- Table View
- List View
The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway
by Mark KurlanskyThe New York Times–bestselling author of Salt examines the intersections between his life and Ernest Hemingway’s in this mix of travel memoir and history.By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky’s life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway’s legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway’s death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway’s and Kurlansky’s lives, resulting in creative accounts of two inspiring writing careers. Travel the world with Mark Kurlansky and Ernest Hemingway in this personal memoir, where Kurlansky details his ten years in Paris and his time as a journalist in Spain—both cities important to Hemingway’s adventurous life and prolific writing.Paris, Basque Country, Havana and Idaho.Get to know the extraordinary people he met there—those who had also fallen under the Hemingway spell, including a Vietnam veteran suffering from the same syndrome the author did, two winners of the Key West Hemingway look-alike contest, and the man in Idaho who took Hemingway hunting and fishing.In The Importance of Not Being Ernest, find:A memoir full of entertaining and illuminative storiesLittle-known historical facts about Hemingway’s lifeAnecdotes about those who suffer from what the Kurlansky calls “hemitis”Readers of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America, or The Boys will love The Importance of Not Being Ernest.Praise for The Importance of Not Being Ernest“An absolute delight! Full of personality, Kurlansky’s book will enchant history, literature, and Hemingway fans alike.” —Library Journal (starred review)
The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera
by Matthew AucoinA user's guide to opera—Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (The New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of operaFrom its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera’s greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms—music, drama, poetry, dance—into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music—opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals.The Impossible Art is a passionate defense of what is best about opera, a love letter to the form, written in the midst of a global pandemic during which operatic performance was (literally) impossible. Aucoin writes of the rare works—ranging from classics by Mozart and Verdi to contemporary offerings of Thomas Adès and Chaya Czernowin—that capture something essential about human experience. He illuminates the symbiotic relationship between composers and librettists, between opera’s greatest figures and those of literature. Aucoin also tells the story of his new opera, Eurydice, from its inception to its production on the Metropolitan Opera’s iconic stage. The Impossible Art opens the theater door and invites the reader into this extraordinary world.
The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
by Karen CheungA boldly rendered—and deeply intimate—account of Hong Kong today, from a resilient young woman whose stories explore what it means to survive in a city teeming with broken promises. &“Hums with the thrill of being lost in this massive, haunted, mythologized, neon city, yet finding oneself in the end.&”—Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Entertainment Weekly, PureWowHong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally—often in vain—against threats to their fundamental freedoms. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. Drawing from her own experience reporting on the politics and culture of her hometown, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have watched their home transform, Karen Cheung gives us a rare insider&’s view of this remarkable city at a pivotal moment—for Hong Kong and, ultimately, for herself.Born just before the handover to China in 1997, Cheung grew up questioning what version of Hong Kong she belonged to. Not quite at ease within the middle-class, cosmopolitan identity available to her at her English-speaking international school, she also resisted the conservative values of her deeply traditional, often dysfunctional family.Through vivid and character-rich stories, Cheung braids a dual narrative of her own coming of age alongside that of her generation. With heartbreaking candor, she recounts her yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests. Cheung also captures moments of miraculous triumph, documenting Hong Kong&’s vibrant counterculture and taking us deep into its indie music and creative scenes. Inevitably, she brings us to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized.An exhilarating blend of memoir and reportage, The Impossible City charts the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory paths of coming into one&’s own.
The Impossible Exile
by George ProchnikAn original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler's rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile--from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis--where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig's extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era--the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.
