Book picks similar to
Pensativities: Selected Essays by Mia Couto
essays
non-fiction
africa
mozambique
North Korea: A Bare Bones History
James Friend - 2015
Kim Il Sung wasted little time before plunging the country into a futile war which cost more than two million people their lives. His son, Kim Jong Il, would wallow in obscene luxury as North Korea suffered one of the Twentieth Century’s most terrible famines. Kim Jong Un has only recently ascended to power. However, he has already ordered his own uncle’s execution by antiaircraft gun. The North Korean people are told that they are the most fortunate in the world. In reality they are the most oppressed. North Korea is a country where criticising the government, or even watching a foreign film, can lead to imprisonment and death.North Korea: A Bare Bones History tells the story of one of the world’s most enigmatic nations. It’s an extraordinary history of war, assassination, kidnapping, terrorism, and an attempt to decapitate a rival head of state.
The Comeback: How Larry Ellison's Team Won the America's Cup (Kindle Single)
G. Bruce Knecht - 2016
New Zealand needed just one more win. Oracle ultimately beat back the odds in what's been called the greatest comeback in sport. But was it? G. Bruce Knecht set out to investigate how Oracle turned things around and, most particularly, the source of extra horsepower that seemed to come from nowhere during the final races. What he discovered was that the team was using a sailing technique that was prohibited under the rules. The Comeback is a pulse-pounding account of Oracle's desperate stop-at-nothing campaign.G. Bruce Knecht, a former staff reporter and foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is the author of three books, including The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Race. Larry Ellison was a major character in that book as well and it explains how his experience in the race led to his pursuit of the America's Cup. A sailor himself, Knecht raced across the Atlantic in 2005 on the yacht that broke the 100-year-old transatlantic race record.Cover design by Charles Rue Woods.
Trailer Dogs: Life in America's New Middle Class (The Trailer Dog Chronicles Book 1)
Ellen Garrison - 2016
After losing their small business and life savings to the government’s unfathomable shutdown, the author and her husband are forced to sell their home and move into a travel trailer. Still reeling from financial loss and the deaths of two of their beloved dogs, the pair embark on a new life in a trailer park, populated with some of the most unconventional characters you’d ever hope not to meet. There’s Gretchen, the park’s unsympathetic and conniving manager, and her puny, perverted husband, Lloyd, who “maintains” the park grounds and who gives pool algae a bad name. Daisy and Lonnie May are the author’s closest neighbors, and are, perhaps, the park’s most devoted couple. Only Daisy May happens to be Lonnie’s dog. Trailer Dogs will make you laugh, cry, and maybe even a little angry. But it will never make you bored.
Happier Than A Billionaire: An Acre in Paradise
Nadine Hays Pisani - 2017
A celebration of one couple's decision to dig deeper roots in one of the happiest places on earth. In her best work to date, Nadine Hays Pisani shares what it's like to follow her dream of starting a new business on a strict budget in Costa Rica. Along the way, she shares the ups and downs of renting, buying, and building her new home in this country known for red tape, taking its time, and the Pura Vida lifestyle. She struggles to live alongside construction crews, invading critters, and a delusional husband who insists everything will work out fine. Nadine introduces a variety of zany characters, makes new friends, and wrestles with unending challenges all while celebrating this beautiful country. This is a stand-alone story, so if you are new to the Happier Than A Billionaire series, it's fine to start right here. But be warned, your friends will wonder why you are wearing a silly grin for the weeks that follow.
Cookham To Cannes: The South of France - Lobsters & Lunatics
Brent Tyler
Deciding that taking a leap into the unknown was better than making no decision at all, they borrowed a little money from some good friends, packed up their belongings and headed to a mobile home site just outside Cannes. Whilst there, they would look for work with the hope of settling in the region. What no one bothered to tell France’s newest arrivals was that the people they were about to be interviewed by and eventually work for were all blisteringly, yet deliciously mad. Whilst minding his own business in the garden belonging to one of these certifiable lunatics, Brent gets adopted by a dog with his own obsession, maintaining the author's theory that sanity is an extremely rare commodity in the south of France.
So Big the Land
Sue Grocke - 2019
With little prelude she is thrown into the deep end of a gritty farming life in a man's world. A life of hard work on untamed lands, a two year odyssey through the outback, and months spent in a remote Aboriginal community, reveal to Sue the very character of the Australian landscape. This is the story of one woman's metamorphosis, from timid, imaginative child to resilient, worldly woman - a profound journey of self discovery through tragedy, unfettered and often life-threatening adventure, and overwhelming joy.
