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Notebooks of a Wandering Monk
by Matthieu RicardThe memoirs of renowned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard and his extraordinary journey toward inner freedom and compassion in action.Matthieu Ricard began his spiritual transformation at the age of twenty-one, in Darjeeling, India, when he met Tibetan teacher Kangyur Rinpoche, who deeply impressed the young man with his extraordinary quality of being. In Notebooks of a Wandering Monk, Ricard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his journey and the remarkable men and women who inspired him along the way, including Kangyur Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and the fourteenth Dalai Lama, as well as great luminaries such as Desmond Tutu, Jane Goodall, and a number of leading scientists.Growing up, Ricard, the son of philosopher Jean-François Revel and artist Yahne Le Toumelin, regularly found himself in the company of intellectuals and artists such as Luis Buñuel, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Igor Stravinsky. Young Ricard loved nature, classical music, and science and dreamed of unlocking the mysteries of molecular biology. But, six years after meeting Kangyur Rinpoche, Ricard gave up a promising career in genetics to pursue a meditative life in the remote Himalayas. While spending half a century in India, Bhutan, and Nepal, he visited Tibet more than twenty times and spent years publishing rare Tibetan texts and photographing his spiritual teachers and the world in which they lived. Elegantly translated by Jesse Browner and accompanied by more than fifty full-color photographs, some of which are Ricard&’s own, Notebooks of a Wandering Monk charts Ricard&’s lifelong path to wisdom and compassion. This candid and reflective memoir will inspire all readers, wherever they may be on their own journey to a meaningful and well-lived life.
Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science
by Richard YeoIn Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, Richard Yeo interprets a relatively unexplored set of primary archival sources: the notes and notebooks of some of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution. Notebooks were important to several key members of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Locke, and others, who drew on Renaissance humanist techniques of excerpting from texts to build storehouses of proverbs, maxims, quotations, and other material in personal notebooks, or commonplace books. Yeo shows that these men appreciated the value of their own notes both as powerful tools for personal recollection, and, following Francis Bacon, as a system of precise record keeping from which they could retrieve large quantities of detailed information for collaboration. The virtuosi of the seventeenth century were also able to reach beyond Bacon and the humanists, drawing inspiration from the ancient Hippocratic medical tradition and its emphasis on the gradual accumulation of information over time. By reflecting on the interaction of memory, notebooks, and other records, Yeo argues, the English virtuosi shaped an ethos of long-term empirical scientific inquiry.
Notebooks: 1936-1947
by Victor SergeAvailable for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works.In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.
Notes & Excerpts on Rice Brothers, Descendants, & Allied Families
by Randall M. RiceWilliam Rice served the equivalent of four tours of duty during the Revolutionary War. First was service in the Culpeper Minute Men Battalion, 1775-1776. The second tour was in the Northern Campaign from Feb. 12, 1776 for two years and he was discharged on February 12, 1778, at Valley Forge. He enlisted a third time for two years and was discharged August 22, 1780, in Richmond, Virginia after serving in the Southern Campaign. And, fourth, he served twice in the Fauquier County Militia for three months or more and was discharged after the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781. This work presents a first time account of approximately 18,000 descendants with over 250,000 related items of data. Many of William's descendants lived in Bedford, Giles, and surrounding counties in Virginia; and Monroe, Summers, Raleigh, and Fayette Counties in West Virginia. This work does not discuss living descendants. The central and dominant quest of this inquiry has always been to find the father of William Rice and Bailey Rice based upon Nathaniel J. Rice's biographical statement that his great-grandfather was killed at Braddock's Defeat on July 9, 1755. During Braddock's Defeat approximately, 456 soldiers and officers of 800, supplemented with new enlistments of the Virginia troops, were massacred, along with 385 wounded, by the French and Indians and left where they fell to this day. As mysterious as it may seem there are no known records, rosters, regimental histories, or muster rolls of the Virginia Regiments or soldiers who participated in Braddock's Defeat, perhaps, to deter the widows from filing claims against a fragile and insolvent government. However, there are known and extant records for the Battle of Great Meadows preceding Braddock's Defeat and other military actions immediately after Braddock's Defeat, but nothing for Braddock's Defeat.
