A rollicking true story of Bibles and bank robberies in Southern California, from a talented and highly praised gonzo journalistChas Smith grew up deeply enmeshed in the evangelical Christian world that grew out of Southern California in the late 1960s. His family included famous missionaries and megachurch pastors, but his cousin Daniel Courson was Grandma's favorite. Smith looked up to Cousin Danny. He was handsome, adventurous, and smart, earned a degree from Bible college, and settled into a family and a stable career. Needless to say, it was a big surprise when Cousin Danny started robbing banks. Known as the "Floppy Hat Bandit," Courson robbed 19 of them in a torrid six-week spree before being caught and sentenced to seven years.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781419754739
|
Hardcover
This Story Will Change
By Crane, Elizabeth
Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephron in this intimate and evolving portrait about the end of a marriage and how life can fall apart and be rebuilt in wonderful and surprising waysOne minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission - I'm not happy - changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It's understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage. Crafting the story as the very events chronicled are unfolding, Crane writes from a place of guarded possibility, capturing through vignettes and collected moments a semblance of the real-time practice of healing.
Counterpoint
|
9781640094789
|
Hardcover
I'll Be Seeing You
By Berg, Elizabeth
The beloved New York Times bestselling author tells the moving love story of caring for her parents in their final years in this beautifully written memoir.Elizabeth Berg's father was an Army veteran who was a tough man in every way but one: He showed a great deal of love and tenderness to his wife. Berg describes her parents' marriage as a romance that lasted for nearly seventy years; she grew up watching her father kiss her mother upon leaving home, and kiss her again the instant he came back. His idea of when he should spend time away from her was never.But then her father developed Alzheimer's disease, and her parents were forced to leave the home they loved and move into a facility that could offer them help. It was time for their children to offer practical advice, emotional support, and direction, to the best of their ability--to, in effect, parent the people who had for so long parented them.
Random House
|
9780593134672
|
Hardcover
The Mockingbird Next Door
By Mills, Marja
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel's celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee, known to her friends as Nelle, has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation - and a great friendship. In 2004, with the Lees' blessing, Mills moved into the house next door to the sisters. She spent the next eighteen months there, sharing coffee at McDonalds and trips to the Laundromat with Nelle, feeding the ducks and going out for catfish supper with the sisters, and exploring all over lower Alabama with the Lees' inner circle of friends. Nelle shared her love of history, literature, and the Southern way of life with Mills, as well as her keen sense of how journalism should be practiced. As the sisters decided to let Mills tell their story, Nelle helped make sure she was getting the story - and the South - right. Alice, the keeper of the Lee family history, shared the stories of their family. The Mockingbird Next Door is the story of Mills's friendship with the Lee sisters. It is a testament to the great intelligence, sharp wit, and tremendous storytelling power of these two women, especially that of Nelle. Mills was given a rare opportunity to know Nelle Harper Lee, to be part of the Lees' life in Alabama, and to hear them reflect on their upbringing, their corner of the Deep South, how To Kill a Mockingbird affected their lives, and why Nelle Harper Lee chose to never write another novel.
The Penguin Press; 1st edition
|
9781594205194
|
Print book
Bird Brother
By Stotts, Rodney
To escape the tough streets of Southeast Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, young Rodney Stotts would ride the metro to the Smithsonian National Zoo. There, the bald eagles and other birds of prey captured his imagination for the first time. In Bird Brother, Rodney shares his unlikely journey to becoming a conservationist and one of America's few Black master falconers. Rodney grew up during the crack epidemic, with guns, drugs, and the threat of incarceration an accepted part of daily life for nearly everyone he knew. To rent his own apartment, he needed a paycheck - something the money from dealing drugs didn't provide. For that, he took a position in 1992 with a new nonprofit, the Earth Conservation Corps. Gradually, Rodney fell in love with the work to restore and conserve the polluted Anacostia River that flows through D.
