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Etched in Sand
Etched in Sand
Calcaterra, Regina
¥88.56
In this story of perseverance in the face of adversity, Regina Calcaterra recounts her childhood in foster care and on the streets and how she and her savvy crew of homeless siblings managed to survive years of homelessness, abandonment, and abuseRegina Calcaterra's emotionally powerful memoir reveals how she endured a series of foster homes and intermittent homelessness in the shadow of the Hamptons, and how she rose above her past while fighting to keep her brother and three sisters together.Beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest, Etched in Sand is an unforgettable reminder that regardless of social status, the American dream is still within reach for those who have the desire and the determination to succeed.
A Curious Invitation
A Curious Invitation
Field, Suzette
¥88.56
Forty of the greatest fictional festivities as seen through the eyes of the world's greatest writers.People love to party. And writers love to attend and document these occasions. The party is a useful literary device, not only for social commentary and satire but also as an occasion where characters can meet, fall in and out of love, or even get murdered.A Curious Invitation is a humorous and informative guide to literature's most memorable parties. Some of these parties are depictions of real events, like the Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of battle with Napoleon in Thackeray's Vanity Fair; others draw on the authors' experience of the society they lived in, such as Lady Metroland's party in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies; while others come straight from the writer's bizarre imagination, like Douglas Adams' flying party above an unknown planet from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.Witty, entertaining, and full of fabulous detail, A Curious Invitation offers readers the chance to crash some of the great parties in literary history.
Tribal
Tribal
Roberts, Diane
¥88.56
One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football. Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault. In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.
I Had a Hammer
I Had a Hammer
Aaron, Hank
¥88.56
The man who shattered Babe Ruth's lifetime home run record, Henry "Hammering Hank" Aaron left his indelible mark on professional baseball and the world. But the world also left its mark on him.I Had a Hammer is much more than the intimate autobiography of one of the greatest names in pro sports it is a fascinating social history of twentieth-century America. With courage and candor, Aaron recalls his struggles and triumphs in an atmosphere of virulent racism. He relives the breathtaking moment when, in the heat of hatred and controversy, he hit his 715th home run to break Ruth's cherished record an accomplishment for which Aaron received more than 900,000 letters, many of them vicious and racially charged. And his story continues through the remainder of his milestone-setting, barrier-smashing career as a player and, later, Atlanta Braves executive offering an eye-opening and unforgettable portrait of an incomparable athlete, his sport, his epoch, and his world.
Auguries of Innocence
Auguries of Innocence
Smith, Patti
¥88.56
Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.
Not Young, Still Restless
Not Young, Still Restless
Cooper, Jeanne
¥88.56
The long-awaited memoir from one of daytime television's most celebrated and beloved actresses.Three or four days a week, Jeanne Cooper drives from her Hollywood Hills home to the job she's held for more than three decades: bringing life to the character of Katherine Chancellor, the outspoken, powerful, and insanely wealthy force of nature who, along with Jeanne herself, has become a legend in the world of daytime television and its number-one show, The Young and the Restless.Now, for the first time, her fans will get to know the woman behind the iconic character. With her signature fearlessness, honesty, and humor, Jeanne chronicles her long tenure in Hollywood and describes her life before, during, and away from the CBS soundstage.Not Young, Still Restless follows Jeanne as she makes her way from small-town Taft, California, to the heart of the Los Angeles movie industry, where the list of her feature-film costars reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood's Golden Age Maureen O'Hara, Raymond Burr, David Janssen, Robert Taylor, Tony Curtis, Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford, and Lee J. Cobb, to name just a few. Jeanne writes vividly of her first foray into the new phenomenon of television and how she found her home at The Young and the Restless.Jeanne's story charts the ups and downs of a long and rich life, including the breakup of a marriage that produced the three great loves of her life her daughter, Caren, and her sons Collin and the actor Corbin Bernsen before it ended, leaving her a single working mother. She also speaks honestly and openly about her battles to overcome alcoholism, defeat breast cancer, and age gracefully in Hollywood, a process that made her the first reality-television star when her character's (and her own) face-lift was filmed live on The Young and the Restless.In Not Young, Still Restless, the Emmy Award–winning actress inspires readers with her ability not only to survive but thrive as an octogenarian in today's Hollywood.
