Author: James Bryant Conant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description

Author: Rosamond Bernier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 142999505X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Rosamond Bernier has lived an unusually full life—remarkable for its vividness and diversity of experience—and she has known many (one is tempted to say all) of the greatest artists and composers of the twentieth century. In Some of My Lives, Bernier has made a kind of literary scrapbook from an extraordinary array of writings, ranging from diary entries to her many contributions to the art journal L'OEIL, which she cofounded in 1955. The result is a multifaceted self-portrait of a life informed and surrounded by the arts. Through the stories of her encounters with some of the twentieth century's great artists and composers—including Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein, Max Ernst, Aaron Copeland, Malcolm Lowry, and Karl Lagerfeld—we come to understand the sheer richness of Bernier's experiences, interactions, and memories. The result is pithy, hilarious, and wise—a richly rewarding chronicle of many lives fully lived.

Author: Julian Dibbell
Publisher: Julian Dibbell
ISBN: 9780805036268
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This novelistic rendering of a true account tells of a celebrated rape case which took place in an electronic "salon", where Internet junkies have created their own interactive fantasy realm.

Author: Sigrid Kendall
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1982245476
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Sigrid Kendall, née Baroness Rüdt von Collenberg, was born in 1930 into the rarefied world of Central European aristocracy with all that title and wealth afforded—castles, estates, and hunting lodges throughout Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, idyllic playgrounds of nature, horseback riding, carriage rides, and nights at the opera. Her childhood, however, coincided with the rise of Hitler, and by the time she was nine years old, her country was on the march toward Russia; one of her earlier family’s houses had been destroyed in the first Allied air raid; and her beloved father, an officer with the German cavalry, had been killed. Yet through a child’s eyes, Germany was home and Hitler, with his mesmerizing radio voice, promising “a thousand years of peace,” seemed like the rightful leader. Post-war Germany brought to her teenage self a different story, a different life—one of shame for the atrocities her country committed, and one in which the complete devastation of her country was the great equalizer among the people. The impact that those post-war years had on Kendall would have a lasting effect on her worldview: to question authority; to earn what you get; and to look out not only for others, but also for yourself. She carried this philosophy with her into a new life in America—immigrating at age twenty-three, newly wedded—and it kept her grounded, even as she fell in love for a second time and assumed the unlikely role of “corporate wife” upon marrying one of the most powerful corporate leaders in the United States. Her life suddenly became one filled with entertaining heads of state and traveling the world over. But for Kendall, her children would always come first and Germany would keep hold of her heart. Narrated with candor and grace, My Many Lives is a deeply moving account of a remarkable life, fractured into so many lives with its unexpected turns, and the true importance of love, loyalty, and resilience.

Author: Aleksandar Hemon
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708886
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then, his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war breaks out in Sarajevo and the city comes under siege, no way to return home; his parents and sister fleeing Sarajevo with the family dog, leaving behind all else they had ever known; and Hemon himself starting a new life, his own family, in this new city. And yet this is not really a memoir. The Book of My Lives, Hemon's first book of nonfiction, defies convention and expectation. It is a love song to two different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean to the bonds of family; it is a stirring exhortation to go out and play soccer—and not for the exercise. It is a book driven by passions but built on fierce intelligence, devastating experience, and sharp insight. And like the best narratives, it is a book that will leave you a different reader—a different person, with a new way of looking at the world—when you've finished. For fans of Hemon's fiction, The Book of My Lives is simply indispensable; for the uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the great writers of our time.A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Author: Susan Lucci
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062061852
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
When Susan Lucci and All My Children were introduced to the world in 1970, American television changed forever. Susan’s character, the beautiful, spirited, and mercurial Erica Kane, was an original—the first vixen viewers loved to hate. But while millions have enjoyed getting to know Erica’s many sides, the woman who played her has remained a mystery. In her long-awaited memoir, this very private actress, wife, mother, daughter, grandmother, sister, friend, and entrepreneur pulls back the curtain to reveal her story. As charming, down-to-earth, and compelling as the woman whose story it tells, All My Life shines a spotlight on one of our most popular stars and reminds us of the power of dreams and how we can find the courage and tenacity to make them come true. This edition contains a new chapter about the landmark final season of All My Children.

Author: Emmanuel Carrère
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 9781429973281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From the acclaimed Emmanuel Carrère, an act of generous imagination that unflinchingly records devastating loss and, equally vividly, the wealth of human solace that follows in its wake In Sri Lanka, a tsunami sweeps a child out to sea, her grand-father helpless against the onrushing water. In France, a young woman succumbs to illness, leaving her husband and small children bereft. Present at both events, Emmanuel Carrère sets out to tell the story of two families—shattered and ultimately restored. What he accomplishes is nothing short of a literary miracle: a heartrending narrative of endless love, a meditation on courage and decency in the face of adversity, an intimate and reverent look at the extraordinary beauty and nobility of ordinary lives. Precise, sober, and suspenseful, as full of twists and turns as any novel, Lives Other Than My Own confronts terrifying catastrophes to illuminate the astonishing richness of human connection: a grandfather who thought he had found paradise—too soon—and now devotes himself to helping his neighbors rebuild their village; a husband so in love with his ailing wife that he carries her in his arms like a knight does his princess; and finally, Carrère himself, longtime chronicler of the tormented self, who unexpectedly finds consolation and even joy as he immerses himself in the lives of others.

Author: Gerda Weissmann Klein
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466812427
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead. Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

Author: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619028808
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
For her first novel in more than nine years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments. My Nine Lives is "Chapters of a Possible Past," as the subtitle declares. It is, as the author has commented, a book filled with "invented memories." Nine vignettes are linked to portray a rich life filled with searching, from London to Delhi, from Hollywood to New York. Each chapter gathers a different cast of characters, some new and some vaguely familiar, and the linked assembly is as exciting and illuminating as an artist's first show at a Soho gallery or a new play at the Studio Theater. After seventeen books, now in her 77th year, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes on as her subject herself, the life she may have or may have wished to live.

Author: Rebecca Mead
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307984788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.