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Author : Paul F. Boller
Publisher :
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 27,11 MB
Release : 1992-01-01
Category : Historians
ISBN : 9780875650982
Author : Paul F. Boller
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 10,3 MB
Release : 2013-05-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0875655572
During the heyday of McCarthyism, the Chicago Tribune, offended by something he had written, contemptuously dismissed Paul Boller as "an obscure professor" - he was then teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Some forty-five years later, reflecting on the incident, Boller wrote an essay on what it was like to be an obscure professor at one of America's less publicized campuses in a conservative community during the late 1950s and early 1960s. That essay became the foundation for this collection of autobiographical selections reflecting the interests and pursuits of a man who gained national recognition, both inside the academic community and beyond, but still values his obscurity. Whether it is a study of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge or an account of his Navy service as a translator of Japanese during World War II, Boller brings to his writing a fresh approach and a lively and wry wit.
Author : Larry Smith
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 47,36 MB
Release : 2009-10-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0061750913
Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time. One Life. Six Words. What's Yours? When Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving. From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-sized pieces. From authors Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford to comedians Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris, to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.
Author : Steven L. Davis
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 43,54 MB
Release : 2010-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0292782357
The first Texas-based writer to gain national attention, J. Frank Dobie proved that authentic writing springs easily from the native soil of Texas and the Southwest. In best-selling books such as Tales of Old-Time Texas, Coronado's Children, and The Longhorns, Dobie captured the Southwest's folk history, which was quickly disappearing as the United States became ever more urbanized and industrial. Renowned as "Mr. Texas," Dobie paradoxically has almost disappeared from view—a casualty of changing tastes in literature and shifts in social and political attitudes since the 1960s. In this lively biography, Steven L. Davis takes a fresh look at a J. Frank Dobie whose "liberated mind" set him on an intellectual journey that culminated in Dobie becoming a political liberal who fought for labor, free speech, and civil rights well before these causes became acceptable to most Anglo Texans. Tracing the full arc of Dobie's life (1888–1964), Davis shows how Dobie's insistence on "free-range thinking" led him to such radical actions as calling for the complete integration of the University of Texas during the 1940s, as well as taking on governors, senators, and the FBI (which secretly investigated him) as Texas's leading dissenter during the McCarthy era.
Author : Michael Howard
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 32,8 MB
Release : 2006-08-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780826491251
Awarded the Military Cross in the Second World War, the author recounts how between battles he befriended the young film director Franco Zefirelli. His account of beating the Germans out of Italy with Bishop Simon Phipps and the ballet critic Richard Buckle is hilarious. This memoir gives insight into the history of Britain in the post war years.
Author : John Plotz
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 22,4 MB
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0231553684
There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors—including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell—read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.
Author : Rachel Hadas
Publisher : Paul Dry Books
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 47,68 MB
Release :
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1589882504
"[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." —Lydia Davis In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of "losing" George. Her narrative begins when George's illness can no longer be ignored, and ends in 2008 soon after his move to a dementia facility (when, after thirty years of marriage, she finds herself no longer living with her husband). Within the cloudy confines of those difficult years, years when reading and writing were an essential part of what kept her going, she "tried to keep track…tried to tell the truth." "If only all doctors and nurses and social workers who care for the chronically ill could read this book. If only patients and family members stricken with such losses could receive what this book can give them. While Strange Relation relates one illness and the life of one family, it is also, poetically, about all illnesses, all families, all struggles, all living. The art achieves the dual life of the universal and the particular, marking it as timeless, making it for us all necessary."