Island Press
|
9781642831740
|
Hardcover
Long Way Home
By Douglas, Cameron
From the scion of Hollywood royalty--son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas--a moving, often shocking, ultimately inspiring memoir detailing his struggle to regain his dignity, humanity, and place in society after many years of drug abuse and almost eight years in prison.Cameron Douglas is born into wealth, privilege, and comfort. His parents are glamorous jet-setters, his father a superstar, his mother a beautiful socialite, his grandfather a legend. On the surface, his life seems golden. But by the age of thirty, he has taken a hellish dive: he's become a drug addict, a thief, and--after a DEA drug bust--a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added to his sentence while incarcerated. Eventually he will spend two years in solitary, where he manages, nonetheless, to hold fast to the brutal ethos of prison survival . . . until: he begins to reverse his savage transformation, to understand the psychological turmoil that has tormented him for years, and to prepare for what will be a profoundly challenging, but eventually deeply satisfying and successful, reentry into society at large.Sparing no one in his sphere--least of all himself--Cameron Douglas gives us a raw and unstintingly honest recounting of his harrowing, remarkable, and, in the end, inspiring life story.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780525520832
|
Hardcover
Greenlights
By Mcconaughey, Matthew
I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
Crown
|
9780593139134
|
Hardcover
Scores
By Blutrich, Michael D
Meet Michael Blutrich. A mild-mannered New York lawyer and founder of SCORES, the hottest strip club in New York City history. SCORES benefited from some unconventional funding - the proceeds of a Florida insurance embezzlement scheme. All Blutrich wanted was to lay low, make the club a success, and put his criminal acts behind him. But then the mafia decided to make SCORES a new home for its own illegal dealings. And just when success was booming to new heights, the FBI came knocking . . .***SCORES (with its popular slogan, "Where Sports and Pleasure Come Together!") became wildly popular, in part thanks to Blutrich's ability to successfully bend the rules of adult entertainment. It was the first club in Manhattan to feature lap dancing by ignoring laws requiring dancers to perform on pedestals and remain six feet away from patrons. He also figured out how to neatly sidestep statutes requiring topless dancers to wear pasties by covering the offending areas of their breasts with latex paint. His formula worked, and SCORES grew into the hottest club in Manhattan, frequented by sports superstars, Oscar-winning actors, television icons, Grammy-winning singers, and political notables alike. On any given night, stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Howard Stern, and Madonna were among the famous faces in the crowd, and SCORES became a staple in the New York club scene.Unfortunately for Michael, it would all soon implode.SCORES was located in a neighborhood controlled by the Gambino crime family, and it soon became a hotbed for illicit mob activity, culminating in a double murder that left two of his employees dead. When federal prosecutors started sniffing around for potential crimes at the club, he went from carefree club owner to undercover spy in a heartbeat. To obtain maximum leniency for his own insurance fraud, Michael became an unlikely (but highly successful) undercover FBI informant. By wearing body wires and placing ceiling cameras in his offices, he was eventually credited by the government with more than 30 mafia convictions, including a crime family head and captains, and associates from multiple international families. For his cooperation, the Department of Justice and the FBI assured him he would avoid any significant jail time.Or that's how it was supposed to go, at least. In his own self-deprecating voice, Blutrich tells it all: recording armed gangsters in the act of committing felonies; repeatedly evading discovery through amazing stealth; living with death threats that included brandished weapons and body searches; revealing long covered-up celebrity tales; enduring a psychotic break from the imposed pressures; and losing everything in his life in the name of earning redemption.
BenBella Books
|
9781942952633
|
Print book
The Search for John Lennon
By Jones, Lesley-ann
Pulling back the many hidden layers of John Lennon's life, Lesley-Ann Jones closely tracks the events and personality traits that led to the rock star living in self-imposed exile in New York - where he was shot dead outside his apartment on that fateful autumn day forty years ago.Late on December 8th, 1980, the world abruptly stopped turning for millions, as news broke that the world's most beloved musician had been gunned down in cold blood in New York City. The most iconic Beatle left behind an unrivaled body of music and legions of faithful disciples - yet his profound legacy has brought with it as many questions and contradictions as his music has provided truths and certainties. In this compelling exploration, acclaimed music biographer Lesley-Ann Jones unravels the enigma that was John Lennon to present a complete portrait of the man, his life, his loves, his music, his untimely death, and, ultimately, his legacy.
