It's a Long Story: My Life


Willie Nelson - 2015
    Funny. Leaving no stone unturned." . . . So say the publishers about this book I've written. What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it. It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, to the Pacific Northwest, from Nashville to Hawaii and all the way back again. Of selling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias while hosting radio shows and writing song after song, hoping to strike gold. It's a story of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms, with a musical sound track ripping right through it. My life gets lived on the road, at home, and on the road again, tried and true, and I've written it all down from my heart to yours. Signed,Willie Nelson

No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page


Martin J. Power - 2015
    Starting with the early Sixties session scene when the teenage Page contributed to recordings by The Who, The Rolling Stones, Tom Jones and many more, the author goes on to explore Page's time in The Yardbirds, the band that would metamorphose into the legendary Led Zeppelin.Supported by album reviews, rare photographs, a full discography and candid conversations with Page's friends, managers and musical collaborators, author Martin Power's No Quarter: The Three Lives Of Jimmy Page represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date biography yet written about Jimmy Page—a "one man guitar army" and true music legend.

Moonage Daydream: The Life & Times of Ziggy Stardust


David Bowie - 2002
    Moonage Daydream is the most complete, detailed exploration of one of rock 'n' roll's greatest creations: Ziggy Stardust.Featuring more than 600 photographs from Mick Rock's vast archive, Moonage Daydream takes the reader from the early English Concerts where Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars made their names, to Ziggy's final swansong, the flamboyant 1980 Floor Show.Alongside Mick Rock's reflections on these incredible images, David Bowie adds his own thoughts: discussing Ziggy's origins ad giving an unprecedented insight into the stratospheric two-year career of his alter-ego.These include reflections on his collaboration with mime artist Lindsay Kemp; the breakthrough tour of the USA; the massive sell-out UK tour that culminated in Ziggy's official retirement; and the recording of Pin Ups in Paris.Mick Rock's camera caught more of the Ziggy legend than any other ad followed Bowie into hotel rooms and dressing rooms, on the road and socialising with musicians and friends including Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger.Also included are formal studio sessions for the Pin Ups album sleeve and the four pioneering music videos that Mick directed and filmed for Bowie.

7 Days In Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and The Summer Everything Went Insane: If We Make It Through November Hugely Expanded Edition


Nathan Rabin - 2016
     The "If We Make It Through November expanded edition" augments the original book with twice as much content. This version includes both a lengthy "manifesto" about the nature of Donald Trump's appeal and a prequel chapter chronicling the curious day when Rabin and his long-lost brother were reunited under a scalding sun, setting the stage for their unlikely but glorious Gathering adventure. Rabin's best book to date chronicles a surreal week the veteran pop culture writer spent covering, in rapid succession, the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump was nominated for President, possibly setting into motion a series of events leading to mankind's end, and the 17th annual Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse's notorious yearly festival of arts and culture. Rabin's companion throughout this crazy adventure, Raoul Duke to his Dr. Gonzo, is the author's long-lost half brother Vincent, a street-fighting welder from the mean streets of Saint Louis with a roughneck past filled with knife fights, horrific violence and almost unimaginable darkness. 7 Days in Ohio is a hilarious and surprisingly moving exploration of a unique moment in American life. It's also a story of brotherhood and family, about two very different men who find common ground in their shared affection for Insane Clown Posse. In the tradition of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and Rabin's previous memoirs comes the book Donald Trump doesn't want you to read (in part because he hates literacy) and the most soulful, moving and even tear-jerking text about men who pretend to be wicked clowns ever written. Praise for Nathan Rabin: "Smart and funny"-Mindy Kaling, The New Yorker "Brilliant"-John Green The Big Rewind: "I'm not as interested in anything as much as Nathan Rabin is interested in everything."-- Chuck Klosterman “With his uncanny grasp of cultural zeitgeist, Rabin could unseat Chuck Klosterman as the slacker generation’s vital critical voice.” —Heeb Magazine "Nathan Rabin's life reads like a fanboy's collision with Dostoyevsky. Hilarious, sad, truthful memoir is compulsively readable."-- Roger Ebert "[Rabin] has packed [The Big Rewind], like a cannon, full of caustic wit and bruised feelings. The result is a lo-fi, sometimes crude book that is nonetheless more effective (and affecting) than it has any right to be."-- The New York Times My World Of Flops: "Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops is like watching a genius nurse a score of frightened, wounded baby birds back to life--a superhuman level of care and compassion lavished on That Which Never Had A Right To Exist. Truly brilliant." —Patton Oswalt You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me "An extremely funny and engaging book about how fandom provides people with surrogate families and a way to escape day-to-day banality." (Rolling Stone (four-star review) "I Love This Book"-Harris Wittels

Surfacing


Kathleen Jamie - 2019
    From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

Human Achievement


David Shrigley - 2002
    Human Achievement collects new truths, anxieties, and amusements from the mundane to the surreal in an addictively strange and entertaining picket-sized primer that welcomes the uninitiated and rewards the faithful.