—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University "Rachel Hadas's own wonderfully resonant poems, along with the rich collection of verse and prose by other writers that she weaves into her story, clarify and illuminate over and over again this thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness—illness that, as she shows us so well, is at once frighteningly alien and also deeply a part of our unavoidable vulnerability as mortal beings. Beautifully written, totally engrossing, and very sad."—Lydia Davis "Strange Relation is a deeply moving, deeply personal, beautifully written exploration of how the power of grief can be met with the power of literature, and how solace can be found in the space between them."—Frank Huyler "A poignant memoir of love, creativity and human vulnerability. Rachel Hadas brings a poet's incisive eye to the labyrinth of dementia."—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and Singular Intimacies "Like an elegy, Strange Relation is about loss and grief. Like all elegies, it also memorializes and celebrates. Rachel Hadas, in the course of her personal narrative, cites accounts of dementia, in its social and personal meanings."—Robert Pinsky "Brilliant and tough-minded, poignant but clear-headed, Rachel Hadas shines a steady light on her experience as the wife of an accomplished composer who, at a comparatively early age, descended into dementia. Strange Relation never sacrifices truth for easy answers. Instead, Hadas uses literature to chart a course through wrenching complexities. This lauded and exceptional poet shows how language itself, the very thing her husband loses, became her shield as she crossed the ravaged lands of decision-making, making new discoveries, new friends, and new sense of the world. Strange Relation snaps with bravery, intelligence, and Hadas' tart, candid wisdom."—Molly Peacock "Strange Relation is a beautifully written and piercingly honest account of life with a brilliant man as he descends into dementia, in his sixties."—Reeve Lindbergh
Author : Terry Castle
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 20,95 MB
Release : 2010-01-15
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0061966282
“[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” —Susan Sontag From one of America’s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written autobiographical essays and a new, long-form piece about the devastation and beauty of early love. James Wolcott, contributing writer to Vanity Fair, calls Terry Castle a “Jedi knight of literary exploration and lesbian scholarship,” and The Professor and Other Writings “a greatest-hits package of show-stopping monologues and offhand-genius riffs.” The Professor and Other Writings is a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of gender, identity, and sexuality in the grand tradition of such feminist luminaries as Susan Sontag, Camille Paglia, and Joan Didion.
Author : Emily Ogden
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 43,71 MB
Release : 2022-04-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 022675135X
"Emily Ogden's On Not Knowing is at once a memoir and suite of pointed inquiries. Her brief, sharply observed essays invite the reader to think with her about problems she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Ogden moves nimbly across registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Unapologetically personal in its range of reference and idiosyncratic in its canon, On Not Knowing takes for its subject neither a life nor a library, but a cherished world. Ultimately, Ogden wants to teach herself to resist the temptation of knowingness: to encounter passionate love, well remembered art, and the new lives of her children without forearming herself with a sense that these things are already understood. Committed, as a scholar, to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness is, for her, a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. These essays want to learn with us to resist the temptation to cling to the wall at the edge of the pool, and instead to swim"--
Author : Heather Lanier
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 18,11 MB
Release : 2021-07-06
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0525559655
“A remarkable book . . . I found myself thinking that all expectant and new parents should read it.” —Michelle Slater A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice In Raising a Rare Girl, Lanier explores how to defy the tyranny of normal and embrace parenthood as a spiritual practice that breaks us open in the best of ways. Like many women of her generation, when Heather Lanier was expecting her first child she did everything by the book in the hope that she could create a SuperBaby, a supremely healthy human destined for a high-achieving future. But her daughter Fiona challenged all of Lanier’s preconceptions. Born with an ultra-rare syndrome known as Wolf-Hirschhorn, Fiona received a daunting prognosis: she would experience significant developmental delays and might not reach her second birthday. The diagnosis obliterated Lanier’s perfectionist tendencies, along with her most closely held beliefs about certainty, vulnerability, God, and love. With tiny bits of mozzarella cheese, a walker rolled to library story time, a talking iPad app, and a whole lot of pop and reggae, mother and daughter spend their days doing whatever it takes to give Fiona nourishment, movement, and language. Loving Fiona opens Lanier up to new understandings of what it means to be human, what it takes to be a mother, and above all, the aching joy and wonder that come from embracing the unique life of her rare girl.