This Life Is in Your Hands
This Life Is in Your Hands
Coleman, Melissa
¥88.56
Set on a rugged coastal homestead during the 1970s, This Life Is in Your Hands introduces a superb young writer driven by the need to uncover the truth of a childhood tragedy and connect anew with the beauty and vitality of the back-to-the-land ideal that shaped her early years.In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue a handsome, idealistic young couple from well-to-do families pack a few essentials into their VW truck and abandon the complications of modern reality to carve a farm from the woods. They move to a remote peninsula on the coast of Maine and become disciples of Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life. On sixty acres of sandy, intractable land, Eliot and Sue begin to forge a new existence, subsisting on the crops they grow and building a home with their own hands.While they establish a happy family and achieve their visionary goals, the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. Winters are long and lean, summers frenetic with the work of the harvest, and the distraction of the many young farm apprentices threatens the Colemans' marriage. Then, one summer day when Melissa is seven, her three-year-old sister, Heidi, wanders off and drowns in the pond where she liked to play. In the wake of the accident, ideals give way to human frailty, divorce, and a mother's breakdown and ultimately young Melissa is abandoned to the care of neighbors. What really happened, and who, if anyone, is to blame?This Life Is in Your Hands is the search to understand a complicated past; a true story, both tragic and redemptive, it tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate, and the power of forgiveness.
The Rules of Gentility
The Rules of Gentility
Mullany, Janet
¥88.56
Regency heiress Philomena Wellesley-Clegg has rather strong opinions about men and clothing. As to the former, so far two lords, a viscount, and a mad poet have fallen far short of her expectations. But she is about to meet Inigo Linsley, an unshaven, wickedly handsome man with a scandalous secret. He's nothing she ever dreamed she'd want why then can she not stop thinking about how he looks in his breeches?A delightful marriage of Pride and Prejudice with Bridget Jones's Diary, Janet Mullany's The Rules of Gentility transports us to the days before designer shoes, apple martinis, and speed dating when great bonnets, punch at Almack's, and the marriage mart were in fashion and captivates us with a winsome heroine who learns that some rules in society are made to be broken.
First Mothers
First Mothers
Angelo, Bonnie
¥88.56
Bonnie Angelo, a veteran reporter and writer for Time, has captured the daily lives, thoughts, and feelings of the remarkable women who played such a large role in developing the characters of the modern American presidents. From formidably aristocratic Sara Delano Roosevelt to diehard Democrat Martha Truman, champion athlete Dorothy Bush, and hard-living Virginia Clinton Kelley, Angelo blends these women's stories with the texture of their lives and with colorful details of their times. First Mothers is an in-depth look at the special mother-son relationships that nurtured and helped propel the last twelve American presidents to the pinnacle of power.
Seasons on Harris
Seasons on Harris
Yeadon, David
¥88.56
The Outer Hebrides of Scotland epitomize the evocative beauty and remoteness of island life. The most dramatic of all the Hebrides is Harris, a tiny island formed from the oldest rocks on earth, a breathtaking landscape of soaring mountains, wild lunarlike moors, and vast Caribbean-hued beaches. This is where local crofters weave the legendary Harris Tweed a hardy cloth reflecting the strength, durability, and integrity of the life there.In Seasons on Harris, David Yeadon, "one of our best travel writers" (The Bloomsbury Review), captures, through elegant words and line drawings, life on Harris the people, their folkways and humor, and their centuries-old Norse and Celtic traditions of crofting and fishing. Here Gaelic is still spoken in its purest form, music and poetry ceilidh evenings flourish in the local pubs, and Sabbath Sundays are observed with Calvinistic strictness. Yeadon's book makes us care deeply about these proud islanders, their folklore, their history, their challenges, and the imperiled future of their traditional island life and beloved tweed.
