Book picks similar to
Kurt Cobain: The Cobain Dossier by Martin Clarke
non-fiction
biography
music
biographies
Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall—From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness
Frank Brady - 2011
and remarkable powers of concentration, Bobby memorized hundreds of chess books in several languages, and he was only 13 when he became the youngest chess master in U.S. history. But his strange behavior started early. In 1972, at the historic Cold War showdown in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he faced Soviet champion Boris Spassky, Fischer made headlines with hundreds of petty demands that nearly ended the competition. It was merely a prelude to what was to come. Arriving back in the United States to a hero’s welcome, Bobby was mobbed wherever he went—a figure as exotic and improbable as any American pop culture had yet produced. No player of a mere “board game” had ever ascended to such heights. Commercial sponsorship offers poured in, ultimately topping $10 million—but Bobby demurred. Instead, he began tithing his limited money to an apocalyptic religion and devouring anti-Semitic literature. After years of poverty and a stint living on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, Bobby remerged in 1992 to play Spassky in a multi-million dollar rematch—but the experience only deepened a paranoia that had formed years earlier when he came to believe that the Soviets wanted him dead for taking away “their” title. When the dust settled, Bobby was a wanted man—transformed into an international fugitive because of his decision to play in Montenegro despite U.S. sanctions. Fearing for his life, traveling with bodyguards, and wearing a long leather coat to ward off knife attacks, Bobby lived the life of a celebrity fugitive – one drawn increasingly to the bizarre. Mafiosi, Nazis, odd attempts to breed an heir who could perpetuate his chess-genius DNA—all are woven into his late-life tapestry. And yet, as Brady shows, the most notable irony of Bobby Fischer’s strange descent – which had reached full plummet by 2005 when he turned down yet another multi-million dollar payday—is that despite his incomprehensible behavior, there were many who remained fiercely loyal to him. Why that was so is at least partly the subject of this book—one that at last answers the question: “Who was Bobby Fischer?”
First Seal
Charles W. Sasser - 1997
Navy SEALs shares his personal story, from the events that molded him as a warrior to the insights he acquired in combat, defining his role in the shaping of twentieth century warfare.
The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End
Danny Dyer - 2015
This book is a window into the world of Danny Dyer - and he's seen more of the world than most so he's got one or two things to say about it.Tackling such vital questions as 'Where have all the old school boozers gone?' 'Are there such things as ghosts?' and 'Am I middle class?' Danny shares his unique take on life with characteristic honesty and humour and reveals why it is that:· What goes around comes around - he learnt the hard way· You can take the boy out of the East End but you can't take the East End out of the boy· Harold Pinter is a diamond geezer · He told the media training expert to do one· Science can prove that West Ham are the best football club in the world· Him and Joanne are like a team - he's Paul Gascoigne, she's David Batty· The human race isn't evolved enough for TwitterSo, hold on to your titfer, it's gonna be a bumpy ride!
Gandhi's Life in His Own Words
Mahatma Gandhi - 1983
And if every page of these chapters does not proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of Truth is ahimsa, I shall deem all my labour in writing these chapters to have been in vain. And, even though my efforts in this behalf may prove fruitless, let the readers know that the vehicle, not the great principle, is at fault.- M. K. Gandhi
Great Balls of Fire : The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis
Myra Lewis - 1982
Paperback Book
Gold Dust Woman: A Biography of Stevie Nicks
Stephen Davis - 2017
Just as Nicks (and Lindsay Buckingham) gave Fleetwood Mac the shot of adrenaline they needed to become real rock stars--according to Christine McVie--Gold Dust Woman is vibrant with stories and with a life lived large and hard: ●How Nicks and Buckingham were asked to join Fleetwood Mac and how they turned the band into stars ●The affairs that informed Nicks' greatest songs ●Her relationships with the Eagles' Don Henley and Joe Walsh, and with Fleetwood himself ●Why Nicks married her best friend's widower ●Her dependency on cocaine, drinking and pot, but how it was a decade-long addiction to Klonopin that almost killed her ●Nicks' successful solo career that has her still performing in venues like Madison Square Garden ●The cult of Nicks and its extension to chart-toppers like Taylor Swift and the Dixie Chicks
Elvis Presley: A Southern Life
Joel Williamson - 2012