Notes After Midnight: How I Outlasted My Teenagers, One Mistake at a Time
by Carol RichmondWhen thirty-five-year-old Carol Richmond decides to end her seventeen-year marriage, she has no idea what&’s in store. Within the first year of the divorce, her ex-husband abandons his children and ignores the court&’s orders to pay child support, and despite working sixteen hours a day and seven days a week, Richmond cannot make ends meet. She is forced to sell her home and hawk her jewelry in order to keep her family fed and housed, and more often than not she relies on hired women to kiss her children goodnight and dry their tears. In the decade to follow, Carol&’s growing children struggle with individual complexities. One son attempts suicide; another utterly fails academically; and her daughter is sexually abused by a trusted acquaintance. Yet Carol and her children endure—because they must. Haunting yet full of humor and self-effacing wisdom, Notes After Midnight is a story of the invisible binding thread connecting each of us to one another—the thread that helps us find our way along even the most difficult of paths.
Notes From Nethers: Growing Up In A Sixties Commune
by Sandra Lee EugsterA unique and honest account of the author's childhood spent on a commune in rural Virginia. Nethers, as the commune came to be called, was the creation of Eugster's idealistic and headstrong mother, Carla. The narrative accurately depicts communal living in all its complexities. An array of colorful characters drifted into the commune, and Eugster writes sensitively about being a child in the midst of all of this. A fascinating memoir with many moments of warmth and humor. Eugster's narrative is also an important piece of American cultural history, and the history of efforts to create a utopian society, which never seem to turn out exactly as planned.
Notes From the Blockade
by Lydia GinzburgThe 900-day siege of Leningrad (1941-44) was one of the turning points of the Second World War. It slowed down the German advance into Russia and became a national symbol of survival and resistance. An estimated one million civilians died, most of them from cold and starvation. Lydia Ginzburg, a respected literary scholar (who meanwhile wrote prose 'for the desk drawer' through seven decades of Soviet rule), survived. Using her own using notes and sketches she wrote during the siege, along with conversations and impressions collected over the years, she distilled the collective experience of life under siege. Through painful depiction of the harrowing conditions of that period, Ginzburg created a paean to the dignity, vitality and resilience of the human spirit.This original translation by Alan Myers has been revised and annotated by Emily van Buskirk. This edition includes ‘A Story of Pity and Cruelty’, a recently discovered documentary narrative translated into English for the first time by Angela Livingstone.
Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press Ser.)
by Jenn AshworthA genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing.Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood. Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane—or might just allow us to keep on living. In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.
Notes On Nightingale
by Sioban Nelson Anne Marie RaffertyFlorence Nightingale remains an inspiration to nurses around the world for her pioneering work treating wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War; authorship of Notes on Nursing, the foundational text for nursing practice; establishment of the world's first nursing school; and advocacy for the hygienic treatment of patients and sanitary design of hospitals. In Notes on Nightingale, nursing historians and scholars offer their valuable reflections on Nightingale and analysis of her role in the profession a century after her death on 13 August 1910 and 150 years since the Nightingale School of Nursing (now the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King's College, London) opened its doors to probationers at St Thomas' Hospital. There is a great deal of controversy about Nightingale-opinions about her life and work range from blind worship to blanket denunciation. The question of Nightingale and her place in nursing history and in contemporary nursing discourse is a topic of continuing interest for nursing students, teachers, and professional associations. This book offers new scholarship on Nightingale's work in the Crimea and the British colonies and her connection to the emerging science of statistics, as well as valuable reevaluations of her evolving legacy and the surrounding myths, symbolism, and misconceptions.
