Listing 1 - 10 of 31 | << page >> |
Sort by
|
Choose an application
"A short, accessible set of prose observations about nature, place, and time, arranged (like Local Wonders) according to the calendar year"-- "Ted Kooser sees a writer's workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what's jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pultizer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America's most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him. "--
Choose an application
"Part memoir, part history, the essays in On a Clear Night portray everyday life in the Heartland, reflecting on work, family, friendships, nature, love, and loss. While they are written from a personal perspective, the essays echo the sentiments of many who live in the heart of the country. Divided into six parts, these fifty-seven essays span the course of Mamminga's life: spending summers at her family's North Woods cabin as a child, marrying her high school sweetheart, raising three sons, becoming a mother-in-law and a grandmother, and finally mourning the loss of her parents' generation. These vignettes are both humorous and poignant, highlighting the importance of ordinary moments and the common experiences that unite us"--
Choose an application
Watson Kirkconnell is one of the most familiar figures in the world of Canadian letters. Educated at Queen's and Oxford, he has published several volumes of poetry and poetry translations, was the founding father and first chairman of the Humanities Research Council, a charter member and national president (1942-44, 1956-58) of the Canadian Authors Association, and has shared in university life for 45 years. He has been active in many other areas of public life; as one of the founders of the Prisoners' Aid Society (now the John Howard Society of Manitoba), a joint organizer of the Citizenship Branch, Ottawa, a founder and first president of the Canadian-Polish Society, as well as the Baptist Federation of Canada of which he was national president (1953-56). In widespread recognition of his work in these many fields Dr. Kirkonnell has received twelve honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, the United States, Hungary, and Germany, knighthoods from Poland and Iceland, and numerous awards from other countries. The chronicle of such a full and active career offers a valuable look at many aspects of Canadian life: in his memoirs Dr. Kirkonnell has avoided a merely chronological arrangement of his autobiography but sought rather to take various phases of the Canadian tradition and to analyse his experience of each down through the years. This Slice of Canada demonstrates the author's discerning faculty of observation and his close involvement, not only with the arts, but with education, religion, politics and other areas of Canadian life.
Choose an application
This philosophical travelogue is a record of the joys (and frustrations) of disconnecting from our complicated, modern existence and living, at a time of climate upheaval, a simple life as close to nature as possible. Eager to know what life might be like if we choose another path, Leonard lived for a year in a cabin in the most remote Arctic settlement he could find and discovered how the paraphernalia of modern living conspires to eliminate our dreams. In the manner of a flat-earther, he went to the High Arctic not just in search of the ice edge, but also to examine the boundaries of our human psyche. No longer ruled by time and blessed by transcendences that flashed him the totality of life, he found harmony with the external world led to an inner dialogue that challenged everything he had known before. Whilst sitting aloof at the top of the world watching humanity having gone astray with our actions threatening to literally change the color of the map, he put the small and great into perspective with the aid of a poetry volume.
Climatic Changes --- Religion --- Personal Memoirs --- Science --- Biography & Autobiography
Choose an application
A rediscovered classic of military history back in print for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II When William B. Dreux parachuted into France in 1944, the OSS infantry officer had cinematic visions of blood-and-guts heroics, of leading the French Maquis resistance forces in daring missions to blow up key bridges and delay the German advance. This isn't the glamorized screen-ready account he expected; this is the real story. Dreux's three-man OSS team landed behind enemy lines in France, in uniform, far from the targeted bridges. No Bridges Blown is a story of mistakes, failures, and survival, a story of volunteers and countrymen working together in the French countryside. The only book written by one of the Jedburghs about his wartime experiences, Dreux brings the history of World War II to life with stories of real people amidst a small section of the fighting in France. These people had reckless courage, little training, and faced impossible odds. This story will resonate with veterans and everyday citizens alike and it brings to life the realities of war on the ground in Nazi-occupied France.
