The Charlotte & William Bloomberg Medford Public Library
October, 08 2024 06:10:37
Virginia Woolf
By Gill, ian
An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies - of strength, style, and creativity - shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thrse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
|
9781328683953
|
Hardcover
Bruce Lee
By Polly, Matthew
The first authoritative biography - featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs - of film legend Bruce Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western cultures, and smashed long-held stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans.Forty-five years after Bruce Lee's sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee's life. It's also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee's family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon. Polly explores Lee's early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father's struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like James Coburn and Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to a white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery. Polly breaks down the myths surrounding Bruce Lee and argues that, contrary to popular belief, he was an ambitious actor who was obsessed with the martial arts - not a kung-fu guru who just so happened to make a couple of movies. This is an honest, revealing look at an impressive yet imperfect man whose personal story was even more entertaining and inspiring than any fictional role he played onscreen.
Simon & Schuster
|
9781501187629
|
Hardcover
Hemingway at War
By Mort, Terry
From Omaha Beach on D-Day and the French Resistance to the tragedy of Huertgen Forest and the Liberation of Paris, this is the story of Ernest Hemingway's adventures in journalism during World War II. In the spring of 1944, Hemingway traveled to London and then to France to cover World War II for Colliers Magazine. Obviously he was a little late in arriving. Why did he go? He had resisted this kind of journalism for much of the early period of the war, but when he finally decided to go, he threw himself into the thick of events and so became a conduit to understanding some of the major events and characters of the war. He flew missions with the RAF (in part to gather material for a novel) ; he went on a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day; he went on to involve himself in the French Resistance forces in France and famously rode into the still dangerous streets of liberated Paris. And he was at the German Siegfried line for the horrendous killing ground of the Huertgen Forest, in which his favored 22nd Regiment lost nearly man they sent into the fight. After that tragedy, it came to be argued, he was never the same. This invigorating narrative is also, in a parallel fashion, an investigation into Hemingway's subsequent work -- much of it stemming from his wartime experience -- which shaped the latter stages of his career in dramatic fashion.
Pegasus Books
|
9781681772479
|
Print book
Out of Line
By Lynch, Barbara
Blood, Bones, & Butter meets A Devil in the Kitchen in this funny, fierce, and poignant memoir by world-renowned chef, restaurateur, and Top Chef judge Barbara Lynch, recounting her rise from a hard-knocks South Boston childhood to culinary stardom.Celebrated chef Barbara Lynch credits the defiant spirit of her upbringing in tough, poor "Southie," a neighborhood ruled by the notorious Whitey Bulger gang, with helping her bluff her way into her first professional cooking jobs; develop a distinct culinary style through instinct and sheer moxie; then dare to found an empire of restaurants ranging from a casual but elegant "clam shack" to Boston's epitome of modern haute cuisine. One of seven children born to an overworked single mother, Lynch was raised in a housing project. She earned a daredevil reputation for boosting vehicles (even a city bus) , petty theft, drinking and doing drugs, and narrowly escaping arrest - haunted all the while by a painful buried trauma. Out of Line describes Lynch's remarkable process of self-invention, including her encounters with colorful characters of the food world, and vividly evokes the magic of creation in the kitchen. It is also a love letter to South Boston and its vanishing culture, governed by Irish Catholic mothers and its own code of honor. Through her story, Lynch explores how the past - both what we strive to escape from and what we remain true to - can strengthen and expand who we are.