Call Me Debbie
Call Me Debbie
Voigt, Deborah
¥88.56
In Call Me Debbie, internationally renowned opera singer Deborah Voigt describes her journey to become one of the world's most celebrated artists. In a strikingly unguarded and revelatory memoir, Voigt writes not just about the excitement and glamor of her musical career, but describes in often harrowing detail her private battles with addictions to food and alcohol, and a myriad of other self-destructive tendencies that nearly destroyed her, threatening to ruin her professional reputation and personal well-being.Voigt reveals here, for the first time, the troubling sequence of addictive behavior that led to her being fired from a London opera production for being too large to fit into the little black dress demanded by the role, and her subsequent gastric bypass surgery and its dramatic aftermath. She speaks openly of the cross-addiction that led to severe alcoholism, frightening all-night blackouts, and suicide attempts. Here, too, is the story of how she achieved complete sobriety, thanks to a twelve-step program and a recommitment to her Christian faith.Highlighting hilarious anecdotes and juicy gossip that illuminate what really goes on backstage, Voigt talks candidly about the impresarios, singers, and conductors with whom she's worked. She offers fascinating insight into the roles she has played and the characters she loves, including Strauss's Ariadne and Salome, Puccini's Minnie, and Wagner's Sieglinde, Isolde, and Brnnhilde, sharing her inspiration and her preparation for playing them. Complete with eight pages of color photographs, Call Me Debbie is a heartfelt, inspirational story that offers a unique look into the life of an incredible artist and a remarkable woman, one who overcame terrible demons before she could regain her self-respect and achieve peace. Powerfully honest and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable memoir.
In Search of Sisterhood
In Search of Sisterhood
Giddings, Paula J.
¥88.56
This history of the largest block women's organization in the United States is not only the story of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (DST), but also tells of the increasing involvement of black women in the political, social, and economic affairs of America. Founded at a time when liberal arts education was widely seen as either futile, dangerous, or impractical for blacks, especially women, DST is, in Giddings's words, a "compelling reflection of block women's aspirations for themselves and for society." Giddings notes that unlike other organizations with racial goals, Delta Sigma Theta was created to change and benefit individuals rather than society. As a sorority, it was formed to bring women together as sisters, but at the some time to address the divisive, often class-related issues confronting black women in our society. There is, in Giddings's eyes, a tension between these goals that makes Delta Sigma Theta a fascinating microcosm of the struggles of black women and their organizations. DST members have included Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Margaret Murray Washington, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, and, on the cultural side, Leontyne Price, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Judith Jamison, and Roberta Flack. In Search of Sisterhood is full of compelling, fascinating anecdotes told by the Deltas themselves, and illustrated with rare early photographs of the Delta women.
The Wilderness of Ruin
The Wilderness of Ruin
Montillo, Roseanne
¥88.56
“Supremely creepy. . . . As thrilling as it is disturbing.” —Boston Globe In 1871, young children were disappearing from Boston’s working-class neighborhoods. The few who returned told desperate tales of being taken to the woods and tortured by a boy not much older than themselves. The police were skeptical—these children were from poor families, so their testimony was easily discounted. And after the Great Boston Fire of 1872 reduced much of downtown to rubble, the city had more pressing concerns. Finally, when the police apprehended Jesse Pomeroy for the crimes, he, like any twelve-year-old, was sent off to reform school. Little thought was given to the danger he might pose to society, despite victims’ chilling reports of this affectless Boy Torturer. Sixteen months later, Jesse was released in the care of his mother, and within months a ten-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy went missing, their mutilated bodies later discovered by police. This set off a frantic hunt for Pomeroy, who was now proclaimed America’s youngest serial killer. When he was captured and brought to trial, his case transfixed the nation, and two public figures—Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes—each probed the depths of Pomeroy’s character in a search for the meaning behind his madness. Roseanne Montillo takes us inside those harrowing years, as a city reeling from great disaster reckoned with the moral quandaries posed by Pomeroy’s spree.
Her Brilliant Career
Her Brilliant Career
Cooke, Rachel
¥88.56
In Her Brilliant Career, acclaimed journalist Rachel Cooke goes back in time to offer an entertaining and iconoclastic look at ten women in the 1950s pioneers whose professional careers and complicated private lives helped to create the opportunities available to today's women. These intrepid and ambitious individuals among them a film director, a cook, an architect, an editor, an archaeologist, and a race car driver left the house, discovered the bliss of work, and ushered in the era of the working woman.Daring and independent, these remarkable, unsung heroines whose obscurity makes their accomplishments all the more astonishing and relevant loved passionately, challenged men's control, made their own mistakes, and took life on their own terms, breaking new ground and offering inspiration. Their individual portraits gradually form a landscape of 1950s culture, and of women's unique and rapidly evolving role.Before there could be a Danica Patrick, there had to be a Sheila van Damm; before there was Barbara Walters, there was Nancy Spain; before Kathryn Bigelow came Muriel Box. The pioneers of Her Brilliant Career forever changed the fabric of culture, society, and the workforce. This is the Fifties retold: vivid, surprising, and, most of all, modern.