The Impossible First: An Explorer's Race Across Antarctica (Young Readers Edition)
by Colin O'BradyIn this Young Readers Edition of Impossible First—perfect for fans of My Shot by Elena Delle Donne and Shaken by Tim Tebow—Colin O&’Brady vividly recounts his fifty-four-day, unsupported, record-shattering solo crossing of Antarctica using every ounce of his strength, years of training, and sheer force of will.Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support, and completely human-powered. But Colin O&’Brady was determined to do just that—even though ten years earlier a tragic accident raised doubts that he&’d ever walk again normally. O&’Brady&’s quest drew him into a head-to-head battle with British SAS Captain Louis Rudd—also striving to be &“the first.&” Enduring Antarctica&’s sub-zero temperatures and pulling a sled that initially weighed 375 pounds in complete isolation and through a succession of whiteouts, storms, and a series of near disasters, O&’Brady journeyed 932 miles to a world first. Honest, deeply moving, filled with moments of vulnerability—and set against the backdrop of some of the most extreme environments on earth, from Mount Everest to Antarctica—The Impossible First reveals how anyone can reject limits, overcome immense obstacles, and discover what matters most.
The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone
by Colin O'BradyColin O’Brady’s awe-inspiring memoir spans his triumphant recovery from a tragic accident to his gripping 932-mile solo crossing of Antarctica. Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support and completely human powered. Yet, Colin O’Brady was determined to do just that, even if, ten years earlier, there was doubt that he’d ever walk again normally. From the depths of a tragic accident, he fought his way back. In a quest to unlock his potential and discover what was possible, he went on to set three mountaineering world records before turning to this historic Antarctic challenge. O’Brady’s pursuit of a goal that had eluded many others was made even more intense by a head-to-head battle that emerged with British polar explorer Captain Louis Rudd—also striving to be “the first.” Enduring Antarctica’s sub-zero temperatures and pulling a sled that initially weighed 375 pounds—in complete isolation and through a succession of whiteouts, storms, and a series of near disasters—O’Brady persevered. Alone with his thoughts for nearly two months in the vastness of the frozen continent—gripped by fear and doubt—he reflected on his past, seeking courage and inspiration in the relationships and experiences that had shaped his life. Honest, deeply moving, filled with moments of vulnerability—and set against the backdrop of some of the most extreme environments on earth, from Mt. Everest to Antarctica—The Impossible First reveals how anyone can reject limits, overcome immense obstacles, and discover what matters most. <P><P><b>2021 Alex Award Winner</b>
The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek
by Lance ParkinA biographer goes in search of Gene Roddenberry, creator of the world’s most successful science fiction franchise.This book reveals how an undistinguished writer of cop shows set out to produce “Hornblower in space” —and ended up with Star Trek, an optimistic, almost utopian view of humanity’s future that has been watched and loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world.Along the way, Lance Parkin examines some of the great myths and turning points in the franchise’s history, and Roddenberry’s particular contribution to them. He looks at the view that the early Star Trek advanced a liberal, egalitarian, and multi-racial agenda; charts the various attempts to resuscitate the show during its wilderness years in the 1970s; explores Roddenberry’s initial early involvement in the movies and spin-off Star Trek: The Next Generation (as well as his later estrangement from both), and sheds light on the colorful personal life, self-mythologizing, and strange beliefs of a man who nonetheless gifted popular culture one if its most enduring narratives.
The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
by Faisal DevjiThe Impossible Indian offers a rare, fresh view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went far beyond a nationalist agenda. Revising the conventional view of the Mahatma as an isolated Indian moralist detached from the mainstream of twentieth-century politics, Faisal Devji offers a provocative new genealogy of Gandhian thought, one that is not rooted in a clichéd alternative history of spiritual India but arises from a tradition of conquest and violence in the battlefields of 1857. Focusing on his unsentimental engagement with the hard facts of imperial domination, Fascism, and civil war, Devji recasts Gandhi as a man at the center of modern history. Rejecting Western notions of the rights of man, rights which can only be bestowed by a state, Gandhi turned instead to the idea of dharma, or ethical duty, as the true source of the self’s sovereignty, independent of the state. Devji demonstrates that Gandhi’s dealings with violence, guided by his idea of ethical duty, were more radical than those of contemporary revolutionists. To make sense of this seemingly incongruous relationship with violence, Devji returns to Gandhi’s writings and explores his engagement with issues beyond India’s struggle for home rule. Devji reintroduces Gandhi to a global audience in search of leadership at a time of extraordinary strife as a thinker who understood how life’s quotidian reality could be revolutionized to extraordinary effect.
