Book picks similar to
The Journal of Georgian Gentleman by Mike Rendell
18th-century
shelfari-foyershelf
21st-century
shelfari-eo
A Shore Thing
Scotty T - 2016
Long before starring in the show, Scotty was living life to the fullest and getting up to all sorts. In this hilarious page turner, Scotty T will not only let slip scandalous secrets from Geordie Shore, Ex on the Beach and Celebrity Big Brother, but will open up about his antics when the cameras stop rolling. But it's not all sex, fights and getting mortal! Scotty also reveals a surprisingly softer side and opens up about living with ADHD, coping with the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and picking up the pieces after the loss of a loved one. The rascal also reflects on the lasses who have tried and failed to tame his heart and introduces us to the love of his life who has been living in the shadows all this time. And if all that wasn't enough, Scotty explains why he loves maths so much, what it was like to join the Neighbours cast, plus finally admits what he really thinks about his castmates, why he was nearly kicked off the show by producers and what life has in store for him after Geordie Shore.
Perseverance
Kristin Peck - 2014
Now, graduating from business school, newly married, Kristin is ready to take the next step of starting a family. But when Kristin’s first pregnancy ends with a miscarriage, she is devastated. When her second pregnancy does as well, Kristin and her husband Bob turn to in vitro fertilization – and are heartbroken again after a third miscarriage. Undaunted, they turn to alternate options, including surrogacy and adoption, but face setbacks at every turn, some so unthinkable that they never could have been predicted. In the most extreme of circumstances, when all of our careful plans are thrown out the window, how do we persevere? In spite of the pain and sorrow of the many years spent trying to start their family, Kristin and Bob remain positive, loving, and driven – and learn in their ultimately rewarding journey that life’s joys come more from the unexpected than from the expected.100% of Kristin Peck’s proceeds from the sale of Perseverance will be donated to Family and Children's Agency.Kristin Peck is thrilled to be the working mother of two amazing children. She keeps herself sane by belting out her favorite pop and country songs while running and completing triathlons, and is proud to have recently completed her first marathon. She is currently EVP, Group President of Zoetis, Inc., the world's largest animal health company. Kristin received her bachelor’s from Georgetown and her MBA from Columbia Business School. Kristin, her husband, two children and their dog live in CT. Perseverance is her first book.Cover design by Hannah Perrine Mode.
Misfits: Ein Manifest | Ein aufrüttelndes Manifest dafür, die Deutungshoheit über das eigene Leben wiederzuerlangen, Normen zu hinterfragen und die eigene Geschichte zu erzählen
Michaela Coel - 2021
With insight and wit, it lays bare her journey to reclaiming her creativity and power, inviting readers to reflect on theirs.Advocating for ‘misfits’ everywhere, this timely, necessary book is a rousing and bold case against fitting in.
My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music
Leon Fleisher - 2010
The pianist Leon Fleisher—whose student–teacher lineage linked him to Beethoven by way of his instructor, Artur Schnabel—displayed an exceptional gift from his earliest years. And then, like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he was struck down in his prime: at thirty-six years old, he suddenly and mysteriously became unable to use two fingers of his right hand. It is not just Fleisher’s thirty-year search for a cure that drives this remarkable memoir. With his coauthor, celebrated music critic Anne Midgette, the pianist explores the depression that engulfed him as his condition worsened and, perhaps most powerfully of all, the sheer love of music that rescued him from complete self-destruction. Miraculously, at the age of sixty-six, Fleisher was diagnosed with focal dystonia, and cured by experimental Botox injections. In 2003, he returned to Carnegie Hall to give his first two-handed recital in over three decades, bringing down the house. Sad, reflective, but ultimately triumphant, My Nine Lives combines the glamour, pathos, and courage of Fleisher’s life with real musical and intellectual substance. Fleisher embodies the resilience of the human spirit, and his memoir proves that true passion always finds a way.
Jane Austen: A Life
Carol Shields - 2001
In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award–winning novelist, Carol Shields’s magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.
Shattered: Struck Down, But Not Destroyed
Frank Pastore - 2010
Frank Pastore was a physically awkward kid who became a professional athlete. An okay student who goes on to earn two masters degrees in philosophy. A former atheist who ends up hosting the biggest Christian radio talk show in America. Shattered is part sports book, because you'll go on road trips, enter clubhouses, and walk on the fields of professional baseball. It's part romantic novel, because you'll journey with two young kids who fall in love and eventually elope, evading not only her family, but the law as well--for she was only 16. It's also a story of brokenness, betrayal, and burn-out. If you were raised in a dysfunctional family, if you've ever had your dreams fall apart, been betrayed by close friends, or hit the psychological "wall" in your professional career, this is your book too. But, most of all, this is an uplifting story of how an unpredictable God can surprise any of us with His goodness and love when we allow Him to make beautiful the shattered fragments of our lives.
The Last Comanche Chief: The Life and Times of Quanah Parker
Bill Neeley - 1995
After the Civil War, the trickle of white settlers encroaching on tribal land in northern Texas suddenly turned inot a tidal wave. Within a few short years, the great buffalo herds, a source of food and clothing for the Indians from time immemorial, had been hunted to the verge of extinction in an orgy of greed and destruction. The Indians' cherished way of life was being stolen from them.Quanah Parker was the fiercest and bravest of the Comanches who fought desperately to preserve their culture. He led his warriors on daring and bloody raids against the white settlers and hunters. He resisted to the last, heading a band of Comanches, the Quahadas, after the majority of the tribe had acquiesced to resettlement on a reservation. But even the Comanches—legendary horsemen of the Plains who had held off Spanish and Mexican expansion for two centuries—could not turn back the massive influex of people and eaponry from the East.Faced with the bitter choice between extermination or compromise, Quanah stepped off the warpath and sat down at the bargaining table. With remarkable skill, the Comanche warrior adapted to the new challenges he faced, learning English and the art of diplomacy. Working to bridge two very different worlds, he fought endlessly to gain a better deal for his people. As the tribe's elder statesman, Quanah lobbied Congress in Washington, D.C., entertained President Teddy Roosevelt and other dignitaries at his home, invested in the railroad, and enjoyed the honor of having a Texas town named after him. The Last Comanche Chief is a moving portayal of this famed leader. His story is an inspiring and compelling chapter in the history of Native Americans and of the American West.
Virginia Woolf
Alexandra Harris - 2011
She felt herself to be at a crossroads: “I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.”Today her prose is still blazing; perhaps it burns brighter than ever. This is the story of how a determined young woman with a notebook became one of the greatest writers of all time. It is a story that sparkles with wit and friendship, language and love, wicked jokes and passionate appreciation of ordinary things.In this illuminating new account, Alexandra Harris uses vivid flashes of detail to evoke Woolf’s changing backgrounds and preoccupations. We move from the close-packed rhythms of a Victorian childhood to the experiments of Bloomsbury and Woolf’s trial-and-error answers to the pressing question of how to live. We see her tackling challenging forms of writing, trying out different voices, following flights of fancy, and returning to earth. Above all, we see her making conscious decisions about what to do next.The book considers each of the novels in context, gives due prominence to a range of Woolf’s dazzlingly inventive essays, traces the contentious course of her “afterlife,” and shows why, seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to haunt and inspire us.
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
Ammon Shea - 2008
aIam reading the OED so you donat have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on...a So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED, The word loveras Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries. In 26 chapters filled with sharp wit, sheer delight, and a documentarianas keen eye, Shea shares his year inside the OED, delivering a hair-pulling, eye-crossing account of reading every word, and revealing the most obscure, hilarious, and wonderful gems he discovers along the way.
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
Helena Kelly - 2016
Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. We see a writer who understood that the novel--until then seen as mindless "trash"--could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness.
The Yogurt Man Cometh
Kevin Revolinski - 2006
Revolinski relates in candid style his encounters in a foreign culture, all told with an open mind and a sense of humor. An enjoyable read for anyone who has spent time in Turkey or who plans to do so.
Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
Helen Thomas - 2006
Gone are the days of frequent firsthand contact with the president. Now, the press sees the president only at tightly controlled and orchestrated press conferences. In addition, Thomas sees a growing -- and alarming -- reluctance among reporters to question government spokesmen and probe for the truth. The result has been a wholesale failure by journalists to fulfill what is arguably their most vital role in contemporary American life -- to be the watchdogs of democracy. Today's journalists, according to Thomas, have become subdued, compromised lapdogs.Here, the legendary journalist and bestselling author delivers a hard-hitting manifesto on the precipitous decline in the quality and ethics of political reportage -- and issues a clarion call for change. Thomas confronts some of the most significant issues of the day, including the jailing of reporters, the conservative swing in television news coverage, and the administration's increased insistence on "managed" news. But she is most emphatic about reporters' failure to adequately question President George W. Bush and White House spokesmen about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and on subjects ranging from homeland security to the economy. This, she insists, was a dire lapse.Drawing on her peerless knowledge of journalism, Washington politics, and nine presidential administrations, as well as frank interviews with leading journalists past and present, Thomas provides readers with a rich historical perspective on the roots of American journalism, the circumstances attending the rise and fall of its golden age, and the nature and consequences of its current shortcomings. The result is a powerful, eye-opening discourse on the state of political reportage -- as well as a welcome and inspiring demand for meaningful and lasting reform.
The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology
Mary Rose O'Reilley - 2006
She is determined, now, not to sacrifice or waste her self. She has struggled for years along the paths set by her suburban childhood, her Catholic upbringing, her failed marriage, and the mute duties of daughterhood. Now, she is trying to see the world through the eyes of the deer that stop outside her window and look in at her. As a wildlife rehabilitator, she feels a closer connection to the natural world as experienced by animals. As an apprentice potter, she sees in a Japanese tea bowl the ultimate balance of action and contemplation. As a Quaker, she can both sit still and sing. And as a writer, O'Reilley can speak clearly to readers at midlife who are expected to know it all, but don't.
Mortality
Christopher Hitchens - 2012
As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for "Vanity Fair," he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this account of his affliction, he describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of mortality.