The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set against the rich backdrop of Southern society--indeed, American society--in the second half of the twentieth century.Author of The Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and Southern History, Joel Williamson is a renowned historian known for his inimitable and compelling narrative style. In this tour de force biography, he captures the drama of Presley's career set against the popular culture of the post-World War II South. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley was a contradiction, flamboyant in pegged black pants with pink stripes, yet soft-spoken, respectfully courting a decent girl from church. Then he wandered into Sun Records, and everything changed. I was scared stiff, Elvis recalled about his first time performing on stage. Everyone was hollering and I didn't know what they were hollering at. Girls did the hollering--at his snarl and swagger. Williamson calls it the revolution of the Elvis girls. His fans lived in an intense moment, this generation raised by their mothers while their fathers were away at war, whose lives were transformed by an exodus from the countryside to Southern cities, a postwar culture of consumption, and a striving for upward mobility. They came of age in the era of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which turned high schools into battlegrounds of race. Explosively, white girls went wild for a white man inspired by and singing black music while wiggling erotically. Elvis, Williamson argues, gave his female fans an opportunity to break free from straitlaced Southern society and express themselves sexually, if only for a few hours at a time.Rather than focusing on Elvis's music and the music industry, Elvis Presley: A Southern Life illuminates the zenith of his career, his period of deepest creativity, which captured a legion of fans and kept them fervently loyal for decades. Williamson shows how Elvis himself changed--and didn't. In the latter part of his career, when he performed regular gigs in Las Vegas and toured second-tier cities, he moved beyond the South to a national audience who had bought his albums and watched his movies. Yet the makeup of his fan base did not substantially change, nor did Elvis himself ever move up the Southern class ladder despite his wealth. Even as he aged and his life was cut short, he maintained his iconic status, becoming arguably larger in death than in life as droves of fans continue to pay homage to him at Graceland.Appreciative and unsparing, culturally attuned and socially revealing, Williamson's Elvis Presley will deepen our understanding of the man and his times.
Mejda: The Family and Early Life of Paramahansa Yogananda
Sananda Lal Ghosh - 1980
The Family and the Early Life of Paramahansa Yogananda.
The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor
Mark Seal - 2011
Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man.The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Clark Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and thus began his journey of deception.Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts, culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising-star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a member of the infamously wealthy Rockefeller family. The impostor charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions - working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection - until his marriage ended, and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s.
Aaron Hernandez's Killing Fields: Exposing Untold Murders, Violence, Cover-Ups, and the NFL's Shocking Code of Silence
Dylan Howard - 2019
For the first time, Aaron Hernandez’s Killing Fields will reveal the real, hitherto unknown motive for the killing of Odin Lloyd—the only crime for which Hernandez was ever convicted and a revelation so shocking it will shake the foundations of the NFL itself. It will also unpick a pattern of violence and brutality stretching back to his time as a teenager at the University of Florida, revealing further shooting victims, evidence of his involvement in the double murder of Daniel Abreu and Safiro Furtado in 2012. Featuring new interviews with Hernandez’s cellmates, serving police investigators, prosecutors, psychologists, attorneys—as well as key witnesses including Hernandez’s drug dealer, a male stripper he hired days before the killing of Lloyd—plus extensive testimony from relatives of Hernandez’s victims, Aaron Hernandez’s Killing Fields is the exhaustive, definitive account of the rise and fall of a man undone by his own appetite for violence, gangsterism, power, drugs, and self-destruction. This is the real Aaron Hernandez story—and perhaps just the beginning of a whole new murder investigation.
J. D. Salinger: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
J.D. Salinger - 2016
D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, he was stalked by besotted fans, would-be biographers, and pushy journalists. In this collection of rare and revealing encounters with the elusive literary giant, Salinger discusses sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly what that onslaught was like, the autobiographical origins of his art, and his advice to writers. Including his final, surprising interview, and with an insightful introduction by New York Times journalist David Streitfeld, these enlightening, provocative, and even amusing conversations reveal a writer fiercely resistant to the spotlight but powerless to escape its glare."