Atria Books
|
9781476795447
|
Print book
Miles & Me
By Troupe, Quincy
An intimate story of Miles Davis, the man, the musician, and his friendship with the young journalist and poet Quincy Troupe--soon to be a major motion picture.Poet, activist and journalist Quincy Troupe's candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an engrossing chronicle of the author's own artistic and personal growth. Miles and Me describes in intimate detail the sometimes harrowing processes of Davis's spectacular creativity and the joys and travails Davis's passionate and contradictory temperament posed to the two men's friendship. Miles and Me shows how Miles Davis, both as an artist and as a black man, influenced Troupe and whole generations of Americans while forever changing the face of jazz. In 1985, Spin magazine hired Troupe to do an exclusive two-part interview with the by-then legendary jazz artist Davis. The hour-and-a-half scheduled interview stretched to ten hours. After it was published, Davis was so enamored of Troupe and the interview that he finally relented to a major publisher's request that he write his autobiography under the condition that they could get Quincy Troupe to write it. Miles: The Autobiography became an instant bestseller and opened up the entire field of popular music autobiography. Years later, Quincy went back to his notes of his time with Miles that had been so important to them both, and produced this more intimate book, Miles and Me, told from his side of their friendship. Miles and Me takes us from St. Louis, where both men grew up, to New York, where both men lived, to Malibu where Miles also kept a home. Troupe also takes us through the entire catalogue of Davis's recordings. Troupe calls his friend "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind, and a son-of-a-bitch." The author's love and appreciation infuses Miles and Me with a rare quality of grace, and at the same time, throughout the book, Troupe's observations of his friend are keen, sometimes hilariously funny, and truthful, as he knows Miles would want him to be.
Seven Stories Press
|
9781609808341
|
Paperback
And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?
By Weschler, Lawrence
The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patientThe author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings -- the account of his long-dormant patients' miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty.Weschler sets Sacks's brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks's capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described "clinical ontologist" whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374236410
|
Hardcover
Pancakes in Paris
By Carlson, Craig
Paris was practically perfect...Craig Carlson was the last person anyone would expect to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams, although one thing was still missing-the good ol' American breakfast he loved so much.Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible-from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients... and even finding love along the way. His diner, Breakfast In America, is now a renowned tourist destination, and the story of how it came to be is just as delicious and satisfying as the classic breakfast that tops its menu.
Sourcebooks
|
9781492632122
|
Print book
7-10 Split
By Bennett, Michael Gordon
Reflecting on America's civil rights era, Bennett, cofounder and CEO of Bennett Global Entertainment, relives his coming-of-age years as a military brat traveling abroad and stateside in this understated, restrained memoir. The Bennett family, with his father in the U.S. Air Force, lives on a series of bases in Spain, Maine, Florida, and Colorado. The military bubble somewhat protects them from the challenges of Jim Crow. Bennett writes boldly of intense confusion in his racial identity, alienation within his black community, and unease among his white classmates in every new location. "Was I a white kid in black skin, or a black kid with white sensibilities?" Bennett writes. "Or did any of it matter?" When his battle-fatigued father returns from Vietnam with an alcoholism problem, the family tries to adjust to his erratic behavior, his conduct pushing each member to an emotional breaking point, but they never succumb to his failings.
Bennett Global Entertainment Publishing
|
9780986416200
|
Print book
The Silver Swan
By Bingham, Sallie
The definitive biography of Doris Duke, the legendary defiant and notorious tobacco heiress and philanthropist, from renowned author Sallie Bingham.As the founder of the Archive for Women's History and Culture at Duke University's Perkins Library, Sallie Bingham has been granted unprecedented access to the Doris Duke archive to present the life of this remarkable and complex woman.The inheritor of James Buchanan Duke's billion dollar tobacco fortune, Doris was a shrewd businesswoman who tripled her father's wealth. Over the course of her life, she would become infamous for successfully suing her own mother at age twelve, establishing her first foundation at twenty-one, and cultivating friendships with Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374142599
|
eBook
The Jolly Roger Social Club
By Foster, Nick
The true story of a series of bold killings which took place in a shadowy American ex-pat community in Panama--a tale of greed, political history, and murderIn the remote Bocas del Toro, Panama, William Dathan Holbert, aka "Wild Bill," is awaiting trial for the murder of five fellow American ex-patriots. Holbert's first victims were the Brown family, who lived on a remote island in the area's Darklands. There, Holbert turned their home into the "Jolly Roger Social Club," using drink- and drug-fueled parties to get to know other ex-pats. The club's tagline was: "Over 90% of our members survive." Those odds were not in his victims' favor. But this is not just a book about what Holbert did and the complex financial and real estate motives behind the killings; it is about why Bocas del Toro turned out to be his perfect hunting ground, and why the community tolerated-even accepted-him for a time. Told through the fascinating history of the country of Panama, a paradise with sinister ties to the political and economic interests of the United States, journalist Nick Foster brings this uniquely bizarre place to life; shedding light on a community where many live under assumed names, desperate to leave their old lives behind-and sometimes people just disappear.
