American writer Stephen Crane died in 1900 at the age of 28. In his short, intense life, this burning boy wrote a masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage , as well as other novels, short stories, and dispatches from the front of two wars. His adventurous life took him to the Wild West, Mexico, then to Cuba during the Spanish American War - dodging bullets which killed those around him, and suffering shipwreck on his way home. Fleeing America because of a scandalous love affair, his last 18 months were spent in Britain where he became a close friends of H.G. Wells, Henry James and, especially, Joseph Conrad. Auster ''s intention is to restore Crane to the pantheon of Modernist 20th century authors such as Conrad. Through Auster''s skill as a novelist, Crane leaps off the page, and into the reader''s heart.
WINNER OF THE GOOD READS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES #1 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018 The masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer - the serial rapist turned murderer who terrorised California for over a decade - from the late Michelle McNamara. I'll Be Gone in the Dark offers a unique snapshot of suburban West Coast America in the 1980s, and a chilling account of the wreckage left behind by a criminal mastermind. It is also a portrait of one woman's obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth, three decades later, in spite of the personal cost. Updated with material which takes in the extraordinary events that followed its initial publication, Michelle McNamara's first and last book is a contemporary classic - humane, haunting and heroic.
There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene of the late 1980s and early 90s. This was the New York of Palladium, of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo, an era when dance music was still a largely underground phenomenon, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby-not just a poor, skinny white kid from deepest Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan, and a teetotaler, in a scene that was known for its unchecked drug-fueled hedonism. He would learn what it was to be spat on, literally and figuratively. And to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City ... And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated the end of things, in his career and elsewhere in his life, and he put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would be in fact the beginning of an astonishing new phase in his life, the multimillion-selling Play . Porcelain is about making it, losing it, loving it, and hating it. It's about finding your people, and your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, finally, somehow, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, Porcelain is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians' memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.
On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, the author sat down and wrote the first entry of "Winter Journal", his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body.
In 1797, Lucia, a beautiful statesman's daughter was married off to a powerful Venetian, only to be caught up in the turbulence of Napoleon's march. This biography tells her story, from a hostess in Habsburg Vienna, lady-in-waiting at the court of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais in Milan to single mother in Paris during the fall of Napoleon's Empire.
Presents ten key Anglo-German encounters from the last 200 years: an encounter between Joe Strummer and the Baader Meinhof gang, Helmut Kohl trying to explain the virtues of German cuisine to a sceptical Margaret Thatcher and philosophers Theodor Adorno and A J Ayer clashing over jazz.
A family story, told with restraint and tenderness. This book is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life.
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bicycle as his principal means of transportation in New York City. From music and the visual arts, to globalisation, politics, the nature of creative work, fashion and art, this book gives readers an insight into what Byrne is seeing and thinking as he pedals around these cities.
Andrew Beatty lived with his family for two and a half years in a village in East Java. When he arrived, he was entranced by a strange and sensual way of life, an unusual tolerance of diversity. Mysticism, Islamic piety and animism coexisted peacefully. But a harsh and puritanical Islamism, was driving young women to wear the veil.
The life story of an extraordinary mathematical genius - John Nash - who became schizophrenic, entered remission, and won the Nobel Prize. Nash was only 21 years old and at Princeton University when he invented game theory, the most influential theory of rational human behaviour of our time.
Judith Tebbutt tells the moving true story of her kidnap ordeal and the murder of her husband, David, by Somali pirates. In September 2011, Judith and her husband set out on an adventurous holiday to Kenya. After a joyous week on safari in the Masai Mara, they flew on to a beach resort forty kilometres south of Somalia. And there, in the early hours of September 11th, tragedy struck them. Judith was torn away from David by a band of armed pirates, dragged over sea and land to a village in the arid heart of lawless Somalia, and there held hostage in a squalid room, a ransom on her head. Responsibility of securing her release now rested with her son Ollie.
Orphaned by war, saved by ballet. Growing up in war-torn Sierra Leone, Michaela DePrince witnesses atrocities that no child ever should. Her father is killed by rebels and her mother dies of famine. Sent to an orphanage, Michaela is mistreated and she sees the brutal murder of her favourite teacher. But there is hope: the Harmattan wind blows a magazine through the orphanage gates. Michaela picks it up and sees a beautiful image of a young woman dancing. One day, she thinks, I want to be this happy. And then Michaela and her best friend are adopted by an American couple and Michaela can take the dance lessons she's dreamed of since finding her picture. Life in the States isn't without difficulties. Unfortunately, tragedy can find its way to Michaela in America, too, and her past can feel like it's haunting her. The world of ballet is a racist one, and Michaela has to fight for a place amongst the ballet elite, hearing the words "America's not ready for a black girl ballerina". And yet... Today, Michaela is an international ballet star, dancing for The Dutch National Ballet at the age of 19. A heart-breaking, inspiring autobiography by a teenager who shows us that, beyond everything, there is always hope for a better future.
Non arrendersi mai, guardare al futuro con speranza, forza d'animo, tanta tenacia, operosità e un pizzico di ironia.
Questo è il messaggio che ci vuole trasmettere l'autrice di "Stefano Reviglio: in capo al mondo per sperimentare" attraverso la storia della vita di suo padre: un uomo che ha sperimentato innanzi tutto se stesso, con scelte molto coraggiose, realizzate sempre con lo sguardo rivolto in avanti.
Un uomo che ha saputo costruire il proprio destino, la vita propria e della sua famiglia, trasmettendo un grande esempio ed un magnifico ricordo che l'autrice ha deciso di condividere come messaggio di speranza in questi tempi, resi cosi difficili da tanti individui senza principi, senza rispetto, senza scrupoli.
Questa biografia inizia con l'infanzia del protagonista, attraverso momenti dolorosi e tenere emozioni e prosegue con i sacrifici degli anni di studio e di lavoro, per terminare con la brillante carriera professionale e l'esperienza imprenditoriale.
Il racconto si intreccia con le complesse esperienze del periodo della guerra, qualche ritaglio di una scanzonata giovinezza, viaggi avventurosi e una storia d'amore durata 56 anni, attraverso lettere, ricordi, poesie e fotografie d'archivio in un magnifico affresco dell'epoca tra gli anni '40 e il 2000.
Questo libro è l'omaggio ad un uomo straordinario e alla donna che è stata sempre al suo fianco.
Features the biography of a great British traveller - the tall, headstrong, and charismatic Lady Hester Stanhope, who defied social convention to become a powerful figure in the Middle East.
Why do explorers put themselves in dangerous situations? And, once the worst possible situation occurs, how do they find the resources to survive? The author presents a series of tales from his own experience as well as that of other explorers including Columbus, Cortez, Scott, Shackleton, Stanley, Livingstone.
In 1935, a young woman wrote a letter to "Nursery World" magazine, expressing her feelings of isolation and loneliness. Women from all over the country experiencing similar frustrations wrote back. To create an outlet for their abundant ideas and opinions they started a private magazine, "The Cooperative Correspondence Club".
Guides us through various alternative realities, rebels and opportunists, and attempts to expand the possibilities of the travel memoir. This book offers an account of a modern day quest that attempts to reveal the lengths people will go to when they view the world through a 'strange telescope'.
Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood's richest man. This title presents relationship between the Tramp, his creator, and his world-wide fans, and retrieves Chaplin as the iconic London street-kid who carried the 'surreal' antics of early British Music Hall triumphantly onto the Hollywood screen.
Hanif Kureishi offers an insight into the birth of a writer - himself - through this memoir that conjures up a family story of how he found his own literary calling from the ashes of his father's failed attempts in the past even as the world turned upside down and India split in two along religious lines.
John Donne led myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul''s Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father''s consent; struggled to feed a family of ten children; and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love. * Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed ''act of evangelism'', showing us the many sides of Donne''s extraordinary life, his obsessions (some common, some very strange), his tempestuous Elizabethan times and his blazing words - unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living, with much to teach us about ourselves, now.
