Author: Margaret Cezair-Thompson Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0307755592 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
It is 1981. Jean Landing secretly plans to flee her beloved Jamaica–the only home her family has ever known, a place now rife with political turmoil. But before she can make her final preparations, she receives devastating news: Lana, her sister, is dead. The country’s state of emergency leaves no time to arrange a proper funeral. Even Jean’s mother, Monica, who hadn’t spoken to Lana in more than a decade, cannot fully embrace her grief. The tragedy only underscores Jean’s need to leave an island that holds no promise of a future. Her harrowing journey to freedom across a battered landscape takes Jean through a terrain of memories: of her childhood, with a detached mother at odds with an adoring father, of her complex bond with Lana, and of the friends and lovers who have shaped and shared her days. Epic in scope, The True History of Paradise poignantly portrays the complexities of family and racial identity in a troubled Eden.
Author: Jean Delumeau Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252068805 Category : Paradise Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Explores the conviction that paradise existed in a precise although unreachable earthly location. Delving into the writings of dozens of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, from Augustine to Dante, this title presents a study of the meaning of Original Sin and the human yearning for paradise.
Author: John Glatt Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 1250035732 Category : True Crime Languages : en Pages : 406
Book Description
Ben Novack, Jr. was born into a life of luxury and opulence. Heir to the legendary Fontainebleau hotel, he spent his childhood surrounded by some of the world's biggest stars, including Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Elvis Presley, and Ann-Margret, who performed regularly at the Fontainebleau's La Ronde Room. He sat by while his parents entertained presidents and movie stars, as they reigned over Miami Beach in the ‘50's and ‘60's, and when the family business went sour he became wealthy in his own right, founding a multi-million dollar business using connections he made at the Fontainebleau. But Ben, Jr.'s luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would end in another hotel room—a thousand miles away from the one where he grew up—when police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death. Seven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation—when his wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for twenty-four hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce. Now prosecutors claimed Narcy let the vicious killers into the room and watched as they beat her husband with dumbbells. They also suspected she was involved in the horrendous death of Novack's mother, just three months before. But it would be Narcy's own daughter who implicated her to the police. John Glatt tells the whole story of this twisted case of passion, perversion, and paradise lost, in Prince of Paradise.
Author: Joan Elizabeth Goodman Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 9780618494811 Category : Canada Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
In 1542, eager to escape the French Huguenot household of her harsh father, sixteen-year-old Marguerite de la Rocque sails with her equally stern uncle, the Sieur de Roberval, to the New World, where she is left alone on an island with only her young Catholic lover and her chaperone to help her survive.
Author: Margaret Cezair-Thompson Publisher: ISBN: 9780755348954 Category : Jamaica Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
It is 1981. Jean Landing secretly plans to flee her beloved Jamaica-the only home her family has ever known, a place now rife with political turmoil. But before she can make her final preparations, she receives devastating news: Lana, her sister, is dead. The country's state of emergency leaves no time to arrange a proper funeral. Even Jean's mother, Monica, who hadn't spoken to Lana in more than a decade, cannot fully embrace her grief. The tragedy only underscores Jean's need to leave an island that holds no promise of a future. Her harrowing journey to freedom across a battered landscape takes Jean through a terrain of memories: of her childhood, with a detached mother at odds with an adoring father, of her complex bond with Lana, and of the friends and lovers who have shaped and shared her days. Epic in scope, The True History of Paradise poignantly portrays the complexities of family and racial identity in a troubled Eden.
Author: Keith O'Brien Publisher: Pantheon ISBN: 0593318439 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 497
Book Description
The staggering story of an unlikely band of mothers in the 1970s who discovered Hooker Chemical's deadly secret of Love Canal—exposing one of America’s most devastating toxic waste disasters and sparking the modern environmental movement as we know it today. “Propulsive...A mighty work of historical journalism...A glorious quotidian thriller about people forced to find and use their inner strength.” —The Boston Globe Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. But in the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn’t take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly sweet smell of chemicals. In this propulsive work of narrative storytelling, NYT journalist Keith O’Brien uncovers how Gibbs and Kenny exposed the poisonous secrets buried in their neighborhood. The school and playground had been built atop an old canal—Love Canal, it was called—that Hooker Chemical, the city’s largest employer, had quietly filled with twenty thousand tons of toxic waste in the 1940s and 1950s. This waste was now leaching to the surface, causing a public health crisis the likes of which America had never seen before and sparking new and specific fears. Luella Kenny believed the chemicals were making her son sick. O’Brien braids together previously unknown stories of Hooker Chemical’s deeds; the local newspaperman, scientist, and congressional staffer who tried to help; the city and state officials who didn’t; and the heroic women who stood up to corporate and governmental indifference to save their families and their children. They would take their fight all the way to the top, winning support from the EPA, the White House, and even President Jimmy Carter. By the time it was over, they would capture America’s imagination. Sweeping and electrifying, Paradise Falls brings to life a defining story from our past, laying bare the dauntless efforts of a few women who—years before Erin Brockovich took up the mantle— fought to rescue their community and their lives from the effects of corporate pollution and laid foundation for the modern environmental movement as we know it today.