Virginia Woolf
By Gill, ian
An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies - of strength, style, and creativity - shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thrse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.
Bruce Lee
By Polly, Matthew
The first authoritative biography - featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs - of film legend Bruce Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western cultures, and smashed long-held stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans.Forty-five years after Bruce Lee's sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee's life. It's also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee's family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon. Polly explores Lee's early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father's struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like James Coburn and Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to a white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery. Polly breaks down the myths surrounding Bruce Lee and argues that, contrary to popular belief, he was an ambitious actor who was obsessed with the martial arts - not a kung-fu guru who just so happened to make a couple of movies. This is an honest, revealing look at an impressive yet imperfect man whose personal story was even more entertaining and inspiring than any fictional role he played onscreen.
Hemingway at War
By Mort, Terry
From Omaha Beach on D-Day and the French Resistance to the tragedy of Huertgen Forest and the Liberation of Paris, this is the story of Ernest Hemingway's adventures in journalism during World War II. In the spring of 1944, Hemingway traveled to London and then to France to cover World War II for Colliers Magazine. Obviously he was a little late in arriving. Why did he go? He had resisted this kind of journalism for much of the early period of the war, but when he finally decided to go, he threw himself into the thick of events and so became a conduit to understanding some of the major events and characters of the war. He flew missions with the RAF (in part to gather material for a novel) ; he went on a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day; he went on to involve himself in the French Resistance forces in France and famously rode into the still dangerous streets of liberated Paris. And he was at the German Siegfried line for the horrendous killing ground of the Huertgen Forest, in which his favored 22nd Regiment lost nearly man they sent into the fight. After that tragedy, it came to be argued, he was never the same. This invigorating narrative is also, in a parallel fashion, an investigation into Hemingway's subsequent work -- much of it stemming from his wartime experience -- which shaped the latter stages of his career in dramatic fashion.
Out of Line
By Lynch, Barbara
Blood, Bones, & Butter meets A Devil in the Kitchen in this funny, fierce, and poignant memoir by world-renowned chef, restaurateur, and Top Chef judge Barbara Lynch, recounting her rise from a hard-knocks South Boston childhood to culinary stardom.Celebrated chef Barbara Lynch credits the defiant spirit of her upbringing in tough, poor "Southie," a neighborhood ruled by the notorious Whitey Bulger gang, with helping her bluff her way into her first professional cooking jobs; develop a distinct culinary style through instinct and sheer moxie; then dare to found an empire of restaurants ranging from a casual but elegant "clam shack" to Boston's epitome of modern haute cuisine. One of seven children born to an overworked single mother, Lynch was raised in a housing project. She earned a daredevil reputation for boosting vehicles (even a city bus) , petty theft, drinking and doing drugs, and narrowly escaping arrest - haunted all the while by a painful buried trauma. Out of Line describes Lynch's remarkable process of self-invention, including her encounters with colorful characters of the food world, and vividly evokes the magic of creation in the kitchen. It is also a love letter to South Boston and its vanishing culture, governed by Irish Catholic mothers and its own code of honor. Through her story, Lynch explores how the past - both what we strive to escape from and what we remain true to - can strengthen and expand who we are.
Miles & Me
By Troupe, Quincy
An intimate story of Miles Davis, the man, the musician, and his friendship with the young journalist and poet Quincy Troupe--soon to be a major motion picture.Poet, activist and journalist Quincy Troupe's candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an engrossing chronicle of the author's own artistic and personal growth. Miles and Me describes in intimate detail the sometimes harrowing processes of Davis's spectacular creativity and the joys and travails Davis's passionate and contradictory temperament posed to the two men's friendship. Miles and Me shows how Miles Davis, both as an artist and as a black man, influenced Troupe and whole generations of Americans while forever changing the face of jazz. In 1985, Spin magazine hired Troupe to do an exclusive two-part interview with the by-then legendary jazz artist Davis. The hour-and-a-half scheduled interview stretched to ten hours. After it was published, Davis was so enamored of Troupe and the interview that he finally relented to a major publisher's request that he write his autobiography under the condition that they could get Quincy Troupe to write it. Miles: The Autobiography became an instant bestseller and opened up the entire field of popular music autobiography. Years later, Quincy went back to his notes of his time with Miles that had been so important to them both, and produced this more intimate book, Miles and Me, told from his side of their friendship. Miles and Me takes us from St. Louis, where both men grew up, to New York, where both men lived, to Malibu where Miles also kept a home. Troupe also takes us through the entire catalogue of Davis's recordings. Troupe calls his friend "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind, and a son-of-a-bitch." The author's love and appreciation infuses Miles and Me with a rare quality of grace, and at the same time, throughout the book, Troupe's observations of his friend are keen, sometimes hilariously funny, and truthful, as he knows Miles would want him to be.
And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?
By Weschler, Lawrence
The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patientThe author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings -- the account of his long-dormant patients' miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty.Weschler sets Sacks's brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks's capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described "clinical ontologist" whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
Pancakes in Paris
By Carlson, Craig
Paris was practically perfect...Craig Carlson was the last person anyone would expect to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams, although one thing was still missing-the good ol' American breakfast he loved so much.Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible-from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients... and even finding love along the way. His diner, Breakfast In America, is now a renowned tourist destination, and the story of how it came to be is just as delicious and satisfying as the classic breakfast that tops its menu.
7-10 Split
By Bennett, Michael Gordon
Reflecting on America's civil rights era, Bennett, cofounder and CEO of Bennett Global Entertainment, relives his coming-of-age years as a military brat traveling abroad and stateside in this understated, restrained memoir. The Bennett family, with his father in the U.S. Air Force, lives on a series of bases in Spain, Maine, Florida, and Colorado. The military bubble somewhat protects them from the challenges of Jim Crow. Bennett writes boldly of intense confusion in his racial identity, alienation within his black community, and unease among his white classmates in every new location. "Was I a white kid in black skin, or a black kid with white sensibilities?" Bennett writes. "Or did any of it matter?" When his battle-fatigued father returns from Vietnam with an alcoholism problem, the family tries to adjust to his erratic behavior, his conduct pushing each member to an emotional breaking point, but they never succumb to his failings.
The Silver Swan
By Bingham, Sallie
The definitive biography of Doris Duke, the legendary defiant and notorious tobacco heiress and philanthropist, from renowned author Sallie Bingham.As the founder of the Archive for Women's History and Culture at Duke University's Perkins Library, Sallie Bingham has been granted unprecedented access to the Doris Duke archive to present the life of this remarkable and complex woman.The inheritor of James Buchanan Duke's billion dollar tobacco fortune, Doris was a shrewd businesswoman who tripled her father's wealth. Over the course of her life, she would become infamous for successfully suing her own mother at age twelve, establishing her first foundation at twenty-one, and cultivating friendships with Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson.
The Jolly Roger Social Club
By Foster, Nick
The true story of a series of bold killings which took place in a shadowy American ex-pat community in Panama--a tale of greed, political history, and murderIn the remote Bocas del Toro, Panama, William Dathan Holbert, aka "Wild Bill," is awaiting trial for the murder of five fellow American ex-patriots. Holbert's first victims were the Brown family, who lived on a remote island in the area's Darklands. There, Holbert turned their home into the "Jolly Roger Social Club," using drink- and drug-fueled parties to get to know other ex-pats. The club's tagline was: "Over 90% of our members survive." Those odds were not in his victims' favor. But this is not just a book about what Holbert did and the complex financial and real estate motives behind the killings; it is about why Bocas del Toro turned out to be his perfect hunting ground, and why the community tolerated-even accepted-him for a time. Told through the fascinating history of the country of Panama, a paradise with sinister ties to the political and economic interests of the United States, journalist Nick Foster brings this uniquely bizarre place to life; shedding light on a community where many live under assumed names, desperate to leave their old lives behind-and sometimes people just disappear.