenty-five years of his close friendship with Ted Berrigan, the legendary poet whose life and work transformed a generation and whose death in 1983 at age forty-eight left a significant rent in the fabric of the American poetry scene. In crisp, clear verbal snapshots, Padgett recaptures the student years in Tulsa and the free-wheeling, scruffy enchantment of their lives in New York City in the early 1960's, a time of low rent and cheap meals, of foreign movies, of hero worship and budding friendships, of endless books and all-night talk-that once-only time when youth's energy is fueled by an intense love of art and poetry.

    Reprint. PW.

    In this unforgettable memoir, John Foster recounts the life and death of his lover, Juan Cespedes. This unlikely love story takes in much of the twentieth century seen from the angle of the outsider: Juan is the refugee from oppression, the immigrant trying to make it, the early victim of a spreading plague. John is the sophisticate from a first-world culture, who fully embraces his unexpected love. This is the rarest of things--a book full of intelligence and laughter that tells of terrible events with intimacy and grace.

    She shares honestly her own emotions as she grapples with the harsh realities of the world, while delighting in the humor and joy found in everyday living.Crafton compassionately recounts the unique stories of the men, women, and children she worked with during her service as a port chaplain in New York and New Jersey and as a minister at Trinity Church on Wall Street. In doing so, she weaves together threads of the mundane and the traumatic, the lovely and the ugly, and the down to earth and the holy, creating an original tapestry of the richness of life.

    The son of a well-to-do Boston lawyer, Dellinger left Yale during the Depression to ride the freight trains, sleep in hobo camps, and stand in bread lines. A community activist, Vietnam protestor, and member of the Chicago Seven, he has been one the front lines of the fight for the weak against the strong. 16 pages of photos.

    "Her personality leaps off the page in all its quirky intensity."--Wilson Library Bulletin

    Elizabeth is in her fourth summer as a camper when we first meet her - at age ten, arriving at Wynakee in the back of her stepfather's Jeep, "dressed in new shorts, a new shirt, new sneakers and a new cap, like any pilgrim ready to be reborn." Possessed of a child's remarkable ability to endow the events of her days with symbolic significance, she is poised to make the most of every moment. With her we enter a world where the comforting daily routine begins with "the chimes of a great brass bell ringing and ringing in waves of deep sound across the meadow and the woods " - a sound "which I never tired of hearing, and which said to me not just 'Listen,' but 'I hear you"'; where skinny-dipping with the other girls in the pond at night, the water "like black velvet stroking every neuron," is a chance to learn "the bliss of bodies, and the deep comfort of forgetting, for the time, our differences"; where a long hike to the Fire Tower on a day when "the heat lay around us like a piece of birch bark carefully cut and ready to be set to flame" may culminate in the realization that "the world itself was a kiln, and that all things, including me, were fired in it"; where on one special day each summer - Klondike Day - the counselors transform the camp into a dream of the Wild West. On Klondike Day gold-painted rocks, hundreds of them, are scattered through the hills for the campers to seek and find; one stone - and only one - is the Klondike Stone, the true treasure, whose finder, chosen by fate itself, is "cleansed, remade, newly wrought." To Elizabeth it is the emblem of the miracle of Wynakee, where a child who has known since her parents' divorce that "things you love can vanish" might experience during a few brief seasons a me

    That earlier book chronicles the author's seventy-first year, a time of both struggle against and acceptance of the encroachments of old age. Extra Innings begins two years later, on the publication date of its predecessor, its author exposed to all the exquisitely mingled hopes and fears of sending a book into the world. In this case, though, each review offered Doris Grumbach not only an opinion of her book, but something of a mirror in which she could see herself as the world sees her - or her self-portrait. It proves a somewhat disorienting route to self-knowledge. And so begins another eventful year - crowded with the literary pleasures (and pains) of a life spent reading and writing; the natural beauties and social particulars of life in coastal Maine; the mingled joys and affronts of travel to New York, Washington, Mexico; and, always, the looming presence of illness and mortality, the author's own and her daughter's as well. Extra Innings is, finally, a book about the successful search for home, the end of a journey to the Cove in Sargentville, Maine, where the serene landscape to be viewed from Grumbach's study comes to match the inward landscape of memory and well-earned peace.