Rumi: The Book of Love
Rumi: The Book of Love
Barks, Coleman
¥88.56
The Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi is most beloved for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love in all its forms erotic, platonic, divine and Coleman Barks presents the best of them in this delightful and inspiring collection. Rendered with freshness, intensity, and beauty as Barks alone can do, these startling and rich poems range from the "wholeness" one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover's loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship to the immersion in divine love. Rumi, the ultimate poet of love, explores all "the magnificent regions of the heart," and he opens you to the lover within. Coleman Barks has made this medieval, Persian-born (present-day Afghanistan) poetic and spiritual genius the most popular poet in America today. This seductive volume reveals Rumi's charms and depths more than any other.
Deconstructing Sammy
Deconstructing Sammy
Birkbeck, Matt
¥88.56
Sammy Davis Jr. lived a storied life. Adored by millions over a six-decade-long career, he was considered an entertainment icon and a national treasure. But despite lifetime earnings that topped $50 million, Sammy died in 1990 near bankruptcy. His estate was declared insolvent, and there was no possibility of itever using Sammy's name or likeness again. It was as if Sammy had never existed. Years later his wife, Altovise, a once-vivacious woman and heir to one of the greatest entertainment legacies of the twentieth century, was living in poverty, and with nowhere else to go, she turned to a former federal prosecutor, Albert "Sonny" Murray, to make one last attempt to resolve Sammy's debts, restore his estate, and revive his legacy. For seven years Sonny probed Sammy's life to understand how someone of great notoriety and wealth could have lost everything, and in the process he came to understand Sammy as a man whose complexity makes for a riveting work of celebrity biography as cultural history.Matt Birkbeck's serious work of investigative journalism unveils the extraordinary story of an international celebrity at the center of a confluence of entertainment, politics, and organized crime, and shows how even Sammy's outsized talent couldn't save him from himself.
Bread, Wine, Chocolate
Bread, Wine, Chocolate
Sethi, Simran
¥88.56
Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi explores the history and cultural importance of our most beloved tastes, paying homage to the ingredients that give us daily pleasure, while providing a thoughtful wake-up call to the homogenization that is threatening the diversity of our food supply.Food is one of the greatest pleasures of human life. Our response to sweet, salty, bitter, or sour is deeply personal, combining our individual biological characteristics, personal preferences, and emotional connections. Bread, Wine, Chocolate illuminates not only what it means to recognize the importance of the foods we love, but also what it means to lose them. Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi reveals how the foods we enjoy are endangered by genetic erosion a slow and steady loss of diversity in what we grow and eat. In America today, food often looks and tastes the same, whether at a San Francisco farmers market or at a Midwestern potluck. Shockingly, 95% of the world's calories now come from only thirty species. Though supermarkets seem to be stocked with endless options, the differences between products are superficial, primarily in flavor and brand.Sethi draws on interviews with scientists, farmers, chefs, vintners, beer brewers, coffee roasters and others with firsthand knowledge of our food to reveal the multiple and interconnected reasons for this loss, and its consequences for our health, traditions, and culture. She travels to Ethiopian coffee forests, British yeast culture labs, and Ecuadoran cocoa plantations collecting fascinating stories that will inspire readers to eat more consciously and purposefully, better understand familiar and new foods, and learn what it takes to save the tastes that connect us with the world around us.
Dresden
Dresden
Taylor, Frederick
¥88.56
For decades it has been assumed that the Allied bombing of Dresden -- a cultured city famous for its china, chocolate, and fine watches -- was militarily unjustifiable, an act of retribution for Germany's ceaseless bombing of London and other parts of England.Now, Frederick Taylor's groundbreaking research offers a completely new examination of the facts and reveals that Dresden was a highly militarized city actively involved in the production of military armaments and communications. Incorporating first-hand accounts, contemporaneous press material and memoirs, and never-before-seen government records, Taylor proves unequivocally the very real military threat Dresden posed -- and how a legacy of propaganda shrouded the truth for sixty years.
