Book picks similar to
Resisting Elegy: On Grief and Recovery by Joel Peckham


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Someone Like Me: An Unlikely Story of Challenge and Triumph Over Cerebral Palsy


John W. Quinn - 2010
    He kept his cerebral palsy a secret from the record- keepers and medical authorities for 20 years. He had a distinguished and highly decorated career despite the pain he endured to appear normal.He served on board destroyers, a battleship, two aircraft carriers and functioned as an administrator for a Seal unit. The outside world also impacted on him further aggravating his CP when he was challenged by alcoholism and excessive grief caused by the suicide of a brother. With help, John Quinn triumphed over both, as he did the painful cerebral palsy.

Steve Jobs Graduation Speech


Steve Jobs - 2011
    Here, word for word is that amazing speech to inspire you to find what it is that you "Love".

Motherhood Martyrdom & Costco Runs


Whitney Dineen - 2017
    • Exhausting—when you realize you’ll most likely never sleep again--like EVER. • Explosive—OMG these kids spew from both ends! And that’s just the beginning. Whitney shares the ridiculous highs and excruciating lows of her catapult into motherhood. Enjoy the ride as this new mom vows to give up profanity while falling in love with… you guessed it, Costco. Be careful, because if you’re anything like Whitney, you may just pee a little. Motherhood Martyrdom & Costco Runs takes the reader on a roller coaster of emotions as Whitney plummets into postpartum depression, desperately tries to get her kids to stop yodeling in public restrooms, and comes to terms with the fact she’ll never quite be queen of her own kingdom. Get ready to laugh, cry, cheer, and pat yourself on the back for the sake of mommies everywhere. And while you’re at it, stop by Costco for a case of toilet paper and a Very Berry Sundae. You won’t regret it!

A Life in Frocks: A Memoir


Kelly Doust - 2010
    For as long as she can remember, Kelly Doust has been passionate about clothes. They are her first, and most enduring, love affair to date. Like many women, she adores the playfulness of fashion and its endless ability to transform. She loves the ritual and drama of getting dressed, assuming different identities in different outfits, and exploring the many facets of her personality. She buys far too many glossy magazines, and puzzles over how she can spend half her life shopping and yet still find herself with nothing to wear. Over the years, clothes have comforted her, given her confidence, lured lovers, made her invisible, secured jobs, aged her, and given back her youth. And yes, they have betrayed her. This is one woman's charming analysis of her fascinating relationship with what she wears.

Granta 149: Europe: Strangers in the Land (The Magazine of New Writing)


Sigrid Rausing - 2019
    It harks back to the 1989 issue of the same name, themed around the response to the fall of the Berlin wall. Through the lenses of exile and migration, we ask ourselves what it means to be European now. Featuring a photoessay by Bruno Fert who steps inside the temporary homes of refugees in camps in Greece and France.

What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered


Patrick Lane - 2004
    He spent the first year of his sobriety close to home, tending his garden, where he cast his mind back over his life, searching for the memories he'd tried to drown in vodka. Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and his garden's life has become inseparable from his own. A new bloom on a plant, a skirmish among the birds, the way a tree bends in the wind, and the slow, measured change of seasons invariably bring to his mind an episode from his eventful past. What the Stones Remember is the emerging chronicle of Lane's attempt to face those memories, as well as his new self--to rediscover his life. In this powerful and beautifully written book, Lane offers readers an unflinching and unsentimental account of coming to one's senses in the presence of nature.

The Cabin


David Mamet - 1992
    They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene -- and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret.The resulting volume may be compared to the plays that have made Mamet famous: it is finely crafted and deftly timed, and its precise language carries an enormous weight of feeling.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living


Krista Tippett - 2016
    The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage. Scientists in a variety of fields; theologians from an array of faiths; poets, activists, and many others have all opened themselves up to Tippett's compassionate yet searching conversation.   In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of teaching faculty.   The open questions and challenges of our time are intimate and civilizational all at once, Tippett says – definitions of when life begins and when death happens, of the meaning of community and family and identity, of our relationships to technology and through technology. The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.   This book offers a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century – of personal growth but also renewed public life and human spiritual evolution. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty as a core moral value and civility and love as muscular practice. Krista Tippett's great gift, in her work and in Becoming Wise, is to avoid reductive simplifications but still find the golden threads that weave people and ideas together into a shimmering braid.   One powerful common denominator of the lessons imparted to Tippett is the gift of presence, of the exhilaration of engagement with life for its own sake, not as a means to an end. But presence does not mean passivity or acceptance of the status quo. Indeed Tippett and her teachers are people whose work meets, and often drives, powerful forces of change alive in the world today. In the end, perhaps the greatest blessing conveyed by the lessons of spiritual genius Tippett harvests in Becoming Wise is the strength to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better.

How Did I Get to Be 40 & Other Atrocities


Judith Viorst - 1976
    So let her help you take a look at that decade of sagging kneecaps and college reunions and fantasies of love in the afternoon: at Maoist kids, cholesterol counts, adult-education courses and other atrocities—which somehow just don’t hurt so much when you laugh.

Red Blanket: An uncensored memoir that reveals the underbelly of surgical training


John Harch - 2020
    

The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses 2012 Edition


Bill Henderson - 2011
    The result: "The most creative, generous, and democratic of any of the annual volumes" (Rick Moody).Among its numerous awards, the Pushcart Prize has been chosen for the Poets Writers / Barnes Noble "Writers for Writers" Award and the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement recognition.

Minor Monuments


Ian Maleney - 2019
    Mostly set in the rural Irish midlands, on a small family farm not far from the river Shannon. This book tracks the final years of Maleney's grandfather's life, and looks at his experience with Alzheimer's disease, as well as the experiences of the people closest to him. Using his grandfather's memory loss as a spur, the essays ask what it means to call a place home how we establish ourselves in a place, and how we record our experiences of a place. The nature of familial and social bonds, the way a relationship is altered by observing and recording it, the influence of tradition and history, the question of belonging - these are the questions which come up again and again. Using episodes from his own life, and drawing on the works of artists like Pat Collins, Seamus Heaney, John Berger and Brian Eno, Maleney examines how certain ways of listening and looking might bring us closer to each other, or keep us apart. Minor Monuments is a thought provoking and quietly devastating meditation on family, and how even the smallest story is no minor event.

My (not so) Storybook Life: A Tale of Friendship and Faith


Elizabeth Owen - 2011
    This enjoyable read handles with heart and a light touch such issues as marriage, family, home ownership, illness, and death.

Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, The FBI and a Devil's Deal


Dick,O'Neil, Gerard Lehr - 2015
    Black Mass Film Tie In

Best White and Other AnxiousDelusions


Rebecca Davis - 2015
    Her razor-sharp wit combines with her acute powers of observation to produce social and political commentary that will have you in stitches even as it informs and provokes you to think seriously about the topics she discusses. In Best White, Davis offers advice on life’s tricky issues; discusses the perils of being a ‘Best White’; laments the fact that society does not have a universally adopted form of greeting, such as the high five; explores the intricacies of social media and internet dating; considers the future of reading and tackles a range of controversial topics in between.