Jonesy: Put Your Head Down and Skate: The Improbable Career of Keith Jones


Keith Jones - 2007
    The improbable hockey career of Jonsey started in 1992, when he was with the Washington Capitals. After a brief stint in Colorado, Keith was traded to Philadelphia, where is hard work, dirty play and colorful personality made him one of the more popular players in recent history. Jonsey is the story of Keith s career in the league as well as all of the interesting stories he accumulated over the course of his career, playing with some of the leagues best players in the last 15 years, including Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic, Mark Recchi and Eric Lindros. The book will include a forward written by Hall of Fame defense-man Ray Bourque.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better


William H. Patterson Jr. - 2014
    

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande - A 20-minute Summary: Medicine and What Matters in the End


Instaread Summaries - 2014
    Being Mortal by Atul Gawande - A 20-minute Summary Inside this Instaread Summary: • Overview of the entire book• Introduction to the important people in the book• Summary and analysis of all the chapters in the book• Key Takeaways of the book• A Reader's Perspective Preview of this summary: Chapter 1 Gawande grew up in Ohio. His parents were immigrants from India and both were doctors. His grandparents stayed in India, and there were few older people in his neighborhood, so he had little experience with aging or death until he met his wife’s grandmother, Alice Hobson. Hobson was seventy-seven and living on her own in Virginia. She was a spirited widow who fixed her own plumbing and volunteered with Meals On Wheels. However, Hobson was losing strength and height steadily each year as her arthritis worsened.Gawande’s father enthusiastically adopted the customs of his new country, but he could not understand the way in which seniors were treated in the US. In India, the elderly were treated with great respect and lived out their lives with family.In the United States, Sitaram Gawande, Gawande’s grandfather, likely would have been sent to a nursing home like most of the elderly who cannot handle the basics of daily living by themselves. However, in India, Sitaram Gawande was able to live in his own home and manage his own affairs, with family constantly around him. He died at the age of one hundred and ten when he fell off a bus during a business trip.Until recently, most elderly people stayed with their families. Even as the nuclear family unit became predominant, replacing the multi-generational family unit, people cared for their elderly relatives. Families were large and one child, usually a daughter, would not marry in order to take care of the parents.This has changed in much of the world, where elderly people end up struggling to live alone, like Hobson, rather than living with dignity amid family, like Sitaram Gawande.One cause of this change can be found in the nature of knowledge. When few people lived to be very old, elders were honored. Their store of knowledge was greatly useful. People often portrayed themselves as older to command respect. Modern society’s emphasis on youth is a complete reversal of this attitude. Technological advances are perceived as the territory of the young, and everyone wants to be younger. High-tech job opportunities are all over the world, and young people do not hesitate to leave their parents behind to pursue them.In developed countries, parents embrace the concept of a retirement filled with leisure activities. Parents are happy to begin living for themselves once children are grown. However, this system only works for young, healthy retirees, but not for those who cannot continue to be independent. Hobson, for example, was falling frequently and suffering memory lapses. Her doctor did tests and wrote prescriptions, but did not know what to do about her deteriorating condition. Neither did her family… About the Author With Instaread Summaries, you can get the summary of a book in 30 minutes or less. We read every chapter, summarize and analyze it for your convenience.

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer


Sarah Bakewell - 2010
    They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and more than four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment--and in search of themselves. This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, travels, and friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers--who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'

Mother, Stranger


Cris Beam - 2012
    Her mother, a distant relative of William Faulkner, told neighbors and family that her daughter had died. The two never saw each other again. Nearly twenty-five years later, after building her own family and happy home life, a lawyer called to say her mother was dead. In this story about the fragility of memory and the complexity of family, Beam decides to look back at her own dark history, and for the secret to her mother’s madness.