The Long Snapper
The Long Snapper
Marx, Jeffrey
¥88.56
Brian Kinchen was a thirty-eight-year-old husband, father of four, and seventh-grade Bible teacher whose professional football career had been over for three years when the New England Patriots called on December 15, 2003. With the Patriots riding a ten-game winning streak and the playoffs only a few weeks away, they needed a fill-in for the obscure but vital job of snapping the ball for their punter and kicker a long snapper. Brian had received similar invitations to tryouts that yielded only disappointment the teams always went with a younger guy. But could he really turn away from the chance of a lifetime?The Long Snapper chronicles Brian's remarkable journey as he and the Patriots seek the ultimate trophy. Unfortunately, the dream come true turns into a personal nightmare as Brian struggles both on and off the field, and the pressure to perform on the biggest stage in professional sports nearly causes him to walk away. Seven weeks after leaving the classroom, however, Brian overcomes his greatest fear and snaps the ball on the historic game-winning field goal with only seconds left in the Super Bowl. As told by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeffrey Marx, The Long Snapper is the story of a man who finally achieves the success he has always wanted. Brian Kinchen's championship ring is a powerful status symbol for all to see. But his journey forces him to reexamine what really matters, and he realizes the true measure of a man has nothing to do with status: life is not about prestige; it is about passion and purpose. It is about impacting the lives of others.
Auto Biography
Auto Biography
Swift, Earl
¥88.56
An unforgettable ode to American car culture, award-winning author Earl Swift's wise, funny, and captivating narrative follows an outlaw-genius motorhead as he attempts to restore an iconic 1957 Chevy from rusted-out wreck to gleaming, chromed work of American art before the FBI closes inA classic '57 Chevy, in wretched shape: Its surviving paint is sun-bleached, salt-pocked, and cracked like a dry lakebed. Its engine hasn't turned over in years. Slumped among hundreds of other rusting hulks on a windswept patch of eastern North Carolina, the Chevy evokes none of the Jet Age optimism that made it the most beloved and instantly recognizable car to ever roll off an assembly line. But for its unlikely rescuer a felon arrested seventy-odd times, and a man who's been written off as a ruin himself the Chevy isn't junk, it's a fossil of the twentieth-century American experience, of a people devoted to and forever changed by the automobile. For Tommy Arney, it's a piece of history, especially so because its decrepit skin conceals a rare asset: a complete provenance, stretching back more than fifty years through twelve previous owners. So, hassled by banks and the FBI, the Chevy's thirteenth owner embarks on a mission to save the car and preserve the long record of human experience it carries with it before his own volatile demons doom him and the car.Earl Swift's masterful narrative charts the shifting dreams and fortunes of the people who've gripped this endangered icon's steering wheel, and in the process captures America's strange and abiding relationship with the automobile as no book has before.
Carnivore
Carnivore
Johnson, Dillard
¥88.56
Amid ferocious fighting that many times nearly took his life, Sergeant Dillard "C. J." Johnson and his crew are recognized by Pentagon reports to have accounted for astonishing enemy KIA totals while battling inside and out of the "Carnivore," the Bradley Fighting Vehicle Johnson commanded during Operation Iraqi Freedom. After miraculously beating stage-three cancer (caused by radiation exposure from firing armor-piercing depleted-uranium rounds during combat), he returned to his platoon in Baghdad for a second tour, often serving as a sniper protecting his fellow troops. Today, Johnson and his men's story is the stuff of legend—earning them a cover story in Soldier of Fortune and a display in the Fort Stewart Museum. But only now is Johnson telling his full story: reviewed and approved for publication by the Department of Defense, Carnivore is the gripping and unflinchingly honest autobiography of a remarkable American warrior. "The estimated enemy KIAs for Staff Sergeant Johnson’s BIFV [Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle] during this fight [22 March, 2003] was 488. The informal estimate from the troop was that Johnson and his crew killed at least 1,000 Iraqis on 23 March. Later in the move north, Johnson engaged and destroyed 20 trucks and tallied 314 KIAs in the vicinity of An Najaf. At Objective FLOYD, Johnson’s platoon fought yet another bitter fight against what they claim was a thousand paramilitary troops. … Events were corroborated by separate interviews with the remainder of C/3-7 CAV, to include the troop commander." —On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the official study of the 2003 invasion commissioned by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff