Book picks similar to
Reading Water: Lessons From The River (Capital Discoveries) by Rebecca Lawton
nature
memoir
water
nonfiction
I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections
Nora Ephron - 2010
. . but rarely acknowledging.Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—I Remember Nothing is pure joy.
The Junket (Kindle Single)
Mike Albo - 2011
He lands an enviable gig writing about shopping and fashion for the city’s major newspaper, but an ill-fated promotional junket gets Albo into hot water. He becomes a gossip item and finds himself caught in an acrimonious war between Old and New Media. Here's a gimlet-eyed account of the back-biting media scene, a glimpse into the inner workings of the fashion crowd, and a candid portrait of what it takes to survive as a writer in today’s chattering and watchful New York City."I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion: favors and junkets and banquets and gifts that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work. Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag."
An Octopus in My Ouzo: Loving Life on a Greek Island
Jennifer Barclay - 2016
From the joy of gardening her own little piece of paradise to the thrill of joining in with the Greek dancing at local festivals, Jennifer learns something new every day – and discovers love again along the way.Dive into this exquisite, honest and deeply moving tale and taste the sweetness of living life to the full on a small island.
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
Annie Dillard - 2016
Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life—a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through backyards, a bookish teenager memorizes the poetry of Rimbaud—with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join Dillard in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard’s elegance of mind.
AWOL on the Appalachian Trail
David Miller - 2006
This is a true account of his hike from Georgia to Maine, bringing to the reader the life of the towns and the people he meets along the way.
Three men on motorcycles: The Amigos ride to Ladakh
Ketan Joshi - 2017
(And SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED….in spirit form. Cybernagger! Astralnagger! ) There are two routes to Ladakh - the Srinagar-Leh road and the Manali-Leh road. Which one should we do? Ah...Let’s do both! What other places should we go to? Ah...Let’s go everywhere! The most epic ride of India deserves a most epic travel story! Read the madcap adventures of the Amigos. Adi - Mr Perpetual Motion, the sunglass executioner. Delzad - the Ghost rider, the tandoori fanatic. Ketan - the cool rider. the husband of SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED! The most hilarious ride story ever written. Check out the sample right now! EXPLORE INDIA WITH THE AMIGOS Ketan, Adi and Delzad ride all over India on their Royal Enfield motorcycles and have the most amazing and hilarious adventures. Join the Amigos as they ride and get insights on Indian history, culture, customs and a bellyaching amount of laughs. Three Men on Motorcycles - The Amigos Ride to Ladakh Three Men Ride Again- The Amigos Ride to Spiti Three Men Ride South The Amigos Ride to Coorg Three Men Ride the Cliffhanger The Amigos Ride the Most Dangerous Roads in the World Check out photos and videos of the rides on www.ketanjoshi.net
Bicycle Diaries
David Byrne - 2008
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them on tour. Byrne's choice was made out of convenience rather than political motivation, but the more cities he saw from his bicycle, the more he became hooked on this mode of transport and the sense of liberation it provided. Convinced that urban biking opens one's eyes to the inner workings and rhythms of a city's geography and population, Byrne began keeping a journal of his observations and insights. An account of what he sees and whom he meets as he pedals through metropoles from Berlin to Buenos Aires, Istanbul to San Francisco, Manila to New York, Bicycle Diaries also records Byrne's thoughts on world music, urban planning, fashion, architecture, cultural dislocation, and much more, all conveyed with a highly personal mixture of humor, curiosity, and humility. Part travelogue, part journal, part photo album, Bicycle Diaries is an eye-opening celebration of seeing the world from the seat of a bike.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan - 2015
Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.
Where's Harry?: Steve Stone Remembers 25 Years with Harry Caray
Steve Stone - 1999
In Where's Harry?, Steve Stone pays tribute to one of baseball's biggest legends never to take the field, remembering the unique baseball commentator who was also the game's biggest fan.
Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West
Dorothy Wickenden - 2011
Bored by their society luncheons, charity work, and the effete young men who courted them, they learned that two teaching jobs were available in a remote mountaintop schoolhouse and applied;shocking their families and friends. "No young lady in our town," Dorothy later commented, "had ever been hired by anybody." They took the new railroad over the Continental Divide and made their way by spring wagon to the tiny settlement of Elkhead, where they lived with a family of homesteaders. They rode several miles to school each day on horseback, sometimes in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied on barrel staves, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The man who had lured them out west was Ferry Carpenter, a witty, idealistic, and occasionally outrageous young lawyer and cattle rancher. He had promised them the adventure of a lifetime and the most modern schoolhouse in Routt County; he hadn't let on that the teachers would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. That year transformed the children, their families, and the undaunted teachers themselves. Dorothy and Rosamond learned how to handle unruly children who had never heard the Pledge of Allegiance and thought Ferry Carpenter was the president of the United States; they adeptly deflected the amorous advances of hopeful cowboys; and they saw one of their closest friends violently kidnapped by two coal miners. Carpenter's marital scheme turned out to be more successful than even he had hoped and had a surprising twist some forty years later. In their buoyant letters home, the two women captured the voices and stories of the pioneer women, the children, and the other memorable people they got to know. Nearly a hundred years later, New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the letters and began to reconstruct the women's journey. Enhancing the story with interviews with descendants, research about these vanished communities, and trips to the region, Wickenden creates an exhilarating saga about two intrepid young women and the settling up of the West.
Robbie Fowler: My Life In Football: Goals, Glory & The Lessons I've Learnt
Robbie Fowler - 2019
He is the sixth-highest goal scorer in the history of the Premier League and notched 183 goals for Liverpool alone.But before all of that, he was a Liverpool lad who loved the game, the Kop and everything that came with it. My Life In Football is the story of a boy who became a legend.Born in Liverpool in 1975, Robbie Fowler became a club icon by the time he was 18. Now, he takes us through the games that have shaped his life and football philosophy, over 25 years after he first signed as a professional for Liverpool.Engaging, personal and revealing, Robbie opens up about his astounding achievements, the price of fame and the regrets and struggles of being a professional footballer. From Hillsborough to Madrid, via the cup treble, that goal line celebration, hundreds of goals, Houllier, Benítez, Klopp and more, Robbie explains his thinking about the modern game. Inviting readers inside the dressing room, he shares stories of legendary teammates like Rush, Owen and Gerrard, as well as his rise to football's top table. How did he get back up so many times after the injuries that blighted his career? What gave him the drive to keep going and pursue his dreams?Robbie's My Life In Football harks back to a simpler time when fans and players shared the same story, and when the local boy really could dream of scoring a hat-trick for his home club when Saturday came.
Letter from New York: BBC Woman's Hour Broadcasts
Helene Hanff - 1992
We meet Arlene, Hanff's high-flying friend who's social life (and wardrobe) put Hanff's one-and-one-half room apartment and simple writer's life in perspective. We walk through Nina's garden, 16 stories up and witness famous New York rites of passage from the hysteria of St. Patrick's Day to Shakespeare's Garden and the neighbors who saved it, to block parties, with their 'sizzling Italian sausages and shish kebab and flossy plates of pate and brie,' all told in Hanff's inimitable style. We join Hanff as she flies to London to realize a lifetime dream at the Ambassador Theatre: opening night for the play, '84, Charing Cross Road.' And we witness the elegant Arlene as she meets and falls in love with a New York City cop.
On a Wave
Thad Ziolkowski - 2002
As a disenchanted, unemployed English professor, Thad decides one day to sneak away from his temp job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. In the meager cold waves, he contemplates how he could have possibly become a semidepressed, chain-smoking, aimless man when for a few shining years of his boyhood, he was invincible. His lapsed love affair with the ocean begins amid the late-sixties counterculture in coastal Florida. After his parents' divorce, nine-year-old Thad escapes from his difficult family -- notably a new brooding and explosive stepfather -- by heading for the thrilling, uncharted waters of the local beach. In the embrace of the surf, he is able to stay offshore for years, until his life is upended once again, this time by a double tragedy that deposits him at a crossroads between a life in the waves and a life on land. Lyrical and disarmingly funny, On a Wave is a glorious portrait of youth that reminds readers of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Frank Conroy's Stop-Time.
This Much Country
Kristin Knight Pace - 2019
In exchange for housing, she would take care of her friend's eight sled dogs.That winter, she learned that she was tougher than she ever knew. She learned how to survive in one of the most remote places on earth and she learned she was strong enough to be alone. She fell in love twice: first with running sled dogs, and then with Andy, a gentle man who had himself moved to Alaska to heal a broken heart. Kristin and Andy married and started a sled dog kennel. While this work was enormously satisfying, Kristin became determined to complete the Iditarod -- the 1,000-mile dogsled race from Anchorage, in south central Alaska, to Nome on the western Bering Sea coast.THIS MUCH COUNTRY is the story of renewal and transformation. It's about journeying across a wild and unpredictable landscape and finding inner peace, courage and a true home. It's about pushing boundaries and overcoming paralyzing fears.
Life Lessons from Bob Ross
Bob Ross - 2020
Chapters range from Blank Canvas: It's Your World, which illuminates how to approach each day, to Bravery Tests: Challenging Yourself, which draws upon your inner strength, to Happy Little Accidents: Creating Success from Failure, which affirms the power of positive thinking.Bob Ross's lessons gently encourage everyone to live their best Bob Ross life--an aspiration more important now than ever before.