The Impossible Life of Mary Benson: The Extraordinary Story of a Victorian Wife
by Rodney BoltThe remarkable true story of the life of Mary Benson: wife of an archbishop, friend of Queen Victoria, mother of three "unpermissably gifted" children—including E. F. Benson, and in love with dozens of womenSometimes touching and sometimes hilarious, this is the story of one lovable, brilliant woman and her trajectory through the often surprising opportunities and the remarkable limitations of a Victorian woman's life. Young Minnie Sidgwick was just 12 years old when her cousin, 12-year-old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853. Edward went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie—as Mary Benson—to preside a social world that ranged from Tennyson, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde to foreign royalty and Queen Victoria herself. Yet Mrs. Benson's most intense relationships were not with her husband and his associates, but with other women. When the Archbishop died, Mary, or "Ben" to her intimates, turned down an offer from the Queen to live at Windsor, and set up home in a Jacobean manor house with her friend Lucy Tait. Drawing on the diaries and novels of the Bensons themselves, including E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, as well as the writing of contemporary writers and poets, this book creates a very rich portrait of Mary Benson, her family, her close female friends, and their world.
The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
by Patchen BarssA "beautifully composed and revealing" (Financial Times) biography of the dazzling and painful life of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose—"a stunning achievement" (Kai Bird, American Prometheus). When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a &“world behind the world&” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world&’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man, success came at a price: He was attuned to the secrets of the universe, but struggled to connect with loved ones, especially the women who care for or worked with him. Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one.
The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office
by Jeremi SuriA bold new history of the American presidency, arguing that the successful presidents of the past created unrealistic expectations for every president since JFK, with enormously problematic implications for American politicsIn The Impossible Presidency, celebrated historian Jeremi Suri charts the rise and fall of the American presidency, from the limited role envisaged by the Founding Fathers to its current status as the most powerful job in the world. He argues that the presidency is a victim of its own success-the vastness of the job makes it almost impossible to fulfill the expectations placed upon it. As managers of the world's largest economy and military, contemporary presidents must react to a truly globalized world in a twenty-four-hour news cycle. There is little room left for bold vision.Suri traces America's disenchantment with our recent presidents to the inevitable mismatch between presidential promises and the structural limitations of the office. A masterful reassessment of presidential history, this book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand America's fraught political climate.
The Impossible Return – Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning
by Anna FishzonThe Impossible Return – Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning is a work of creative nonfiction and autotheory. It is part cancer memoir, part psychoanalytic theorizing, and part history of late Soviet Ukraine.Anna Fishzon’s personal narrative is interspersed with interludes exploring other “reconstructions” (Chernobyl’s sarcophagus, the perestroika years) as well as psychoanalytic reflections on anxiety, prosthesis, hypochondria, and tattooing. The authorial voice is intentionally polyphonic: elegiac, humorous, at times academic and philosophical. Each chapter is set in the context of the writing process, with discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine. The prologue examines the psychoanalyst’s bodily presence in treatment and includes clinical vignettes that discuss the impact of remote therapy sessions during lockdown, and an epilogue provides a meditation on repetition compulsion and the impossibility of mourning fully.Through theoretical and personal reflections on mourning and recovery after catastrophic collapses of psyche, body, and place, this book makes original contributions to psychoanalysis, Slavic and cultural studies, trauma studies, film criticism, and history. This unique work will be relevant to readers interested in psychoanalytic studies, cancer and disability studies and critical theory, and academics of autotheory and memoir.