Notes and Reminiscences of a Staff Officer: Chiefly relating to the Waterloo Campaign and to St Helena matters during the captivity of Napoleon
by Pickle Partners Publishing Lt.-Colonel Basil Jackson Robert Cooper SeatonThis ebook is purpose built and is proof-read and re-type set from the original to provide an outstanding experience of reflowing text for an ebook reader. Although written many years after the events, Lt-Col Jackson's writing makes for much interesting reading. The text falls into three distinct parts; the first, the events of the Waterloo Campaign, the second, Jackson's experiences on St. Helena and his interactions with Napoleon's staff and his meeting of the Great Captain and thirdly his view of the works published or purportedly published about St Helena. The eyewitness account of a young staff officer on the Quartermaster-General's staff at Waterloo, whilst containing some errors perhaps due to memory lapses, makes for excellent reading and is an important memoir of that momentous campaign. His praise of the Duke of Wellington's actions during the battle itself are tempered with some criticism of his handling of the campaign as a whole, particularly his reaction to Napoleon's advance. Although avoiding the Anglocentric view of the critical Prussian intervention at Planchenoit, doesn't hesitate to condemn their pillage and attempts to make off with cannon captured by the Anglo-Dutch army. Following the occupation of Paris, during which he takes part in a number of dangerous incidents with a surly and angry populace, Jackson is ordered to St Helena as a part of the staff organisation. His interactions with Gourgaud, Montholon, Las Cases and Bertrand are of capital interest, and his estimation of Napoleon's character. During his brief interview with the prisoner himself, Napoleon "... alluding to two or three block-houses then in course of erection at the island, asked what Emmett expected to attack them, "est-ce les rais et les souris?" [is it the rays of the sun and the mice?] we were then dismissed." Jackson also defends his former chief, Sir Hudson Lowe against various slanderous attacks for his role as Governor of St Helena, for the majority of Napoleon's imprisonment. An interesting read. Text taken from 1903 edition, full and complete, published by John Murray, London Author - Basil Jackson [1795-1889] Editor - Robert Cooper Seaton [1853-1915] Annotations - Pickle Partners Publishing
Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief
by Kate InglisPart memoir, part handbook for the heartbroken, this powerful, unsparing account of losing a premature baby will speak to all who have been bereaved and are grieving, and offers inspiration on moving forward, gently integrating the loss into life.Inglis’s story is a springboard that can help other bereaved parents—and anyone who has experienced wrenching loss—reflect on emotional survival in the first year; dealing with family, friends, and bystanders post-loss; the unique survivors’ guilt, feelings of failure, and isolation of bereavement; and the fortitude of like-minded community and small kindnesses. Inglis’s unique voice—at once brash, irreverent, and achingly beautiful—creates a nuanced picture of the landscape of grief, encompassing the trauma, the waves of disbelief and emptiness, the moments of unexpected affinity and lightness, and the compassion that grows from our most intense chapters of the human experience.
Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954–1971
by Elias CanettiNotes from Hampstead is a map of the late Nobel laureate's thinking, a triumphant compendium of aphoristic, enigmatic, and expository writings covering a characteristically diverse range of subjects."Canetti is a meticulous writer, and in reading his notes, one can easily see him hovering over a just formed sentence, pencil in hand, wondering whether to cut or to add or to leave well enough alone." - Publishers Weekly
Notes from My Deathbed, and Beyond
by Hilary HunterHilary is the dying patient in the corner of the ward. Her children have been called in to say their goodbyes. Her mission to starve and drink herself to death is about to succeed.But this is her notebook………In this frank and honest set of notes, written in random episodes, Hilary brings her wry sense of humour and sensitivity to her reflections on an unconventional life, and her complicated relationships with those around her. The book explores her 1960s' middle-class childhood, her teenage years in the 1970s, and her adult life spent largely in South West France. It also analyses the disintegration of a marriage.Hilary's writing strikes a wonderful balance between Nick Hornby - with his many references to popular culture - and Virginia Woolf, with her "stream of consciousness" approach. This book is, above all, a study of womanhood and sexuality, disappointment and alcoholism. The reader is swept along on a torrent of events and recollections, until they finally discover how Hilary's life was saved. An unmissable read.
Notes from My Travels
by Angelina JolieThree years ago, award-winning actress Angelina Jolie took on a radically different role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Here are her memoirs from her journeys to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Ecuador, where she lived and worked and gave her heart to those who suffer the world's most shattering violence and victimization. Here are her revelations of joy and warmth amid utter destitution...compelling snapshots of courageous and inspiring people for whom survival is their daily workŠand candid notes from a unique pilgrimage that completely changed the actress's worldview -- and the world within herself.
Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)
by Karsonya Wise WhiteheadThis historical biography provides a scholarly analysis of the personal diaries of a young, freeborn mulatto woman during the Civil War years.In Notes from a Colored Girl, Karsonya Wise Whitehead examines the life and experiences of Emilie Frances Davis through a close reading of three pocket diaries she kept from 1863 to 1865. Whitehead explores Davis’s worldviews and politics, her perceptions of both public and private events, her personal relationships, and her place in Philadelphia’s free black community in the nineteenth century. The book also includes a six-chapter historical reconstruction of Davis’s life.While Davis’s entries provide brief, daily snapshots of her life, Whitehead interprets them in ways that illuminate nineteenth-century black American women’s experiences. Whitehead’s contribution of edited text and original narrative fills a void in scholarly documentation of women who dwelled in spaces between white elites, black entrepreneurs, and urban dwellers of every race and class.Drawing on scholarly traditions from history, literature, feminist studies, and sociolinguistics, Whitehead investigates Davis’s diary both as a complete literary artifact and in terms of her specific daily entries. With few primary sources written by black women during this time in history, Davis’s diary is a rare and extraordinarily valuable historical artifact.
Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life
by Erin WunkerErin Wunker is a feminist killjoy, and she thinks you should be one, too. Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept of the "feminist killjoy"), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed's project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view. Neither totemic nor complete, the non-fiction essays that make up Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life attempt to think publicly about why we need feminism, and especially why we need the figure of the feminist killjoy, now. From the complicated practices of being a mother and a feminist, to building friendship amongst women as a community-building and -sustaining project, to writing that addresses rape culture from the Canadian context and beyond, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life invites the reader into a conversation about gender, feminism, and living in our inequitable world.
Notes from a Public Typewriter
by Michael Gustafson Oliver UbertiA collection of confessional, hilarious, heartbreaking notes written anonymously on a public typewriter for fans of PostSecret and Other People's Love Letters.When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page? Yes, no, and did they ever.Every day, people of all ages sit down at the public typewriter. Children perch atop grandparents' knees, both sets of hands hovering above the metal keys: I LOVE YOU. Others walk in alone on Friday nights and confess their hopes: I will find someone someday. And some leave funny asides for the next person who sits down: I dislike people, misanthropes, irony, and ellipses ... and lists too. In NOTES FROM A PUBLIC TYPEWRITER Michael and designer Oliver Uberti have combined their favorite notes with essays and photos to create an ode to community and the written word that will surprise, delight, and inspire.
Notes from a Young Black Chef (Adapted for Young Adults)
by Joshua David Stein Kwame OnwuachiThis inspiring memoir, now adapted for young adults, chronicles Top Chef star and Forbes and Zagat 30 Under 30 phenom Kwame Onwuachi's incredible and odds-defying fame in the food world after a tough childhood in the Bronx and Nigeria.Food was Kwame Onwuachi's first great love. He connected to cooking via his mother, in the family's modest Bronx apartment. From that spark, he launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars he made selling candy on the subway and trained in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country. He faced many challenges on the road to success, including breaking free of a dangerous downward spiral due to temptation and easy money, and grappling with just how unwelcoming the world of fine dining can be for people of color.Born on Long Island and raised in New York City, Nigeria, and Louisiana, Kwame Onwuachi's incredible story is one of survival and ingenuity in the face of adversity.Praise for the adult edition of NOTES FROM A YOUNG BLACK CHEF"Kwame Onwuachi's story shines a light on food and culture not just in American restaurants or African American communities but around the world." --Questlove"Fierce and inspiring. . . . This rip-roaring tale of ambition is also a sobering account of racism in and out of the food industry." --New York Tiimes Book Review
Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir
by Joshua David Stein Kwame Onwuachi“Kwame Onwuachi’s story shines a light on food and culture not just in American restaurants or African American communities but around the world.” —Questlove By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Kwame Onwuachi had opened—and closed—one of the most talked about restaurants in America. He had launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars that he made from selling candy on the subway, yet he’d been told he would never make it on television because his cooking wasn’t “Southern” enough. In this inspiring memoir about the intersection of race, fame, and food, he shares the remarkable story of his culinary coming-of-age. Growing up in the Bronx, as a boy Onwuachi was sent to rural Nigeria by his mother to “learn respect.” However, the hard-won knowledge gained in Africa was not enough to keep him from the temptation and easy money of the streets when he returned home. But through food, he broke out of a dangerous downward spiral, embarking on a new beginning at the bottom of the culinary food chain as a chef on board a Deepwater Horizon cleanup ship, before going on to train in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country and appearing as a contestant on Top Chef. Onwuachi’s love of food and cooking remained a constant throughout, even when he found the road to success riddled with potholes. As a young chef, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of fine dining can be for people of color, and his first restaurant, the culmination of years of planning, shuttered just months after opening. A powerful, heartfelt, and shockingly honest story of chasing your dreams—even when they don’t turn out as you expected—Notes from a Young Black Chef is one man’s pursuit of his passions, despite the odds.“This is an astonishing and open-hearted story from one of the next generation’s stars of the culinary world. I am so excited to see what the future holds for Chef Kwame—he is a phoenix, rising into better and better things and showing us all what it means to be humble, hungry, and daring.” —José Andrés
Notes from an Island