Author: Sandy Allen Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1501134051 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
“Compelling…A bracing work of art and a loving tribute” (Los Angeles Times), this propulsive, stunning book illuminates the experience of living with schizophrenia like never before. Sandra Allen did not know their uncle Bob very well. As a child, Sandy had been told Bob was “crazy,” that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than Sandy had been alive, and what little Sandy knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009 Bob mailed Sandy his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps, a stream of error-riddled sentences more than sixty, single-spaced pages, the often-incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a “true story” about being “labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic,” and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out to the world. “Searing” (O, The Oprah Magazine), “enthralling” (Star-Tribune, Minneapolis), and “a marvel” (Esquire), A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise shows how Sandy translated Bob’s autobiography, artfully creating a gripping coming-of-age story while sticking faithfully to the facts as he shared them. Sandy also shares background information about their family, the culturally explosive time and place of their uncle’s formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. The result is a heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious portrait of a young man striving for stability in his life as well as his mind, and an utterly unique lens into an experience that, to most people, remains unimaginable. “Thrilling…Gorgeous…a watershed in empathetic adaptation of ‘outsider’ autobiography” (The New Republic), A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise is a dazzlingly, daringly written book that’s poised to change conversations about schizophrenia and mental illness overall.
Author: Margaret Mayhew Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1407041088 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
Fans of Katie Flynn, Rosamunde Pilcher and Dinah Jeffries will love this emotional and sweeping wartime romance set in Singapore from bestselling author Margaret Mayhew. READERS ARE LOVING THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE! "Moving tale of bravery and human endurance...the sounds and smells and life of Singapore come alive in this well-told story" - 5 STARS "This is an amazing read" - 5 STARS "Left me craving more, loving the characters, totally absorbed in the detailed descriptions and finding myself recommending her novels over a coffee with friends" - 5 STARS "Great read!" - 5 STARS "Really loved this book" - 5 STARS ********************************************** SHE ONLY LIVED FOR PLEASURE... ...until war forced her to find courage she did not know she had, and love where she least expected it. 1941: Britain is in the grip of war; life in the Far East is one of wealth and privilege. In Singapore Susan Roper enjoys dancing, clothes and fast cars, tennis and light flirtations with visiting naval officers - her life is devoted solely to pleasure and dismisses any warnings of danger. Singapore goes on partying, oblivious to the threat of invasion and believing the British flag will, protect them from all enemies. But when Japan invades, Susan finds herself in grave danger. She becomes an ambulance driver and is taken prisoner by the Japanese. Gradually and reluctantly she realises that she will have to face many hardships and witness terrible events, forcing her to acknowledge the truth...But will this new world lead her to a love where she least expects it?
Author: Toni Morrison Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0804169888 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times
Author: David K. Randall Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393292932 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
"A true story of the battle for paradise…men and women fighting for a slice of earth like no other." —New York Times Book Review Frederick and May Rindge, the unlikely couple whose love story propelled Malibu’s transformation from an untamed ranch in the middle of nowhere to a paradise seeded with movie stars, are at the heart of this story of American grit and determinism. He was a Harvard-trained confidant of presidents; she was a poor Midwestern farmer’s daughter raised to be suspicious of the seasons. Yet the bond between them would shape history. The newly married couple reached Los Angeles in 1887 when it was still a frontier, and within a few years Frederick, the only heir to an immense Boston fortune, became one of the wealthiest men in the state. After his sudden death in 1905, May spent the next thirty years fighting off some of the most powerful men in the country—as well as fissures within her own family—to preserve Malibu as her private kingdom. Her struggle, one of the longest over land in California history, would culminate in a landmark Supreme Court decision and lead to the creation of the Pacific Coast Highway. The King and Queen of Malibu traces the path of one family as the country around them swept off the last vestiges of the Civil War and moved into what we would recognize as the modern age. The story of Malibu ranges from the halls of Harvard to the Old West in New Mexico to the beginnings of San Francisco’s counter culture amid the Gilded Age, and culminates in the glamour of early Hollywood—all during the brief sliver of history in which the advent of railroads and the automobile traversed a beckoning American frontier and anything seemed possible.
Author: Margaret Cezair-Thompson
Author: Jean Delumeau
Author: John Glatt
Author: Joan Elizabeth Goodman
Author: Margaret Cezair-Thompson
Author: Keith O'Brien
Author: Sandy Allen
Author: Margaret Mayhew
Author: Toni Morrison
Author: David K. Randall