    The book reveals Fisher's "magnificent resilience, the comfort she took from daily writing, her marvelous powers of observation and humor, and, of course, her lifelong attractions to good food and drink."--San Francisco Chronicle.

    Children's Hospital in Boston is the nation's premier pediatric medical center--a place where miracles occur daily, due in large part to world-renowned surgeon Hardy Hendren, who's about to face one of his most challenging cases. 16 pages of photos.

    

    The award-winning group perform nearly 100 concerts every year, for African American churches, the progressive Christian community, the anti-racism movement, and many others. Photos. Magazine features.

    Army, helps liberate Buchenwald, trains youngsters for Israel's War of Independence, and drives the Mirrer Rosh Yeshivah and countless others daily to the sunrise minyan at the Kosel.

    Hoping she'll be one of the vast majority of those who go on to lead full, productive lives relatively undisturbed by the disease, she takes off alone for the wilds of Alaska, leaving home, work, and family behind to live out her dream of a life filled with excitement and adventure. Janet spends the next several years amidst the spectacular beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, migrating with the change in seasons from her log cabin in the woods to a tiny fishing village on the coast. Her summers are spent climbing glaciers, fishing for crab, and sailing classic schooners. Winters are filled with dogsled racing, hot-air ballooning, and putting out to sea on a working ship. The MS begins to re-assert itself, however, in a chronic pattern of attacks and remissions, and she struggles to adjust - even submitting to twenty-six barehanded operations by the "psychic surgeons" of the Philippine Islands. As the disease progresses in rare, unexpected ways, a wheelchair finally becomes a necessity. She then enters a rehabilitation center and provides us with a graphic, unflinching look at what it takes to prepare for life with a serious disability. Janet James's penchant for black humor, cold beer, and handsome men results in numerous outsized tales. Her story is a frank, detailed account of life with a profound disability - a rare example of what MS can do. But through it all, she reminds us that life, regardless of its circumstances, truly is whatever we choose to make it.

    The soft-hackled fly is one of the most venerable trout patterns known to man, having been first on Dame Juliana Berner's famous list dated in 1497. Even hardened sceptics will benefit from Nemes' colourful experiences at home and abroad, and be intrigued by the fascinating history of the soft-hackles, the entomological explanation for their success, and the simplicity of their tying -- for which the author provides illustrated step-by-step instructions.

    We fight to hold on to recent memories even as, with a force like gravity, time pulls us apart from those who have died.” In her memoir, Grieving, Ruth Coughlin lays bare the story of her and her husband, William J. Coughlin as their lives, intertwined, are forever changed by his sudden and terminal illness. Written with beauty, poignancy and clarity, it is as much about love as it is about grief; a comforting reminder that in the aftermath of death the shape of love is forced to change, but its depth and endurance remains untouchable. The journey of Ruth and William is both remarkable and heart-breaking. They are a vibrant couple; friends and lovers planning to grow old together, always believing in tomorrow. Yet, as they discover too early, the subject of Grieving is one that will cast a shadow over all of us during our lives — rarely do we expect it, but when it arrives, we are at its mercy. This is a book for anyone who has experienced the shattering reality of loss, the courage to let your loved one go in their final moments, the aftermath of an empty space in the bed, and the longing for a friend who is gone but never forgotten. In prose that are written with stark honesty, Ruth Coughlin addresses the anguish of widowhood and the prospect of life after death. Praise for Grieving: “Grieving is a heartfelt outpouring, by turns sentimental and angry, that documents an extraordinary relationship and a couple’s shattered dream of growing old together.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer “The strengths of Grieving are its precise details and fluid movement through time — back and forth between the endless weeks of tests and treatments, earlier, happier stages in the Coughlins’ romance, and the undiscovered territory beyond Bill’s death ... If truth rings, Grieving is a beautifully constructed bell.” — Booklist “Grieving: A Love Story intertwines two tales — one about the couple’s precious and painful last months together; the other about Ruth’s devastation after Bill’s death. It’s really only one story, of course, about the way that love changes shape, molding itself to fit life’s contours.” — Detroit Free Press “Coughlin notes that bereavement brings about a narcissism that is nearly ‘pathological.’ In confessing her obsessional grief, spiralling depression and self-neglect, she wanted to reassure other bereaved people who are still setting the table for their dead husband, or waving when they see a car that looks like the deceased’s, that they are not insane.” — New York Daily News “What makes Grieving so compelling is its honest, real desperate immediacy, and the willingness of its author to struggle on the page, with her own confusion and pain without false heroism or literary posing. No one can tell you everything about grief; but Ruth Coughlin tells a great deal, and tells it beautifully, with humor, love, sorrow, frustration and hope.” — Detroit News “Moving ... Coughlin comes across not as a triumphant heroine but as a vulnerable human being torn by rage, confusion, and grief — one just beginning to find her way of bearing her existence.

