FullReviews Index - page 2
Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season With an Inner-city Debate Squad
In Cross-X, Joe Miller tells the compelling story of an inner city high school debate squad that in spite of overwhelming educational, economic, and racial odds, excels in a game dominated historically by privileged students with prep school backgrounds.
A Million Little Pieces
When James Frey checks himself into the world's oldest drug and alcohol treatment facility (undoubtedly Hazelden, though Frey never says), he is disfigured beyond recognition, has spent the preceding weeks in an alcohol and drug induced blackout, and is wanted in 3 states on a variety of charges. "A Million Little Pieces" is the starkly honest account of his return from the black hole of addiction.
Kitchen Confidential
When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded that appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectable shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.
Cross Country
Robert Sullivan,the author of "Rats," who has driven cross-country more than two dozen times, recounts his family's annual summer migration from Oregon to New York. "Cross Country," his story of moving his family back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast (and various other migrations), is replete with all the minor disasters, humor, and wonderful coincidences that characterize life on the road, not to mention life.
Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing
Lee Server paints a comprehensive picture of Ava Gardner in this exhaustively researched biography. Beginning with her dirt poor childhood in tobacco country, North Carolina and tracing her rise into stardom and then mega-stardom, Server delivers a comprehensive movie star biography.
Night
Night is Elie Wiesel’s candid, horrific, and poignant account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.
The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky
In The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, Ken Dornstein takes readers on a journey through the life and death of his elder brother, David, who died at the age of 25 in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Six years Ken's senior, David was a writer who incessantly filled spiral notebooks with his fictions, thoughts, and life experiences. Obsessed with succeeding as a writer, David imagined that this success would only come after death at a young age.
Tony and Me
The close professional relationship between Jack Klugman and Tony Randall has long been famous, but the details of their personal friendship have never been revealed until now. In Tony and Me by Jack Klugman with Burton Rocks the depth of this friendship is fully explored and touchingly revealed for the very first time. "What I didn't get a chance to tell Tony Randall was that our friendship had made me a better human being."
My Friend Leonard
"My Friend Leonard" by James Frey revolves around the struggles faced by Frey upon his release from rehab and subsequent imprisonment. As Frey tells us repeatedly in "A Million Little Pieces," he is "an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a criminal." His challenge now is to reforge his relationship to the world ad to those who dwell therein.
With the Beatles
It was the ultimate 60s scene: the ashram in Rishikesh, India where the Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow, a stray Beach Boy and other 60s icons gathered along the shores of the Ganges-amidst paisley and incense and flowers and guitars-to meditate at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The February 1968 gathering received such frenzied, world-wide attention that it is still considered a significant, early encounter between Western pop culture and the mystical East.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong
In a narrative filled with revelations, James Hansen re-creates Neil Armstrong's career in flying, from his seventy-eight combat missions as a naval aviator flying over North Korea to his transatmospheric flights in the rocket-powered X-15 to his piloting Gemini VIII to the first-ever docking in space. These milestones made it seem, as Armstrong's mother put it, "as if from the very moment he was born -- farther back still -- that our son was somehow destined for the Apollo 11 mission."
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
In Girl Sleuth, Melanie Rehak weaves a history of Nancy Drew and her creators. Both Nancy and her "author," were invented by Edward Stratemeyer, who created the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys. But Nancy Drew was brought to life by Mildred Wirt Benson, a journalist, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who transformed herself into a CEO to run her father's company after he died. Together, Benson and Adams created a character that has inspired generations of girls to be as strong-willed as they were.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
In Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller delivers her memory of an African childhood fraught with hardship, loss, and danger. She became accustomed to armed guerrillas and landmine-littered roads; hunger, drought, and malaria were never far off; and her family was both guilty of and victim to the racism that consumed colonial Africa in the late 20th century.
Jesus Land
Julia Scheeres' Jesus Land is an unforgettable memoir of trying to survive childhood. During the mid-1980s, Julia Scheeres and her black, adopted brother, David are sixteen years old and have just moved to rural Indiana, to a racism neither of them is prepared for. At home, a distant mother-more involved with her church's missionaries than with her own children-and a violent father only compound their problems. Scheeres' Jesus Land is a heart-breaking and compelling memoir.
The Game
In cities around the world, men meet in underground "lairs" to discuss tactics and strategies for picking up women. Afterwards, they venture into the "field"-bars and clubs-and practice, questing after the holy grail: the perfect girl. Under a pseudonym, New York Times bestselling author Neil Strauss ventured into this bizarre subculture, traveling around the world and meeting the world's greatest seducers, men who claim to have found the combination to unlock a woman's legs-and her heart.
Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life
Radical Simplicity speaks directly to that craving we all have for the simple life. Radical Simplicity is filled with practical tips for living more simply. It includes instructions for making a sauna, a compost bin, and other aids to the natural life. "You can live a life of freedom, one in harmony with the rhythms of nature, and your own internal rhythm and creativity," Price says. This book will teach you how.
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom
A rebel from start to finish (1694 — 1778), During much of his life Voltaire was the toast of society for his plays and verse, but his barbed wit and commitment to human reason got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the King, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. Voltaire Almighty provides a look at the life and thought of one of the major forces behind the European Enlightenment.
Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond
The announcement of an African-American child sired by the late segregationist and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond shook the American political and social establishment. A steady re-examination of race relations - especially Sen. Thurmond's attitudes - soon followed. Authors Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson carefully articulate the historical, personal, and political elements that defined the life of Strom Thurmond.
The Story of Chicago May
Nuala O'Faolain, the author of Are You Somebody, and Almost There, has come upon a story that is not only a perfect match for her literary gifts but also takes her career in a surprising and rich new direction. This Irish woman writer who achieved international fame with a remarkably candid appraisal of her own unorthodox life has taken as her subject another daughter of Ireland-this one a notorious criminal and unrepentant, independent woman, Chicago May.
History Play: The Lives and After Life of Christopher Marlowe
Rodney Bolt's life of Christopher Marlowe plays out a surprising solution to a literary mystery, bringing the spirit of William Shakespeare alive as we've never seen it before. As we accompany Marlowe into the halls of academia, the society of the popular English players traveling Europe, and the dangerous underworld of Elizabethan espionage, a fascinating and almost plausible life story emerges, along with a startlingly fresh look at the plays and poetry we know as Shakespeare's.
Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Don't Panic celebrates the life of Douglas Adams who, in a field in Innsbruck in 1971, had an idea that became The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: the radio series that started it all, the five book 'trilogy', the TV series, almost-film, and everything that followed. Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman also tells the story of the other projects Douglas worked on, including his posthumous collection The Salmon of Doubt.
In His Own Words
The most stirring voice to come out of South Africa, Nelson Mandela has brought his message of freedom, equality, and human dignity to the entire world. Now his most eloquent and important speeches are collected in a single volume. From the eve of his imprisonment to his release 27 years later, from his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize to his election as South Africa's first black president, these speeches span some of the most pivotal moments of Mandela's life and of his countrys history.
Chronicles, Volume One
By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles, Volume I into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.
Eyeing the Flash: The Education of a Carnival Con Artist
At age fifteen, Peter Fenton is a gawky math whiz schoolboy with a dissatisfied mother, a father who drinks himself to foolishness, and no chance whatsoever with girls. That's when he meets Jackie Barron. Eyeing the Flash is an insider's view of the carnival underworld -- the cons, the double-dealing, the quick banter, and, of course, the easy money. The story of a shy middle-class kid turned first-class huckster, Peter Fenton's coming-of-age memoir is highly unorthodox.