The Impossible Survivor: From stockyard to the Great Escape
by Jeff SteelNothing can prepare a man for the horrors of war, nor the haunting memories that linger long after the battle is over. In The Impossible Survivor, Jeff Steel invites readers into the life of Neil Lindsay, a retired RAF Bomber Command veteran, as he confronts the shadows of his past. On a seemingly ordinary day in 1995, Neil and his daughter Margaret visit a memorial honouring the fallen soldiers of the Goulburn Valley. What begins as a simple outing soon unravels the buried truths of Neil&’s harrowing experiences during World War II. An ambitious young man, Neil's fate intertwined with the legendary figures of the RAF, including the celebrated Wing Commander Guy Gibson. He bravely flew perilous missions over Nazi Germany, becoming the sole survivor of a downed bomber and enduring two years of torment in a German prisoner-of-war camp. As he stands before the memorial stone he provides a glimpse into his past, sharing the first fragments of the extraordinary story that had been hidden for so long.The Impossible Survivor is a powerful tribute to those who fought bravely, capturing the essence of ordinary men faced with extraordinary circumstances. These men did not seek out the risk of death or the challenges of war; they volunteered out of a sense of duty and courage. They faced life-or-death situations with a blend of character, training, determination, and a touch of luck, fully aware of the slim chances of returning home. Neil Lindsay&’s story stands as a powerful testament to their extraordinary resolve.
The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Anti-Gravity History of Skateboarding
by Cole Louison<p>Skateboarding: the background, technicality, culture, rebellion, marketing, conflict, and future of the global sport as seen through two of its most influential geniuses. <p>Since it all began half a century ago, skateboarding has come to mystify some and to mesmerize many, including its tens of millions of adherents throughout America and the world. And yet, as ubiquitous as it is today, its origins, manners, and methods are little understood. <p>The Impossible aims to get skateboarding right. Journalist Cole Louison gets inside the history, culture, and major personalities of skating. He does so largely by recounting the careers of the sport's Yoda Rodney Mullen, who, in his mid-forties, remains the greatest skateboarder in the world, the godfather of all modern skateboarding tricks and its Luke Skywalker Ryan Sheckler, who became its youngest pro athlete and a celebrity at thirteen. The story begins in the 1960s, when the first boards made their way to land in the form of off-season surfing in southern California. It then follows the sport's spikes, plateaus, and dropsincluding its billion-dollar apparel industry and its connection with art, fashion, and music. <p>In The Impossible, we come to know intimately not only skateboarding, but also two very different, equally fascinating geniuses who have shaped the sport more than anyone else.</p>
The Impossible: The Miraculous Story of a Mother's Faith and Her Child's Resurrection
by Ginger Kolbaba Joyce SmithTHE IMPOSSIBLE reveals prayer's immediate and powerful impact through the true account of a family whose son died and was miraculously resurrected. Through the years and the struggles, when life seemed more about hurt and loss than hope and mercy, God was positioning the Smiths for something extraordinary-the death and resurrection of their son.When Joyce Smith's fourteen-year-old son John fell through an icy Missouri lake one winter morning, she and her family had seemingly lost everything. At the hospital, John lay lifeless for more than sixty minutes. But Joyce was not ready to give up on her son. She mustered all her faith and strength into one force and cried out to God in a loud voice to save him.Miraculously, her son's heart immediately started beating again.In the coming days, John would defy every expert, every case history, and every scientific prediction. Sixteen days after falling through the ice and being clinically dead for an hour, he walked out of the hospital under his own power, completely healed.THE IMPOSSIBLE is about a profound truth: prayer really does work. God uses it to remind us that He is always with us, and when we combine it with unshakable faith, nothing is impossible.