    More interested in dating than child-rearing, her father left her in the care of a violent, unhinged nanny. A riveting first-person account, Riding the Cyclone careens like the Coney Island roller coaster from gut-wrenching sadism to hilariously caustic commentary as Lauren tries to make sense of her world. Growing up in extreme isolation amid suburban affluence, she suffers from the profound disconnect between appearance and reality. Seeking freedom from her terrifying home in an idyllic private high school, Lauren finds her inner chaos mirrored in the upheavals of the '60s. "A beautiful and unusual coming of age story." 
- Alison Baker, author, Loving Wanda Beaver

    With an older sister's efficiency, she notified her parents and arranged Bobby's cremation; then, almost against her will, she began to grieve. This extraordinary book is a record of what she encountered in that "landscape without gravity."Here is a bold account of a sister coming to terms with her brother's death and with the type of grief that arises only when one sibling loses another—a grief that is all too often unacknowledged and borne in silence. Here too is a map for that "hero's journey" we call mourning. Ascher locates the moments of healing inside the kind of hurt that seems to last forever, making this profoundly comforting, invaluable reading for anyone—especially brothers and sisters faced with loss.

    While Words is an account of Mandy's diagnosis and treatment, Gala is "the scenario of a wish-fulfillment" (as West writes in the preface), a continuation of the father and daughter's joyful investigation of the richness of life and its amazing possibilities. Ranging across natural history and astronomy in his effort to understand his daughter's handicap, West finds in Mandy/Michaela an irrepressible and unpredictable guide to the mysteries of the universe. Brought together in the same volume, the books also allow a unique look at how nonfiction and fiction techniques can be used to the same ends in the hands of a master of prose.

    Though equipped with Aryan false-identity papers, she found life marked by daily threats and the danger of discovery - by the Gestapo, Polish police, extortionists, collaborators, hoodlums, and even former colleagues and acquaintances. Rosenberg's wartime trek took her to Polish cities, German military hospitals, and finally to Heidelberg, Germany, where she worked as a maid in a Nazi household from 1944 until her liberation by American forces. Her story is also a testimony to the power of friendship. Brought together in the ghetto, she and her friend Maria continued to support each other in their ensuing struggle for survival.

    In stories that span the decades of the 1940s through 1990s he recreates the barrio in all its multi-faceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, numbers collectors, tropical fruit vendors and sidewalk games of dominoes, its knife fights and junkies' raps and its succesful stories of craftsmen and entrepeneurs. These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet experiences, but throughout, Jack Agüeros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion that gloriously affirm quiet moments of grace and triumph in common and ordinary struggles—the real stuff of literature.

    In Valley of The Giant Buddhas she describes the adventures and discoveries of her life in Afghanistan. As a Westerner in an Eastern land, and as a woman in a man's world, her perspective is filled with wonder as well as humor. She opens up a land that is unfamiliar to most of us who know little of Afghanistan except as a former battleground for the superpowers. From the far corners of this exotic land, to the spotlight of international diplomacy, Morag Murray's warm humanity illuminates the charm of everyday life and the struggles of kings and rulers. Fascinating tour of many lesser known and sometimes hidden ancient sites in Afghanistan. True story of travels there in the twentieth century before the Russian invasion. Full of humorous insight into the many cultural and political stresses that clearly contributed to the situation as it is today. This is a wonderful book containing very interesting material that is available nowhere else.