John Peel


Mick Wall - 2004
    In 1967 he returned to the UK and joined Radio One at its start. His late-night radio shows were cult listening for music fans of all ages, and many bands admit that without his support, they would never have made it.While Radio One changed, he remained a constant factor in its schedules, and in 1998 he was awarded the OBE for his services to broadcasting. It was in that year that he also began his multi-award- winning show Home Truths on Radio Four. Mick Wall tells the story of arguably the most influential man in the history of British rock music, speaking to those who knew him well to build up a complete portrait of this hugely popular figure.

England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond


Jon Savage - 1991
    Savage brings to life the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid implosion of the Pistols through layers of rich detail, exclusive interviews, and rare photographs. This fully revised and updated edition of the book covers the legacy of punk twenty-five years later and provides an account of the Pistols' 1996 reunion as well as a freshly updated discography and a completely new introduction.

The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father


Jim Wight - 1999
    of photos.

Kate: Kate Middleton: Princess in Waiting


Claudia Joseph - 2009
    Sophisticated beyond her years, as well as academically gifted, Kate has charmed William's louche circle of friends as well as the House of Windsor.Yet behind her polished veneer lies the extraordinary tale of an impoverished working-class family that overcame deprivation and adversity to rise to the upper echelons of society.Claudia Joseph has spoken to members of Kate's family and friends, who have provided an intriguing insight into the extraordinary journey her family has made from the mining villages of Durham to an apartment in the royal residence of Clarence House.Drawing on exclusive interviews and containing previously unpublished photographs, this is an authoritative account of Kate Middleton's life so far.

Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America


James Webb - 2004
    Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, traveling in groups of families and bringing with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerrilla fighters. Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, dislike of aristocracy and a military tradition, and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself. Born Fighting is the first book to chronicle the full journey of this remarkable cultural group, and the profound, but unrecognized, role it has played in the shaping of America. Written with the storytelling verve that has earned his works such acclaim as “captivating . . . unforgettable” (the Wall Street Journal on Lost Soliders), Scots-Irishman James Webb, Vietnam combat veteran and former Naval Secretary, traces the history of his people, beginning nearly two thousand years ago at Hadrian’s Wall, when the nation of Scotland was formed north of the Wall through armed conflict in contrast to England’s formation to the south through commerce and trade. Webb recounts the Scots’ odyssey—their clashes with the English in Scotland and then in Ulster, their retreat from one war-ravaged land to another. Through engrossing chronicles of the challenges the Scots-Irish faced, Webb vividly portrays how they developed the qualities that helped settle the American frontier and define the American character. Born Fighting shows that the Scots-Irish were 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army; they included the pioneers Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston; they were the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain; and they have given America numerous great military leaders, including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Audie Murphy, and George S. Patton, as well as most of the soldiers of the Confederacy (only 5 percent of whom owned slaves, and who fought against what they viewed as an invading army). It illustrates how the Scots-Irish redefined American politics, creating the populist movement and giving the country a dozen presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. And it explores how the Scots-Irish culture of isolation, hard luck, stubbornness, and mistrust of the nation’s elite formed and still dominates blue-collar America, the military services, the Bible Belt, and country music. Both a distinguished work of cultural history and a human drama that speaks straight to the heart of contemporary America, Born Fighting reintroduces America to its most powerful, patriotic, and individualistic cultural group—one too often ignored or taken for granted.

And Furthermore


Judi Dench - 2010
    Here she tells her story.

Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography


John Gruen - 1991
    By the time of his death in 1990 at the age of thirty-one, Haring's career had moved from underground New York to the most prestigious galleries and museums in the world. Here Keith Haring's story is told by those who knew him—and by the artist himself. He candidly reflects on all aspects of his life, including his approach to art, being gay, and how he came to terms with AIDS. John Gruen masterfully combines Haring's own words with the observations of those who knew him best, including art dealer Leo Castelli; Madonna; artists Roy Lichtenstein, Francesco Clemente, and Kenny Scharf; Claude Picasso; Timothy Leary; and William Burroughs, among others. Haring emerges as both a courageous and enigmatic personality—a champion of art for all people.

A Childhood in Malabar: A Memoir


Kamala Suraiyya Das - 2003
    At once an outsider and an integral part of her ancestral home, Kamala struggle to fathom the intricacies of class, caste and language.

Spring Cannot Be Cancelled


David Hockney - 2021
    So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year earlier, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art.Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s new Normandy drawings and paintings alongside works by Van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, color, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see . . . but about how to live.