Annie's Girl: How an Abandoned Orphan Finally Discovered the Truth About Her Mother


Maureen Coppinger - 2009
    She was just three years old.      She remained in the orphanage until the age of 16, subjected to cruelty and neglect, and starved of love and affection. One of her closest friends was taken away to an asylum after her spirit was broken by repeated beatings, and Maureen herself faced a constant battle against despair. It was an environment from which no one emerged unscathed.      Throughout these tormented years, Maureen dreamed only of escape, and when she was contacted again by her mammy she believed all her dreams were about to come true. Life in the outside world brought its own challenges, however, and Maureen was thrown into turmoil when she discovered that the truth about her past was more murky than she had ever realised.      Annie's Girl stands apart as a poignant testimony to the resilience of the human heart. This touching and evocative memoir is the incredible story of an illegitimate industrial-school survivor's profound struggle to overcome a shame-filled past and solve the mystery of her origins.

Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind


Harold Bloom - 2019
    Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.

Obama's Last Stand: Playbook 2012 (POLITICO Inside Election 2012)


Glenn Thrush - 2012
    The third edition, Obama’s Last Stand, follows the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama as it struggles to find the winning formula in a political landscape that has changed dramatically since his history-making victory in 2008. Though battered and bruised after nearly four years in office, Barack Obama remains the most competitive player on the field in American politics today. In Obama’s Last Stand, POLITICO White House correspondent Glenn Thrush chronicles the efforts of the president and his team to secure a second term in the face of a determined opposition, unfavorable economic headwinds, and a series of missteps by his own team. This is a revealing portrait of the president at the most precarious moment in his political life, with insights and anecdotes drawn straight from the notebook of one of the most perceptive reporters in America. The trash-talking schoolyard athlete in Obama is very much in evidence, especially when he speaks caustically about his Republican rivals, including the man he thinks is trying to steal his legacy, Mitt Romney. Yet apart from Romney and the uncertain economy, Obama’s greatest obstacle on the road to reelection may be Obama 2008. He and his team of talented advisers must try to reconcile their nostalgia for that once-in-a-lifetime campaign with the realities of an election fundamentally altered by the advent of super PACs and the evaporation of Obama’s superstar popularity. That challenge has led a campaign operation that once prided itself on flawless execution of strategy to commit several of the most dangerous unforced errors of Obama’s political career. Yet the game is far from over. If Obama is sometimes his own worst enemy, he also has the talent and drive to reclaim this race. Spurred on by the realistic prospect of losing, and growing ever more impatient with the foibles of his campaign staff, Obama the competitor is gearing up for the most critical fourth quarter of his career. This is the story of the last stand that will either cement his legacy forever—or consign him to a roster of once-promising one-term presidents.

Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football's Lost Genius


Oliver Kay - 2016
    For one thing, he was blessed with extraordinary talent. Those who played alongside and watched him in the Manchester United youth team in the early 1990s insist he was as good as Ryan Giggs - possibly even better. Giggs, who played on the opposite wing, says he is inclined to agree.Doherty was also an eccentric - by football standards, at least. When his colleagues went to Old Trafford to watch the first team on Saturday afternoons, he preferred to take the bus into Manchester to go busking. He wore second-hand clothes, worshipped Bob Dylan, read about theology and French existentialism and wrote songs and poems. One team-mate says "it was like having Bob Dylan in a No 7 shirt".On his 17th birthday, Doherty was offered a five-year contract - unprecedented for a United youngster at that time - and told by Alex Ferguson that he was destined for stardom. But what followed over the next decade is a tale so mysterious, so shocking, so unusual, so amusing but ultimately so tragic, that you are left wondering how on earth it has been untold for so long.The stories of Doherty's contemporaries, that group of Manchester United youngsters who became known as the "Class of '92", are well known. Giggs ended up as the most decorated player in United's history; David Beckham became the most recognisable footballer on the planet; Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and others are household names. The story you don't know is about the player who, having had the world at his feet, died the day before his 27th birthday following an accident in a canal in Holland.