by Tove JanssonFrom a renowned artist and writer, a deeply personal nature journal about the island that informed her many works, with paintings from her longtime partner, artist Tuulikki &“Tooti&” Pietilä. In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki &“Tooti&” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin. Tove's signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti's subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island&’s ecology and character. Notes from an Island is both a work of artistic collaboration and an homage to the deep love the two women shared. One feels as if Jansson&’s journal, with Tooti&’s sketches tucked inside, has been unearthed like a treasure from under a pile of old quilts in the back of their rustic cabin. Praise for the essay, &“The Island&” &“At once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem, &‘The Island&’ reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book and a vignette of Klovharun ... the text seems to change following mysterious tides from a timeless present to an urgent past.&” —Hernan Diaz, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Praise for Tove Jansson "It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature."—The Guardian "Her style is not at all 'poetic'—quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures."—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Guardian &“Tove Jansson was a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.&”—Philip Pullman &“It&’s hard to describe the astonishing achievement of Jansson&’s artistry.&”—Ali Smith
Notes from the Bottom of the World: A Life in Chile
by Suzanne AdamChile—named the Lonely Planet 2017 destination of the year—has been Suzanne Adam’s home for over four decades. She knows the territory—its culture, its idiosyncrasies, and its exotic landscapes, from Patagonian glaciers to the northern Atacama Desert. In this heartfelt collection of sixty-three personal essays, she searches for universal truths and sparks of beauty revealed in small, daily moments both in her native land—the United States—and in Chile. She considers how her American past and move to Chile have shaped her life and enriched her worldview, and she explores with insight questions on aging, women’s roles, spiritual life, friendship, love, and writers who inspire.In a return trip to Colombia fifty years after her two-year stay there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Adam reflects on the mark left on her by that experience. Finally, she crosses America from east to west, immersing herself in regional cultures and discovering a common thread of reciprocity throughout.
Notes from the Hard Shoulder
by James MayTop Gear presenter and columnist for the Daily Telegraph James May brings together another brilliant collection of his most controversial and humorous writing. From tales of motoring adventures through India, Russia and Iceland, to classic articles on essential subjects such as driving songs and haunted car parks, these gems from the number one car connoisseur will take readers on a motoring journey that will amuse and entertain in equal measure.
Notes from the Henhouse: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing
by Elspeth BarkerA sharp and witty collection of autobiographical essays by the late Elspeth Barker—acclaimed journalist and author of the beloved modern classic O Caledonia.Following the publication of her acclaimed, darkly funny novel O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker&’s sharp and witty essays appeared regularly in the national press. Notes from the Henhouse, a selection of the most personal of these pieces, welcomes readers into the celebrated writer&’s life. Tracing Barker&’s upbringing from her Scottish roots, these essays beautifully capture her time with the poet George Barker and her profound sense of loss following his death. She writes about George&’s former lover Elizabeth Smart and other figures from 1950s bohemia and 1960s counterculture. Pieces like &“Thoughts in a Garden,&” equal parts hilarious and moving, read like dispatches from the front lines of country living, depicting the vagaries of raising a large family and assorted pets in a damp and drafty farmhouse. Vivid, charming, and wholly original, Notes from the Henhouse is a wonderful glimpse into the life of an extraordinary writer.
Notes from the Hyena's Belly
by Nega MezlekiaIn this acclaimed memoir, Mezlekia recalls his boyhood in the arid city of Jijiga, Ethiopia, and his journey to manhood during the 1970s and 1980s. He traces his personal evolution from child to soldier--forced at the age of eighteen to join a guerrilla army. And he describes the hardships that consumed Ethiopia after the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise to power of the communist junta, in whose terror thousands of Ethiopians died. Part autobiography and part social history, Notes from the Hyena's Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, during the defining and turbulent years of the last century.
Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark
by Taylor PlimptonHere in New York, a good night never ends. We will not let it. Though the hour is late, we are more awake than we have ever been in our lives, we are wild-eyed and grinning and dancing around like fools, and the music is thumping and the lights are flashing and the whole place is pulsating like a massive beating heart, and we do not want to go home, we do not want to go to sleep. Above all, we do not want to miss anything. So begins Notes from the Night, Taylor Plimpton's account of a night out in New York City. Passionately engaged and endlessly curious, Plimpton is part participant, part observer, a student and uniquely apt chronicler of human behavior--particularly at its most absurd. Accompanied by his best friend Zoo and a tight-knit band of other mischief-makers, and fueled by drinks, drugs and big dreams, Plimpton journeys from one Manhattan hotspot to the next with boundless energy and an eye for the dark, often comic realities of club culture. Exploring the myriad pleasures, mysteries and pitfalls of that elusive world, Notes from the Night is guide to a place - and a state of mind - that has never been mapped.