Points of Entry: Encounters at the Origin Sites of Pakistan
Nadeem Farooq Paracha - 2018
In these marvellous essays on history, politics and society, cultural critic Nadeem Farooq Paracha upturns various reductive readings of the country by revealing its multi-layered reality. With wit and insight, he investigates past events and their implications for modern-day society. Thus, one piece explores how and why Mohenjo-daro has been neglected as a historical site, and another examines how Muhammad-bin-Qasim, who briefly invaded Sindh in 713 CE, has come to be lionised as the original founder of Pakistan. There is a story about a Pakistani Jimi Hendrix who plays the guitar like a dream and also one about a medieval emperor who lives on in the swear words of a Punjabi peasant. There are essays on Pakistani pop music, on Afro-Pakistanis and on how Jhuley Lal came to be more than just a folk deity for Sindhi immigrants in India. Points of Entry examines the constant struggle between two distinct tendencies in Pakistani civic-nationalism—one modernist, the other theocratic—and the complex society it has birthed.
A Simple Life: Living off grid in a wooden cabin in France
Mary-Jane Houlton - 2021
They were already used to a simple life, having spent the last three years living on their boat in France for the summer seasons, and returning to the UK and their caravan for the winters. This tiny cabin would now be their new home for the winter months, taking them a step further along the road to self-sufficiency. They had no electricity, no kitchen, no bathroom or bedroom and the loo was a bucket in a shed, but the property came with five acres of field and woodland.From now on their lives would be simple, pared back to the basics, but they found that an off-grid lifestyle was by no means an uncomfortable experience. Responsibilities didn’t disappear but they changed, becoming less onerous. There was more time to think, and to appreciate the natural world around them. Living in such rural isolation, each day brought something new to marvel at: deer browsing in the field at dusk, salamanders on the doorstep, owls calling by night.If their own world felt increasingly magical, the outside world was far from it. They had moved to a foreign country at an historic time, living through a pandemic and adapting to the day-to-day implications of Brexit.A Simple Life doesn’t just follow Mary-Jane and Michael as they settle into their new lives, it also raises questions about what really matters to people. What makes us happy? How does it feel to have few possessions? Will life become unbearable without a flushing toilet?Thought-provoking and amusing, this book opens a window onto a different way of living. Mary-Jane shares a wealth of information and, if you have ever found yourself longing for a simpler life, this might tempt you to take those first tentative steps on the journey.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo | Executive Summary (Life Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo. Konmari Method)
Book§Swift - 2015
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Guided By Angels: Part 1 of 3: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World
Paddy McMahon - 2014
He believes that we are born with spiritual connections to one or more angels, and if we want their help in life we need to be open to receiving their assistance.
Clean: A story of addiction, recovery and the removal of stubborn stains
Michele Kirsch - 2019
And yet, when she finally does have something like that life, as a wife and mother in 1980s London, she is the one blaring music from her room, necking vodka and valium and making an almighty mess of her home and family.Cleaning other people’s houses, eventually, is the only option left. At 50 years old, post rehab, living alone in a Hackney bedsit, Michele finds herself finishing her working life as she had begun, “in a dumb job that you do when you can’t really do anything else...”This is a remarkable, powerful, and often unbearably funny memoir in which cleaning and getting clean intertwine as a strange and magical form of redemption. Michele Kirsch is a Nora Ephron for the modern age.
Pale Native: Memories of a Renegade Reporter
Max Du Preez - 2003
Sometimes wacky, sometimes profound, the title is always entertaining, with the odd bit of sleaze.
The Racist's Guide to the People of South Africa
Simon Kilpatrick - 2010
After sorting out the labels Black, English Whites, Afrikaners, and Coloreds, the discussion pushes on to more difficult questions: Why should you never give a White woman a white-gold engagement ring? Why do Indian men always play sports in jeans? and How do Colored gangsters fare in the navy?
How Fast Can You Run
Harriet Levin Millan - 2016
When the US grants approximately 4,000 unaccompanied minors political asylum, Majok becomes Michael, and he is given a new start in the US. Yet his life is not without trauma, culminating when a fellow student betrays him. This is the story of a survivor who summons the courageous spirit of millions of refugees throughout history—and it lives on today.
Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho
Will McGrath - 2018
There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who―with sweetest face―drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath’s Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.