Pegasus Books
|
9781643136721
|
Hardcover
Negroland
By Jefferson, Margo
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAt once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac - here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in upper-crust black Chicago - her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite - Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.
Blessed Are the Bank Robbers
By Smith, Chas
A rollicking true story of Bibles and bank robberies in Southern California, from a talented and highly praised gonzo journalistChas Smith grew up deeply enmeshed in the evangelical Christian world that grew out of Southern California in the late 1960s. His family included famous missionaries and megachurch pastors, but his cousin Daniel Courson was Grandma's favorite. Smith looked up to Cousin Danny. He was handsome, adventurous, and smart, earned a degree from Bible college, and settled into a family and a stable career. Needless to say, it was a big surprise when Cousin Danny started robbing banks. Known as the "Floppy Hat Bandit," Courson robbed 19 of them in a torrid six-week spree before being caught and sentenced to seven years.
This Story Will Change
By Crane, Elizabeth
Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephron in this intimate and evolving portrait about the end of a marriage and how life can fall apart and be rebuilt in wonderful and surprising waysOne minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission - I'm not happy - changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It's understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage. Crafting the story as the very events chronicled are unfolding, Crane writes from a place of guarded possibility, capturing through vignettes and collected moments a semblance of the real-time practice of healing.
I'll Be Seeing You
By Berg, Elizabeth
The beloved New York Times bestselling author tells the moving love story of caring for her parents in their final years in this beautifully written memoir.Elizabeth Berg's father was an Army veteran who was a tough man in every way but one: He showed a great deal of love and tenderness to his wife. Berg describes her parents' marriage as a romance that lasted for nearly seventy years; she grew up watching her father kiss her mother upon leaving home, and kiss her again the instant he came back. His idea of when he should spend time away from her was never.But then her father developed Alzheimer's disease, and her parents were forced to leave the home they loved and move into a facility that could offer them help. It was time for their children to offer practical advice, emotional support, and direction, to the best of their ability--to, in effect, parent the people who had for so long parented them.
The Mockingbird Next Door
By Mills, Marja
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel's celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee, known to her friends as Nelle, has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation - and a great friendship. In 2004, with the Lees' blessing, Mills moved into the house next door to the sisters. She spent the next eighteen months there, sharing coffee at McDonalds and trips to the Laundromat with Nelle, feeding the ducks and going out for catfish supper with the sisters, and exploring all over lower Alabama with the Lees' inner circle of friends. Nelle shared her love of history, literature, and the Southern way of life with Mills, as well as her keen sense of how journalism should be practiced. As the sisters decided to let Mills tell their story, Nelle helped make sure she was getting the story - and the South - right. Alice, the keeper of the Lee family history, shared the stories of their family. The Mockingbird Next Door is the story of Mills's friendship with the Lee sisters. It is a testament to the great intelligence, sharp wit, and tremendous storytelling power of these two women, especially that of Nelle. Mills was given a rare opportunity to know Nelle Harper Lee, to be part of the Lees' life in Alabama, and to hear them reflect on their upbringing, their corner of the Deep South, how To Kill a Mockingbird affected their lives, and why Nelle Harper Lee chose to never write another novel.
Bird Brother
By Stotts, Rodney
To escape the tough streets of Southeast Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, young Rodney Stotts would ride the metro to the Smithsonian National Zoo. There, the bald eagles and other birds of prey captured his imagination for the first time. In Bird Brother, Rodney shares his unlikely journey to becoming a conservationist and one of America's few Black master falconers. Rodney grew up during the crack epidemic, with guns, drugs, and the threat of incarceration an accepted part of daily life for nearly everyone he knew. To rent his own apartment, he needed a paycheck - something the money from dealing drugs didn't provide. For that, he took a position in 1992 with a new nonprofit, the Earth Conservation Corps. Gradually, Rodney fell in love with the work to restore and conserve the polluted Anacostia River that flows through D.