    Her commanding physical presence and extraordinary technique have made her not only a superstar of American dance and an innovator in her field but also an inspiration to African Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Last November, Doubleday published Dancing Spirit, this remarkable woman's autobiography. Now, with Anchor's paperback publication, an even wider audience can trace the steps of her career: her early years in Philadelphia, where she began studying dance at the age of six, her discovery by Agnes de Mille; years of frustration and struggle in a field that favored petite, fair, White women; her legendary collaboration with Alvin Ailey; her work on Broadway in the musical Sophisticated Ladies; the formation of her own company, the Jamison Project, and her return to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as artistic director after its founder's death in 1989. Dancing Spirit contains vivid portraits of many artists Jamison has worked with, including Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Jessye Norman, Geoffrey Holder, Carmen de Lavallade, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to name only a few. And Jamison talks frankly about the price exacted by a dancer's nomadic life--rootlessness, fleeting relationships, the obsession with physical beauty. Illustrated with sixty photographs, Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Wisechild, again eloquently explores her childhood and her journey to heal, this time focusing on her relationship with her emotionally abusive mother. Wisechild moves between her present life and her childhood memories to uncover her own emotional development at different ages beginning with infancy. Using therapy, creative expression, inner voices and bodywork, Wisechild shares her journey of change and personal empowerment. An eloquent and moving book for those wanting to explore their relationship with their mothers and also for those who want to better understand child development, emotional abuse and healing.

    Ron Santo has a remarkable story to tell, from the trauma of a serious illness to his fame as one of the greatest third basemen in the history of baseball.Loaded with untold stories about the greatest players ever to grace the game, and updated for seasons to come, this book will delight not only Cubs fans, but baseball fans everywhere.

    Edited by Wilson's biographer, this volume records the final years of one of our foremost critics and writers, taking its place alongside his major works as an enduring contribution to American culture....Witnessing his own foibles and the ironies of human nature, expressing feeling more deeply than he often had in his journal, he writes his account of this decade with a concentration undiluted by other large-scale projects. The extraordinary personal record begun in another pivotal period in American life, with "The Twenties," comes to a fitting culmination in "The Sixties."

    Take two energetic young professionals fresh from the New York advertising world, drop them into a small Maine town as the new owners of the village store/restaurant/dance hall/soda fountain/guest house/bowling alley, and you are guaranteed some highly entertaining results!

    in her single-engine Luscombe Silvaire.Gosnell's true story of life as a woman pilot flying cross-country solo—including photos taken on her amazing trip—will make the confirmed urban dweller yearn for open spaces and the adventurous life.

    Her short story collection, Squandering the Blue, was hailed by the Chicago Tribune as "one of the most remarkable collections you will ever read." The Los Angeles Times has called her a "visionary" and Newsday has praised her writing as "beautiful and poetic...hard to resist." Now, in Wonders of the West, Braverman surpasses all previous expectations with a novel about internal exile and the dark side of the American dream. It is the early 1960s and the world is on the verge of monumental change. Jordan Lerner is a teenager adrift in a land of brutally unconscious adults, struggling for breath in a place that is slowly losing air. Jordan's mother has dared to leave her husband and tradition for the idea of a second chance in California. She has risked crossing the country in a broken-down car, pawning jewelry like parts of herself to raise money for the road. Jordan half expects that she will be next. State by state, mother and daughter find themselves sleeping on the ground, impoverished, engaged in a journey that is more than metaphoric, that is leaving a stain on their souls. Through the arid, blistering heat and the cold, blue dark of the night they are initiated into an America that has nothing to do with postcards. It is a nation of hallucinatory, frightening highway motels and vegetable stands, of deserts and lies and the growing realization that they have left nothing to arrive at something less than that. What they discover is a tawdry Dust Bowl outpost, a region of poverty on the Pacific where families disintegrate beneath the sullen palms and sunsets sordid as a garish bruise. It is here that Jordan Lerner struggles to invent herself and finds the courage to recognize and seize her destiny.