The Imposters
by Tom RachmanThe Imposters is the first novel in stories that Tom Rachman has written since his international bestseller The Imperfectionists.'An astonishing achievement - brutally funny, humane, dizzying - will win Rachman the readership he deserves' Patrick Gale'Clever and full of tricks from start to finish' SpectatorIt's set during a crisis in democracy, a society in lockdown linked digitally but convulsed by a social media frenzy, and is told by a little-known, little-read Dutch novelist named Dora Frenhofer who has decided that her life as an old woman in this post-truth pandemic world has become too much.But like a twenty-first century Scheherazade Dora spins stories to fend off the evil day, conjuring connections from her past to give meaning to the present. She imagines the fate of her missing brother, lost on the hippie trail in India in the sixties; the loneliness of her estranged daughter Beck, whose career writing stand-up shows for Netflix dramatizes the culture wars; Danny, an almost equally unfashionable writer she meets at a festival; the tortured history of the van driver who takes her unwanted books away; the nonchalant courier who nearly ran her over in the rain; her former lover, the sophisticated food critic; her last remaining friend. And finally, Dora's own last chapter.The Imposters is Rachman at his inimitable best, a writer whose formal ingenuity and flamboyant technique is matched by his humanity and generosity.
The Impostor
by Xavier De La Porte Jade LindgaardHow do we explain what Perry Anderson calls "the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy," easily the best-known "thinker" under sixty in France? "It would," he continues, "be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France's public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?"This book, based on a careful investigation comparing BHL's words with his deeds, seeks to explore the remarkable persistence of this celebrity pseudo-philosopher since he burst onto the scene in 1977. Delving into his networks in the spheres of politics, the media and big business, Lindgaard and de la Porte reveal what the success of this three-decade long imposture tells us about the degeneration of contemporary French intellectual and cultural life.About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir (Graphic Novel)
by Laurie SandellLaurie Sandell grew up in awe (and sometimes in terror) of her larger-than-life father, who told jaw-dropping tales of a privileged childhood in Buenos Aires, academic triumphs, heroism during Vietnam, friendships with Kissinger and the Pope. As a young woman, Laurie unconsciously mirrors her dad, trying on several outsized personalities (Tokyo stripper, lesbian seductress, Ambien addict). Later, she lucks into the perfect job--interviewing celebrities for a top women's magazine. Growing up with her extraordinary father has given Laurie a knack for relating to the stars. <p><p> But while researching an article on her dad's life, she makes an astonishing discovery: he's not the man he says he is--not even close. Now, Laurie begins to puzzle together three decades of lies and the splintered person that resulted from them--herself.<P> <i>Advisory: Bookshare has learned that this book offers only partial accessibility. We have kept it in the collection because it is useful for some of our members. To explore further access options with us, please contact us through the Book Quality link on the right sidebar. Benetech is actively working on projects to improve accessibility issues such as these. </i>
The Impostor: A True Story (Maclehose Press Editions )
by Frank Wynne Javier CercasFrom the award-winning author of Soldiers of Salamis, a propulsive and riveting narrative investigation into an infamous fraud: a man who has been lying his entire life. <P><P>Who is Enric Marco? An elderly man in his nineties, living in Barcelona, a Holocaust survivor who gave hundreds of speeches, granted dozens of interviews, received important national honors, and even moved government officials to tears. <P><P>But in May 2005, Marco was exposed as a fraud: he was never in a Nazi concentration camp. The story was reported around the world, transforming him from hero to villain in the blink of an eye. Now, more than a decade later--in a hypnotic narrative that combines fiction and nonfiction, detective story and war story, biography and autobiography--Javier Cercas sets out to unravel Marco's enigma. <P><P>With both profound compassion and lacerating honesty, Cercas takes the reader on a journey not only into one man's gigantic lie, but also--through its exploration of our infinite capacity for self-deception, our opposing needs for fantasy and reality, our appetite for affection--into the deepest, most flawed parts of our humanity.
The Impressionists
by Rosie DickinsToday Impressionist paintings draw huge crowds and sell for millions. But when they were first painted, those same pictures caused public outrage and the artists who created them struggled to make a living. This is the fascinating story of those artists, now known as the Impressionists.
The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl
by Elisabeth GitterDid you ever wonder what inspired Helen Keller's mother to have such high hopes for her daughter? The answer is Laura Bridgman, the original deaf-blind girl who inspired Charles Darwin to visit her and also write about her in American Notes.