Long Way Home
By Douglas, Cameron
From the scion of Hollywood royalty--son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas--a moving, often shocking, ultimately inspiring memoir detailing his struggle to regain his dignity, humanity, and place in society after many years of drug abuse and almost eight years in prison.Cameron Douglas is born into wealth, privilege, and comfort. His parents are glamorous jet-setters, his father a superstar, his mother a beautiful socialite, his grandfather a legend. On the surface, his life seems golden. But by the age of thirty, he has taken a hellish dive: he's become a drug addict, a thief, and--after a DEA drug bust--a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added to his sentence while incarcerated. Eventually he will spend two years in solitary, where he manages, nonetheless, to hold fast to the brutal ethos of prison survival . . . until: he begins to reverse his savage transformation, to understand the psychological turmoil that has tormented him for years, and to prepare for what will be a profoundly challenging, but eventually deeply satisfying and successful, reentry into society at large.Sparing no one in his sphere--least of all himself--Cameron Douglas gives us a raw and unstintingly honest recounting of his harrowing, remarkable, and, in the end, inspiring life story.
Greenlights
By Mcconaughey, Matthew
I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
Scores
By Blutrich, Michael D
Meet Michael Blutrich. A mild-mannered New York lawyer and founder of SCORES, the hottest strip club in New York City history. SCORES benefited from some unconventional funding - the proceeds of a Florida insurance embezzlement scheme. All Blutrich wanted was to lay low, make the club a success, and put his criminal acts behind him. But then the mafia decided to make SCORES a new home for its own illegal dealings. And just when success was booming to new heights, the FBI came knocking . . .***SCORES (with its popular slogan, "Where Sports and Pleasure Come Together!") became wildly popular, in part thanks to Blutrich's ability to successfully bend the rules of adult entertainment. It was the first club in Manhattan to feature lap dancing by ignoring laws requiring dancers to perform on pedestals and remain six feet away from patrons. He also figured out how to neatly sidestep statutes requiring topless dancers to wear pasties by covering the offending areas of their breasts with latex paint. His formula worked, and SCORES grew into the hottest club in Manhattan, frequented by sports superstars, Oscar-winning actors, television icons, Grammy-winning singers, and political notables alike. On any given night, stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Howard Stern, and Madonna were among the famous faces in the crowd, and SCORES became a staple in the New York club scene.Unfortunately for Michael, it would all soon implode.SCORES was located in a neighborhood controlled by the Gambino crime family, and it soon became a hotbed for illicit mob activity, culminating in a double murder that left two of his employees dead. When federal prosecutors started sniffing around for potential crimes at the club, he went from carefree club owner to undercover spy in a heartbeat. To obtain maximum leniency for his own insurance fraud, Michael became an unlikely (but highly successful) undercover FBI informant. By wearing body wires and placing ceiling cameras in his offices, he was eventually credited by the government with more than 30 mafia convictions, including a crime family head and captains, and associates from multiple international families. For his cooperation, the Department of Justice and the FBI assured him he would avoid any significant jail time.Or that's how it was supposed to go, at least. In his own self-deprecating voice, Blutrich tells it all: recording armed gangsters in the act of committing felonies; repeatedly evading discovery through amazing stealth; living with death threats that included brandished weapons and body searches; revealing long covered-up celebrity tales; enduring a psychotic break from the imposed pressures; and losing everything in his life in the name of earning redemption.
The Search for John Lennon
By Jones, Lesley-ann
Pulling back the many hidden layers of John Lennon's life, Lesley-Ann Jones closely tracks the events and personality traits that led to the rock star living in self-imposed exile in New York - where he was shot dead outside his apartment on that fateful autumn day forty years ago.Late on December 8th, 1980, the world abruptly stopped turning for millions, as news broke that the world's most beloved musician had been gunned down in cold blood in New York City. The most iconic Beatle left behind an unrivaled body of music and legions of faithful disciples - yet his profound legacy has brought with it as many questions and contradictions as his music has provided truths and certainties. In this compelling exploration, acclaimed music biographer Lesley-Ann Jones unravels the enigma that was John Lennon to present a complete portrait of the man, his life, his loves, his music, his untimely death, and, ultimately, his legacy.
Negroland
By Jefferson, Margo
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAt once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac - here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in upper-crust black Chicago - her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite - Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.