    They became... FIGHTING MENA special forces adventurer who became Korean Minister of Agriculture for a day...a mini-D-Day that happened when a Green Beret met some Navy guys with a problem...an Operation code named Barroom designed to parachute four five-ton elephants deep in the Vietnamese jungle. In Jim Morris' classic collection of Special Forces stories, we are given a vivid, sometimes humorous, and often terrifying, look at the culture of the elite warrior trained to fight outside the box, survive in hostile terrain, and kill the enemy before the enemy knew he was there. Profiling men who wanted to be the best, Morris leads us through night jumps and ambushes, from the day-to-day action of Green Berets fighting alongside indigenous Vietnamese to the onslaught that was the Tet Offensive. Along the way, the jungle comes alive, the smell of white phosphorous burns the nostrils, and the voices of brave and extraordinary men-some who lived and some who died-are etched in the mind forever...

    He left millions of television viewers, watching live, stunned and speechless. He also left his best friend, Bo Kimble, a tremendous legacy. On the court they were known as "The Hank and Bo Show," the most promising players in the NCAA of their time. Yet they were more than just teammates, more than just players. From their first meeting on a playground as kids, they were inseparable. In the tradition of Bang the Drum Slowly and Brian's Song, For You, Hank is the story of a unique friendship. Supportive, humorous, and even competitive, Hank Gathers' and Bo Kimble's friendship was forged and carried, from the broken asphalt playgrounds of North Philadelphia to the gleaming basketball courts of Los Angeles. And it was a friendship nurtured by their families; supported by Father Dave, who helped them survive Philly's mean streets; and encouraged by Loyola's Dave Spencer, who pushed them to work to their potentials. It was a friendship that ended in tragedy and triumphed in love. For upon Hank's death Bo found himself alone, but inspired by his friend's dreams. From his first left-handed free throw tribute to Hank at the NCAA finals to his place in the NBA on the L. A. Clippers, Bo has fulfilled his vow to carry on the vision he and Hank shared all their lives. Heart-wrenching and poignant, funny and tragic, Bo Kimble's honest portrayal of his friendship with Hank Gathers is, ultimately a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

    From Roosevelt to Clinton, Block tells us about his five decades of working in the nation's capital, with notes on famous personalities and his own strong political opinions. 8-page insert.

    A member of the South African Parliament from 1953-1989, Suzman used that forum to bear witness to and challenge the policy of apartheid. Photos.

    In an inside look at the world of ballet by one of America's greatest ballet dancers, Edward Villella reflects on his tempestuous dancing career and his relationship with master choreographer George Balanchine.

    Packed with all-new tales of his years behind the mike and behind the scenes, this entertaining follow-up to Emery's bestselling biography, Memories, includes priceless recollections about some of the most celebrated country performers of yesterday and today.

    Yet Sojourner Truth was born a slave near the Hudson River in Ulster County, New York, in the late 1700s. Called merely Isabella as a slave, once freed she adopted the name of Sojourner Truth and became a national figure in the struggle for the emancipation of both Blacks and women in Civil War America.Despite the dual discrimination she suffered as a Black woman, Truth significantly shaped both her own life and the struggle for human rights in America. Through her fierce intelligence, her resourcefulness, and her eloquence, she became widely acknowledged as a remarkable figure during her life, and she has become one of the most heavily mythologized figures in American history.While some of the myths about Truth offer inspiration, they have also contributed to distortions about American history, especially about the experiences of Black Americans and women. In this landmark work, the product of years of primary research, Pulizter-Prize winning biographer Carleton Mabee has unearthed the best available sources about this remarkable woman to reconstruct the most authentic account of her life to date. Mabee offers new insights on why she never learned to read, on the authenticity of the famous quotations attributed to her (such as Ar'n't I a woman?), her relationship to President Lincoln, her role in the abolitionist movement, her crusade to move freed slaves from the South to the North, and her life as a singer, orator, feminist and woman of faith. This is an engaging, historically precise biography that reassesses the place of Sojourner Truth--slave, prophet, legend--in American history.

    This is the story not only of 609 Squadron's war during the summer of 1941, but also of Richey's exploits until the end of the war at Fighter Command HQ.

    Not a how-to but an elegant prose description of plant and color combinations, highlighted by more than 300 spectacular full-color photographs of Great Dixter--Lloyd's home and gardens in Sussex, England.