The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl
by Elisabeth GitterThe resurrected story of a deaf-blind girl and the man who brought her out of silence.In 1837, Samuel Gridley Howe, director of Boston's Perkins Institution for the Blind, heard about a bright, deaf-blind seven-year-old, the daughter of New Hampshire farmers. At once he resolved to rescue her from the "darkness and silence of the tomb." And indeed, thanks to Howe and an extraordinary group of female teachers, Laura Bridgman learned to finger spell, to read raised letters, and to write legibly and even eloquently.Philosophers, poets, educators, theologians, and early psychologists hailed Laura as a moral inspiration and a living laboratory for the most controversial ideas of the day. She quickly became a major tourist attraction, and many influential writers and reformers visited her or wrote about her. But as the Civil War loomed and her girlish appeal faded, the public began to lose interest. By the time Laura died in 1889, she had been wholly eclipsed by the prettier, more ingratiating Helen Keller.The Imprisoned Guest retrieves Laura Bridgman's forgotten life, placing it in the context of nineteenth-century American social, intellectual, and cultural history. Her troubling, tumultuous relationship with Howe, who rode Laura's achievements to his own fame but could not cope with the intense, demanding adult she became, sheds light on the contradictory attitudes of a "progressive" era in which we can find some precursors of our own.
The Imprisoned Princess: The Scandalous Life of Sophia Dorothea of Celle
by Catherine CurzonThis royal biography of the 17th century princess and mother of King George II recounts an epic tale of privilege, passion, scandal, and disgrace.When Sophia Dorothea of Celle married her first cousin, the future King George I, she was an unhappy bride. Filled with dreams of romance and privilege, she hated the groom she called “pig snout” and wept at news of her engagement. When she arrived in the austere court of Hanover, the vibrant young princess found herself ignored and unwanted—while her husband openly gallivanted with his mistress.Then Sophia Dorothea plunged into a dangerous affair with the dashing soldier Count Phillip Christoph von Königsmarck, a man as celebrated for his looks as his bravery. When he and Sophia Dorothea fell in love, they were dicing with death. Watched by a scheming countess who had ambitions of her own, it was only a matter of time before scandal gripped the House of Hanover. In the end, Sophia Dorothea was divorced, disgraced, and locked away in a gilded cage for 30 years—whilst her lover faced an even darker fate.
The Imprisoned Traveler: Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon's Italy (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850)
by Keith CrookThe Imprisoned Traveler is a fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its elusive author. Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year “detention” came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth’s contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth’s encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth’s allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The Improbable Shepherd
by Sylvia Jorrin Joshua Kilmer-Purcell"The lessons of Sylvia's farm are not just applicable for those who dream of living the rural life. They're universally instructive, and joyfully addictive." --Joshua Kilmer-Purcell, The Fabulous Beekman BoysIn this sequel to her popular first collection, Sylvia Jorrín returns with more vignettes -- along with personal photos, artwork, and recipes--from her life on thefarm to again inspire readers old and new. The Improbable Shepherd is a continuation of Sylvia's Farm, covering the past five years of her experiences on a rural sheep farm. This book brings readers closer to the world around them, and to recognize the simple, often hidden beauties it holds. Told in short vignettes and anecdotes, it is a journal of the continuing growth, persistence, and hope that each new day can bring.Nearly a decade after the publication of her first book, life on Sylvia Jorrin's farm continues to present our improbable shepherdess with new opportunities to appreciate the peace and unexpected joys that farm life brings despite too many tasks and too little time.The Improbable Shepherd immerses the reader fully in Sylvia's farm, echoing her own experiences living with the land and includes photos, and illustrations and Sylvia's personal recipes. Appealing to those who loved Sylvia's first book and want to return, as well as for all the newcomers who have yet to discover Sylvia's powerful prose and earnest message, The Improbable Shepherd will inspire you to follow your dreams, whatever they may be.