Military Biography --- Personal Memoirs --- United States --- World War, 1939-1945 --- Biography & Autobiography --- History --- Military biography --- Personal memoirs --- United states --- World war, 1939-1945 --- Biography & autobiography
Choose an application
"The letters take us into his "workshop," illuminating the research behind his distinctive documentary long poems and the social nature of his creative production. They also reveal the complex network of writers, critics, artists and political figures of which Pratt was a part, the evolution of the Canadian book trade from the 1920s through to the early 1960s, and the emergence of radio (and specifically, of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) as a tool for forging national identity. Pratt's correspondence both confirms the public persona of one of Canada's first literary celebrities and provides glimpses of the private character behind the mask."-- "This edition of E.J. Pratt's letters is the final volume in the Collected Works series. Because of Pratt's role in the making of Canadian culture between and after the World Wars, his correspondence highlights key moments in our cultural history and provides a view of the enterprise from its very centre."--
Poets, Canadian --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- Canadian poets --- Pratt, E. J. --- Pratt, Edwin John,
Choose an application
"Phoning Home is a collection of entertaining and thought-provoking essays featuring the author's quirky family, his Jewish heritage, and his New York City upbringing. Jacob M. Appel's recollections and insights, informed and filtered by his advanced degrees in medicine, law, and ethics, not only inspire nostalgic feelings but also offer insight into contemporary medical and ethical issues. At times sardonic and at others self-deprecating, Appel lays bare the most private aspects of his emotional life. "We'd just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the backseat of my mother's foul-tempered Dodge Dart," writes Appel of his family vacation with his two favorite rubber cat toys. Shortly thereafter Fat and Thin were lost forever--beginning, when Appel was just six years old, what he calls his "private apocalypse." Both erudite and full-hearted, Appel recounts storylines ranging from a bout of unrequited love gone awry to the poignant romance of his grandparents. We learn of the crank phone calls he made to his own family, the conspicuous absence of Jell-O at his grandaunt's house, and family secrets long believed buried. The stories capture the author's distinctive voice--a blend of a physician's compassion and an ethicist's constant questioning. "--
LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- Bioethicists --- Lawyers --- Physicians --- Ethicists --- Appel, Jacob M., --- Family.
Choose an application
"With the discipline of a surgeon performing a critical operation, acclaimed storyteller Harry Mark Petrakis strips away layers of his nine decades of life to expose the blood and bone of a human being in his third memoir and twenty-fifth book, Song of My Life. Petrakis is unsparing in exposing his own flaws, from a youthful gambling addiction, to the enormous lie of his military draft, to a midlife suicidal depression. Yet he is compassionate in depicting the foibles of others around him. Petrakis writes with love about his parents and five siblings, with nostalgia as he describes the Greek neighborhoods and cramped Chicago apartments of his childhood, and with deep affection for his wife and sons as he recalls with candor, comedy, and charity a writer's long, fully-lived life. Petrakis recounts the near-fatal childhood illness, which confined him to bed for two years and, through hours of reading during the day and night, nurtured his imagination and compulsion toward storytelling. A high school dropout, Petrakis also recalls his work journey in the steel mills, railroad depots, and shabby diners of the city. There is farce and comedy in the pages as he describes the intricate framework of lies that drove his courtship of Diana, who has been his wife of sixty-nine loving years. Petrakis shares his struggles for over a decade to write and publish and finally, poignantly describes the matchless instant when he holds his first published book in his hands. The chapters on his experiences in Hollywood where he had gone to write the screenplay of his best-selling novel A Dream of Kings are as revealing of the machinations and egos of moviemaking as any Oliver Stone documentary. Petrakis's individual story, as fraught with drama and revelation as the adventures of Odysseus, comes to an elegiac conclusion when, at the age of ninety, he ruminates on his life and its approaching end. With a profound and searing honesty, this self-exploration of a solitary writer's life helps us understand our own existences and the tapestry of lives connecting us together in our shared human journey. "--
Choose an application
Sir Nick Young's memoir is a fascinating and candid account of his thirteen years as chief executive of the British Red Cross (2001-2014). During this critical period he led the organization's response to the financial crisis, the Iraq War, the Asian Tsunami, the London bombings, a kidnapping, the fighting in Syria, media challenges, and numerous earthquakes, floods and other disasters.The author shares the strains and moments of fulfillment, relief and humor, as he played a key role in the response to some of the 21st Century's most dramatic and dangerous events. His book paints a vivid yet modest picture of what is involved running one of the world's best-known disaster response organizations, reacting to catastrophes, both man-made and natural, and saving the lives and livelihoods of those caught up in global disasters, conflicts and health emergencies.It is rare for charity leaders to reveal their insights in this way and, at the same time, paint such a vivid picture of life at the top of a large voluntary organization. The result is a compelling read, particularly for those interested in international affairs, the way charities work, and what makes them different from other types of world class organizations.
Personal memoirs --- Biography & autobiography --- War --- Relief of sick and wounded. --- Young, Nicholas, --- British Red Cross Society.
Choose an application
In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees--from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers--were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs.It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy--political, environmental, and personal--that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day.
Personal Memoirs --- United States --- Southern States --- Nuclear Warfare --- Biography & Autobiography --- History
Listing 1 - 10 of 31 | << page >> |
Sort by
|