The Art of War and Tao Te Ching: Ancient Chinese Wisdom Classics


Sun Tzu - 2011
    It is fundamental to Philosophical Taoism. Specially formatted for the Amazon Kindle, with easy navigation table of contents, and adjustable font size.

The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller


Carol Baxter - 2017
    Jail attendants said they understood she was held in connection with the shooting of an airline pilot.'Petite, glamorous and beguiling, Jessie 'Chubbie' Miller was one remarkable woman ... flyer, thrill seeker, heartbreaker. No adventure was too wild for her, no danger too extreme. And all over the world men adored her.When the young Jessie left suburban Melbourne and her newspaperman husband in 1927, little did she know that she'd become the first woman to complete an England to Australia flight (with a black silk gown thrown into her small flight bag, just in case), or fly the first air race for women with Amelia Earhart, or that she would disappear over the Florida Straits feared lost forever only to charm her way to a rescue. Nor could she have predicted that five years later she'd find herself at the centre of one of the most notorious and controversial murder trials in United States history. And this all began with something as ridiculously mundane as a pat of butter.The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller is a spellbinding story of an extraordinary woman - an international celebrity during the golden age of aviation - and her passionate and spirited life.

The Most Dangerous Man in the World: The Explosive True Story of Julian Assange and the Lies, Cover-ups and Conspiracies He Exposed


Andrew Fowler - 2011
    The Internet is the battle ground. In this war there will only be one winner. In The Most Dangerous Man in the World, award-winning journalist Andrew Fowler talks to Julian Assange, his inner circle, and those disaffected by him, deftly revealing the story of how a man with a turbulent childhood and brilliance for computers created a phenomenon that has disrupted the worlds of both journalism and international politics. From Assange’s early skirmishes with the “cult” of Scientology in Australia to the release of 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of the September 11th attacks and on to the visual bombshell of the Collateral Murder video showing American soldiers firing on civilians and Reuters reporters, Fowler takes us from the founding of WikiLeaks right up to Cablegate and the threat of further leaks in 2011 that he warns could bring down a major American bank. New information based on interviews conducted with Assange reveal the possibility that he has Asperger’s syndrome; the reason U.S. soldier Bradley Manning turned to an ex-hacker to spill military secrets; and how Assange helped police remove a “how to make a bomb” book from the Internet. The mother of one of his children also talks for the first time about life with Julian when he was setting up WikiLeaks. According to the “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange is “the most dangerous man in the world.” But just who is Julian Assange, and why is his quest for transparency and freedom of the press so dangerous in the eyes of his detractors? In a fascinating account that reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, Fowler reveals all—what it means, and why it matters. Like The Looming Tower on 9/11 or The Lords of Finance on the collapse of the US economy, The Most Dangerous Man in the World is the definitive, journalistic account of a massive global news event that’s changing the face of journalism and the way governments do business.

Battleworn: The Memoir of a Combat Medic in Afghanistan


Chantelle Taylor - 2014
    In peace and war Taylor is as radiant as gold and as tough as diamond' Sam Kiley - author of Desperate Glory and Foreign Affairs Editor of Sky News. Chantelle Taylor joined the British Army in 1998 as a combat medical technician. Ten years later she made history, becoming the first female soldier to kill a Taliban fighter in close-quarter combat while on patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. In Battleworn, she tells the story of B Company, a beleaguered group of individuals who fought relentlessly to hold Nad-e Ali, a dusty, sweltering hellhole surrounded by the Taliban. A routine patrol into an area saturated with enemy fighters escalates into a seven-week siege. Facing the possibility of death daily, Taylor writes of gun battles and perilous patrols, culminating in the extraction of more than sixty-six casualties with four killed in action. A powerful story written with a humility that captures the sometimes impalpable humour of soldiers at war, Battleworn provides a testament to combat medics all over the world. It highlights the crucial role that they play in today's 360-degree battlefield.

This Is Not a Pipe


Michel Foucault - 1968
    Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.

Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life


Lev Losev - 1999
    His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.